Long trek keeps some Afghan voters home

When they decided the time had come to vote, Sarar and his fellow nomads simply herded their camels to the polling station.

They tethered the animals outside and filed in.

About the same time, a couple of rockets landed at a United Nations base near the election headquarters in Kabul, injuring one man.

It was election time in Afghanistan.

Sarar was caked with dust. It coated his face, his long yellow patu shawl and his Massoud-style pakoul cap.

Illiterate like all the nomads, he chose a candidate from photographs on the ballot sheet.

The Kuchi nomads, Afghanistan's poorest and most neglected people, were getting their chance to vote.

Sarar is only 15, under the legal age to vote, but somehow he had managed to get hold of a polling card.

All around, people were emerging from the towering mountains to cast their vote.

They came out of crevasses where you could not believe a path ran, from villages nestled high above, hidden behind the peaks.

If the elections had come two months later, they might not have been able to vote because the passes would be snowed up.

They came on donkeys. They came crammed 10 to a car, grown men sitting on one another's laps. And most of all they walked, along mountain paths where no vehicle can be driven.

These extraordinary scenes were repeated across Afghanistan, from the deserts of Kandahar to the icy Pamir mountains of the Wakhan, as people tramped across deserts and through mountains to cast their votes in the first parliamentary elections for more than three decades, enduring hardships that would put the citizens of more established democracies to shame.

There were reports of a lower turnout than at last year's presidential elections, but in Panjshir the people's passion to vote was obvious.

Mir Racha walked for four hours through the mountains to cast his vote - and he did it in sandals.

He set off just after dawn. When he arrived at Bazarak, a small village of mud houses in the middle of the Panjshir Valley, he cast his vote, stood talking with a few acquaintances for a couple of minutes, then set off again on the four-hour walk home.

He could not afford to delay if he wanted to be home before sundown.

"It's a very difficult journey," he said.

"But we must vote for our representatives. Every Afghan must vote for the future of his country because this election can help us develop our country."

One man who was not voting was Assadullah. He had forgotten his voter card and since his home lies 48 hours' walk from the nearest drivable road, there was little he could do about it. He comes from Nuristan, the most remote of all Afghanistan's extraordinarily remote places, made famous in the West by Eric Newby's book, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush.

But then the Nuristani was a little confused about the elections. He thought President Hamid Karzai was the new king of Afghanistan.

All day, a minibus trawled up and down the dirt road that leads through Panjshir, searching for the Kuchi nomads. It had been laid on by the election authorities as a sort of nomad-mobile, a shuttle bus to bring them to the polling stations to vote.

The only problem was that no one knew where the Kuchi were staying, so the driver had to search out their tents and camels.

Some time after lunch, the nomad-mobile broke down, a victim of Afghanistan's axle-shattering roads, and the Kuchi were left to make their own way to the polling stations.

They spend the summers in high pasture like the Panjshir, driving their livestock to lowlands such as those round Jalalabad for the winter.

It is a penurious existence, but the effort to get the Kuchi to vote seemed to be an overwhelming success yesterday.

One of the victims of Afghanistan's often brutal geography was women voters.

Many of the men who walked for hours from remote villages said the women from their families had not come because the route was too arduous, or because they would have been at risk of assault on the unprotected mountain paths.

Some of the men tried to bring their wives and daughters' voting cards and cast their votes by proxy, but Fatma, the chief official at the Bazarak polling station, was a tough woman who could hold her own against any Afghan man and was having none of it.

Sixty-five of the 149 seats in Parliament are reserved for women.

Aside from a few cases of under-age voting, there was little sign of irregularities - and birth records do not exist in rural Afghanistan.

A spate of violence in the run-up to the elections, including a thwarted attempt to blow up a major dam, were a message from former rulers the Taleban that they have not gone away.

A full-scale insurgency led by the Taleban is raging across half of Afghanistan, in the Pashtun-dominated south and east.

Seven candidates were killed in the weeks leading up to the elections, and one high-profile candidate, Bashar Dost, called a press conference on the eve of voting to deny reports he had been killed.

But there are grave fears of more killing after the votes are counted because of a seemingly ill-judged electoral law that has become jokingly known as the "assassination clause".

It stipulates that if any winning candidate is physically unable to take up his seat in Parliament, the seat will go to the runner-up.

Given Afghanistan's long past of violence, this is being seen here as an open invitation to disgruntled losers to "adjust" the results by assassinating the candidates who beat them to the post.

With the huge logistical task of bringing in ballot papers from remote provinces, the final count is set for October 22.

Bloody days are feared between then and November 2 when Parliament is supposed to be confirmed.

- INDEPENDENT