AFGHAN WOMEN NEED SECURITY SAFEGUARDS BEFORE ELECTION
An historic opportunity, to involve Afghan women in the country’s new democracy, will be lost if the international community allows them to be intimidated away from the polls on October 9th. WOMANKIND Worldwide is calling for increased security and greater election monitoring to encourage the 4 million Afghan women who have registered, to cast their votes in the presidential elections. Women make up 42% of those with polling cards, but the UK-based women’s rights and development agency says that female voters are likely to stay away from the polls if their security isn’t safeguarded.
Security has significantly deteriorated in the capital, Kabul, and the provinces over the past few months. Taliban and other militants have pledged to disrupt the Presidential elections as part of a concentrated campaign to destabilise the country’s reconstruction. 29 aid workers have been killed this year and, since voting registration began, election-related attacks have killed 12 people and injured 30. WOMANKIND’s 3 partner organisations in Afghanistan say women involved in aid and election work are being intimidated by “night letters” - anonymous notes posted after dark night threatening retribution for political involvement. And despite a national campaign to encourage female registration and voting, just 20% of people registered in the five southern provinces are women.
Anne-Kristin Treiber, WOMANKIND’s Afghanistan programme manager, says “Women’s rights have been made the core, if not the legitimate cause, for justifying the international community’s intervention in Afghanistan. The extension of NATO’s mandate beyond Kabul and the deployment of 3000 extra troops in the north won’t guarantee basic security. Some Afghan women will still be risking their lives to vote. More civilian police and security need to be sent to the provinces to ensure that voting can go ahead without the manipulation and interference of warlords. And special attention should be paid to ensuring that women have safe access to polling stations outside the capital.”
Women in Afghanistan are continuing to suffer terrible human rights abuses under provincial warlords, with rape and sexual assault all too common. WOMANKIND is calling on NATO member states to fulfil their obligations to protect women from Gender Based Violence in post-conflict situations, such as rape, sexual assault, trafficking, forced marriage and honour killings as set out in Security Council Resolution 1325.
Free and fair elections will be hampered if the training of 125-thousand election workers to run polling stations in the 35 provinces is not urgently completed. And WOMANKIND warns that the number of expected international monitors - currently less than 150 - is far below what is needed to prevent fraud and intimidation at polling stations.
