KABUL, Afghanistan -- One of the two candidates for Afghan president will withdraw from a contested audit of the results unless election officials meet a series of technical demands made by his campaign, one of his top aides said Tuesday.
Declaring the process a "joke," Fazul Ahmad Manawi, the chief auditor for the candidate, Abdullah Abdullah, said Abdullah would stop cooperating with the audit and would withdraw from the election entirely unless the demands were met by this morning.
As if to underscore the disarray into which the presidential election has descended, Manawi's news conference, held at the headquarters of the Independent Election Commission, was immediately followed by a melee, with representatives of Abdullah and his opponent, Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, shouting and throwing punches until the riot police arrived and restored order, arresting at least two people.
There was no immediate statement from the Ahmadzai campaign in response to Manawi's withdrawal threat.
An exhaustive audit is being conducted of all the sealed ballots from the June 14 runoff. Objections from the candidates' representatives have repeatedly stalled and delayed the counting, making it increasingly unlikely that Afghanistan will have a new president in place before an important NATO summit in Wales on Sept. 4 and 5.
After two visits by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, most recently on Aug. 8, both candidates pledged to cooperate with the audit and accept its results and then join together in a national unity government led by whoever is determined to be the winner.
"The U.N. notes, that on both 12 July and 8 August the candidates already explicitly committed to accepting the result of the audit," the United Nations said in a written statement. "Should one campaign choose not to participate in the conclusion of the enormous exercise which they requested, the United Nations and the domestic and international observers will increase their participation so as to ensure the continuing credibility of the process."
Western diplomats have said it appears likely that the audit will find fraud on both sides and that the invalidated votes will not be enough to change the result, with Ahmadzai most likely to be the winning candidate.
In the initial voting April 6, Abdullah, in a field of 10 candidates, was the largest vote-getter by a large margin but not a majority, forcing a runoff with Ahmadzai. The Abdullah campaign has accused Ahmadzai and President Hamid Karzai's government of conspiring to rig the runoff.
On Monday, the Independent Election Commission began what it calls the adjudication process, in which, based on the audit results, it declares fraudulent votes invalidated. Representatives of the Abdullah campaign complained that too few votes were being invalidated, based on results Monday and Tuesday.
"If by tomorrow the United Nations and the IEC do not meet our demands, we are going to withdraw from the audit process and announce the end of our participation in the election process," Manawi said. "Whatever the outcome would be will not be our responsibility anymore and will not be acceptable to us."
The U.N. is assisting in the audit, providing technical experts and advice.
Manawi did not make public what the campaign's five demands were.
"The invalidation process is just a joke, and there is no intention of throwing out fraudulent votes," Reuters quoted Manawi as saying.
A spokesman for Abdullah, Ali Farhad, confirmed that it was Abdullah's intention to withdraw from participation in the audit and the election unless the demands were met. He cited a report published recently by The New York Times about election fraud as justification for the campaign's position. The article suggested that as much as a fourth of all votes cast in the runoff may have been fraudulent.
The fighting Tuesday came just a week after a similar scuffle, on Aug. 19, at the election commission headquarters between election observers from both campaigns. That fight sent three people to the hospital with knife and scissor wounds. Fights among the monitors also broke out Aug. 6 and July 25, according to Afghan news accounts.
A Section on 08/27/2014