Friday, October 19, 2018

Peace, Blood, and Hope: Women in Afghanistan’s Election

By 
Afghanistan is holding its parliamentary elections on October 20, 2018 after a three-and-half-year delay due to voter fraud and security concerns. To date, a total of 10 candidates have been killed during the ramp up to elections, with the last killed the last night of the official campaigning period, October 17.
“What makes this election different, is it is bloodier and more violent than the previous ones,” said Horia Mosadiq, an Afghan expert in safety and security trainings. “This violence is coming from the Taliban and political opponents.”

The elections were supposed to run in 2015, also a bloody year. On a hot summer day in 2015, Homera Kohzad, then working as an adviser to the governor of Baghlan, was leading an event to break the fast for Ramadan at a mosque. During the iftar a suicide bomber attacked, injuring 41 people, including Kohzad, who was critically injured.
“If a woman is not safe in a mosque, where can she be safe?” said Kohzad from her home in Kabul, just one week before the kick off of her parliamentary campaign in Baghlan. Kohzad shared photos with The Diplomat of her recovery in the hospital, showing numerous shrapnel scars on her legs. “It took me 21 days to recover, to be able to walk. My complete healing time was three months.”
With an electronic voter registration system in place since the spring, about 2,500 candidates went through the nomination process for the lower Wolesi Jirga. Of those, 418 are women, representing just 17 percent of the candidates – despite a quota set at 27 percent out of 249 total seats for women, or 68 seats.
While this system is designed to encourage a democratic vote, it has been used by Afghanistan’s patronage system, which has powerful backers, such as warlords, drug lords, and Afghanistan’s mafia, according to research by AREU.

No comments:

Post a Comment