Kabul, April 04: The Afghan parliament’s upper house has voiced support for President Hamid Karzai in limiting the role of foreigners in the five-seat election fraud watchdog.
Karzai had issued a decree in February to reduce the number of foreigners in the watchdog body which includes three foreigners and two Afghans. The move led to a dispute with the White House over how to run a September parliamentary election.
The lower house of the Afghan parliament voted on Wednesday to overrule the decree; but the upper house, in a counter measure on Saturday, excluded the lower house’s proposal from its own agenda.
The upper house leadership concluded that the parliament lacked the power to rule on electoral laws within a year of an election, which would thus prevent it from placing the veto on its agenda, Reuters reported.
In a Thursday speech to Afghan election commission workers in Kabul, Hamid Karzai blamed foreign powers for the fraud that occurred during last years elections.
“There was fraud in presidential and provincial council elections — no doubt that there was a very widespread fraud, very widespread,” he said referring to the August presidential election but added that “Afghans did not do this fraud. The foreigners did this fraud.”
Karzai accused Western officials of bribing and threatening election staff and perpetrating vote fraud in an attempt to weaken both him and the parliament.
Although the Afghan president — declared the winner of the presidential race in November after his opponent Abdullah Abdullah stood down — did not directly mention the US, the White House expressed deep concern over Karzai’s remarks.
His comments drew a sharp rebuke from Washington. US State Department Spokesman Philip J Crowley called them “preposterous” and White House spokesman Robert Gibbs described them as “troubling.”
Karzai later said that he is ‘surprised’ that his remarks have caused such uproar.
——–Agencies