Afghanistan’s leadership crisis has deepened after one presidential candidate released audio recordings that he said captured a senior election official conspiring to commit large-scale fraud using the code word “stuffed sheep” to discuss illegally filled ballot boxes.
In 15 minutes of sometimes slightly surreal conversation, two men urge an official to fire election staff with suspect loyalties and replace them with known supporters, ramp up plans for vote buying and ballot stuffing, and close down polling stations in areas thought to be unsympathetic.
“Take the sheep into the mountain and bring them back stuffed,” one man says, before apparently lamenting the growing cost of buying votes.
“The price of goats and sheep has gone up these days,” he says ruefully.
A campaign manager for former mujahidin doctor Abdullah Abdullah on Sunday said one speaker in that conversation was a close aide of the Afghan Chief Electoral Officer Ziaulhaq Amarkhil, although he refused to reveal the source of the recordings or offer any verification of the speakers’ identity.
He claimed that the other man was from the campaign team of Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank technocrat and author of the book Fixing Failed States. Ghani appears to have a majority of votes in the June 14 run-off against Abdullah, but is accused by his rival of cheating.
A two-stage vote that was initially hailed as a triumph for the Afghan people and their fledging democracy, after Taliban threats failed to deter millions from turning out to cast their ballots, has since descended into a tense standoff with no clear path to a resolution.
Abdullah announced last week that he was withdrawing from the election process, accusing Afghan President Hamid Karzai and Amarkhil of helping Ghani rig the vote, with assistance from government and election officials around the country.
He called for UN mediation, an offer unexpectedly endorsed by Karzai himself, even though the president had spent years squeezing all traces of foreign influence out of the electoral system.
The UN itself has been more circumspect.
“This is a process which we respect as an Afghan-led process, Afghan-managed process and we would not want to take steps which would be seen as interfering or substituting the UN for Afghan leadership,” Deputy UN Envoy Nicholas Haysom told journalists on Saturday. “The task ahead of us is to have the candidates re-engage fully in the electoral process... There is no other way of electing a legitimate leader.”
Amarkhil himself was allegedly captured in some of the conversations played to journalists, asking a contact to “bring the sheep, stuffed properly,” but also complaining peevishly about how little attention Ghani was giving him.
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
RSS