 |
Afghan President Hamid Karzai speaks at a meeting in Kabul October
26, 2004. With victory all but a formality in Afghanistan's historic
presidential election, Hamid Karzai waited on Tuesday for the final votes
to be counted to confirm his
win.
[Reuters] |
The country's joint
U.N.-Afghan electoral board confirmed that the American-backed incumbent had
clinched a five-year term as the country's first popularly chosen leader.
"His excellency Hamid Karzai is the winner of the election," board chairman
Zakim Shah said at a ceremony in the capital. "We are announcing the first
elected president of Afghanistan."
Shah said the Karzai won 55.4 percent support in the Oct. 9 election, 39
points clear of his closest challenger and enough to avoid a second round.
A spokesman for Karzai, who was in the United Arab Emirates for the funeral
of its late president, said his camp was "very glad to finally have the result
we wanted" and appealed to rivals to put a bruising campaign behind them.
"We are starting a new life, a new Afghanistan and we hope everyone with
cooperate with its reconstruction," Elmi said.
Karzai was expected to make a victory speech in the Afghan capital on
Thursday.
However, his nearest rival, former Education Minister Yunus Qanooni, refused
to concede defeat, raising the risk of political instability in a country slowly
emerging from a quarter-century of war.
In its final report released Wednesday, the election panel confirmed problems
including ballot stuffing and with ink used to mark people's fingers to prevent
multiple voting.
But it said there was "no evidence" that the problems were widespread, or
that they favored only Karzai.
"There were shortcomings," Staffan Darnolf, a Swedish election expert on the
panel, said at a news conference. "But they could not have materially affected
the overall result."
Qanooni's running mate, Syed Hussein Alemi Balkhi, said the report was
"unacceptable" but stopped short of saying that they would reject the election
result.
"We had a lot of questions, but the panel was not able to answer them,"
Balkhi said. "We are not satisfied with their findings."
Karzai has vowed to accelerate the slow rebuilding of a country shattered by
war and drought with the goal of doubling the income of ordinary Afghans by
2009.
But any attempt to focus on the economy will be complicated by the challenge
of confronting warlords and drug traffickers even as a stubborn insurgency
grinds on.
The size of his task — and the rancor surrounding the vote — has also been
highlighted by an ongoing hostage crisis involving three foreign election
workers.
The abduction has been claimed by a splinter group of the Taliban, which had
vowed to attack the election process, but officials also suspect the involvement
of militia leaders who could lose out if Karzai presses on with efforts to
disarm unruly warlords.
More than 8 million Afghans cast their ballots more than three weeks ago in a
show of enthusiasm for a democratic experiment on which Taliban rebels had
declared war.
