Afghan election authorities are due to unveil preliminary results of a presidential runoff after a five-day delay as Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai rejected a coalition with his main rival, a move that may spark protests. Abdullah Abdullah, a former foreign minister who won the first round of voting in April, is boycotting the results after accusing the Independent Election Commission of Afghanistan of stuffing ballot boxes in favor of Ghani, a former World Bank economist. His camp wants today’s announcement delayed again. “We will not accept the preliminary results until clean votes are separated from fraudulent votes,” Abdullah told reporters in Kabul yesterday. “The international community wants a government based on legitimate votes.” Failure to reach a deal threatens to trigger violence in one of Asia’s poorest countries and delay the signing of a pact that’s needed to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond this year and secure billions of dollars in aid. Ghani has said the funds are essential to pay Afghan soldiers as they fight Taliban insurgents who ran the country before the U.S. invasion in 2001. “A disputed result could threaten the country’s fragile democracy and stability,” Faizullah Jalal, an economics professor at Kabul University, said by phone. “The international community must intervene and coordinate with Afghan institutions to find a way for its resolution otherwise we may experience another civil war and national crisis.”
Posted on: Mon, 07 Jul 2014 09:57:23 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015