Thank you all for being here. I will perhaps get us started with a few words about the preparations for the Berlin Conference. Before I do this, I would like to start by welcoming the announcement that was made this morning by President Karzai about the holding of the elections. That decision is going to make everyone’s life a lot easier. It will certainly allow the Secretariat and the Joint Electoral Management Body to start preparing for the holding of these elections. I think it will also help political parties and candidates to now have a better sense of what has to be accomplished between now and September. I think it is also very important in terms of public information and civic education and since you are all in the public information business, you will have an important role to play to try to bring an awareness to millions of Afghans who will be involved in this exercise about their duties, their responsibilities and about the process.

It also makes an important difference for the Berlin Conference. Indeed, coming as it does in the wake of this announcement, the Berlin Conference takes a bit of a different meaning. First of all, clearly it is going to be an opportunity for the international community and for the Afghan Government to understand how huge the agenda is between now and September. Huge because there will be a large task to fulfill when it comes to information and education. But also and perhaps more so because in order to have a proper election in September, clearly many things that haven’t happened in the past couple of years, must now happen in a very, very short period of time.

You all have taken note of the announcement yesterday by the Ministry of Defence about disarmament. The objective to have by the end of June a 40 percent reduction of the troop strength of the AMF and full cantonment of heavy weapons is clearly an enormous task but it is also a necessary task. As you know, Afghans since the signing of the Bonn Agreement have been saying the same thing – no elections without disarmament. We have been taking this clamor very seriously and we do believe that the next few months will have to focus in a very significant way on allowing these elections to take place in a country that will not be fully disarmed but should be well on its way towards disarmament.

In terms of political freedoms and freedom of the press, clearly between now and September much more has to happen. We hope that the media law will soon be passed and it should beef-up the protection of journalists. We also feel that throughout the country there are places where the operation of political parties is difficult. All of this has to change before a free and fair election can take place.

The second thing that we hope Berlin will do in addition to understanding better what has to be done between now and September, is to understand better what must happen after September. The Bonn Agreement provides that the holding of free and fair elections will be somehow the culmination of the agenda. The creation of a fully representative Government will no doubt create a much better dynamic for the future of the country but it is certainly not the end of what the Bonn process has requested – the creation of a new army, the creation of police, the creation of a civil administration and reconstruction – all those obligations that the international community and the Government of Afghanistan have taken upon themselves will not end on the day of the elections. We very much hope that the Berlin Conference will be an opportunity for everyone to understand the magnitude of the post-electoral agenda.

A third area that we hope the Berlin Conference will be able to emphasize is the need to continue to the fairly special relationship that has developed between Afghanistan and the international community. You have all been witnesses to the intensity of that cooperation over the past couple of years, perhaps not as much as we would all have liked but there certainly has been a very significant effort at bringing international partners and the Afghan counterparts in a very close relationship. That relationship will need to continue and we hope that the Berlin Conference will send that very strong signal that while the formal time line of the Bonn Agreement will be met by the month of September, we really have a new partnership that must continue and must take with it all of the positive features of cooperation between the international community and the State of Afghanistan until now.

With these brief points, I would be glad to take your questions.

Question and Answers

Question: The Afghan Government is going to Berlin with their demand of $28 billion for seven years. Everyone is concentrating on this but what about it being a chance for political inclusion that was mentioned earlier?

SRSG: Inclusiveness is certainly our concern and you know that the UN over the past couple of years has repeatedly emphasized the need for reform of central Government institutions. This reform in our view had essentially two aspects. One was to create more effectiveness, to make sure that police could in fact operate as an effective police and that the army could operate as an effective army. But we always felt that in addition to the element of effectiveness there was an element of representation. In the same way that the elections are suppose to allow for a fully representative government to emerge, we also always thought that fully representative institutions must be created. We continue to feel that way and we continue to believe that between now and September more can be achieved in terms both of effectiveness and representation.

This being said, I think there is also a fairly strong momentum towards political participation, and this is something that I think I mentioned in the last press conference. These elections in September do take place against a background where we feel more people aspire to participate and hopefully more people will participate – new political parties, new candidates. This element of representation and inclusiveness is not something that we have forgotten. Indeed we insist on those changes – disarmament, more political freedoms – because we do believe that for these elections to be credible, they have to be open to people both currently operating as political parties or as factions and those who are not currently able to operate.

Question: How do you expect the donors at the Berlin Conference to respond to the issue of Herat and the factional violence in some provinces? How would the Afghan Government convince the donors of their legitimacy beyond Kabul?

SRSG: Thank you for bringing up Herat because I think that it is a very important background to this conference. What does it show? First of all I think it shows very clearly how critical the issue of disarmament is. The fact that whatever the circumstances that lead to the confrontation were, it is now obvious that as long heavy weapons are in the hands of rival factions, as long as weapons are in the hands of rival factions, there simply is no guarantee that security will exist for the citizens in their daily life and for an election. I think one of the most forceful reminders that Herat is sending to Berlin and to all of us is how critical the achievement of these disarmament and demobilization targets are. What we do hope is that Berlin will take note of that situation and will insist that the agenda of DDR is a critical part of state building, and that we simply will not be able to make so much progress in terms of army, in terms of police, if at the same time we do not address the issue of weapons being still today in the hands of rival factions.

All of us were fairly shocked by what happened in October of last year when there was the latest round of skirmishes between the 7th Corps and 8th Corps in Mazar. Frankly, we thought that after that perhaps the situation would have calmed down. I think for all of us it is a very sobering reminder of where we really are that six months after Mazar we now face the same kind of situation in Herat.

Question: In the past, you were saying elections were going to be in June. Can we say now that they will be held in September?

SRSG: My understanding of the announcement made by President Karzai this morning is precisely this and this is a decision that we support. Let me say one thing about free and fair. Freedom and fairness is not a given. That these elections will be free and fair depends very much on what is going to happen between now and then. This is why we are sensitive to the fact that the two statements came very close to one another: the statement on DDR and the statement on the elections. We believe that these two are deeply linked and that a commitment to hold free and fair elections in September is a commitment to complete the process of DDR, as was indicated yesterday, before these elections take place.

Question: Is the date of September the last date or could it be delayed if you don’t have the number of voters or because of the security situation?

SRSG: We have looked into this issue of timing and we have consulted fairly widely with representatives of political parties and civil society leaders and the message that we got from most of them is that people want to have elections this year. There is clearly now a sense of political participation and people would be bitterly disappointed if these elections did not take place this year. This is why we feel comfortable that while an election this year will not be perfect – if we have one more year or two more years to prepare perhaps it would be more perfect two years from now – but the political will today among the majority of Afghans is: lets do it and lets do it this year.

To answer your question, we are convinced that this is the right time. But we are also convinced that the right conditions are not yet there and this is why it is so important for us that the next six months be dedicated to make sure these conditions should exist by then.

I will take advantage of your question to say that one of the hopes that we do have is that an election by September will allow NATO to be deployed in larger numbers. You know that there is a request from President Karzai to NATO to expand their presence throughout the country and we do believe that having a date in September will hopefully make it easier for the state members of NATO to generate, as they say, the necessary force to have a proper, adequate presence in the country by the time of the elections.

Question: What about the number of voters – what if there are not enough?

SRSG: On voters, lets first of all look at the situation that we have today. I think we have about 1.6 million voters registered in the eight major population centers and that represents, if I am not mistaken, only 300,000 people short of the 1.9 million voters who are expected to be in those eight population centers. This means that we are very, very close. Already our colleagues are telling us that the rate of registration in these eight centers is decreasing which gives you a good indication that you are meeting your targets. Our colleagues are intending to extend in both Kandahar and Kabul, the presence of those sites to make sure everybody does have a chance but I think what we are seeing is that the process is working. People are registering and they are doing it fairly quickly. We feel very confident that starting the nationwide process on the first of May and carrying on for the whole of May and as much of June as may be necessary, will give us a comprehensive process of registration.

Question: On weapons collection, you mention that there will be a 40 percent decrease. Do you think that Afghanistan will be safe and secure for the election process, for a free and fair election, when there will still be 60 percent with weapons?

SRSG: Two things on this. Number one is that the announcement that was made yesterday by the Ministry of Defence covers until the 30th of June so the commitment that is now on the table is to complete 40 percent demobilization and 100 percent heavy weapon cantonment by the 30th of June. Between the 30th of June and September there is still time to further the process of DDR. That doesn’t mean as you say that all weapons or even all soldiers will be demobilized by then. I think that it is very important for all of us but certainly for the media to assist in investigating the situation, in telling the public and the rest of us whether with this effort we have essentially something that is an acceptable level of risk.

Let me tell you one more thing. Earlier this year when the issue of timing was on the table, the first that we did was to go out to the regions and to the provinces to ask people what they thought about security and about elections. The very strong message that we got in return was yes, there is an issue of security but that issue of security must not prevent us from aiming at an election this year. We have to do more on disarmament, we have to do more on political freedom, we have to do more on all kinds of fronts but let us continue to try to make this election happen this year. So this is very much how we approach this process. We will carry on and we will insist that DDR should take place and that more DDR should take place between the 30th of June and September. We continue to believe that the people want these elections to take place in the coming months.

I will just conclude by reiterating what I said about public information. One of the difficulties is clearly that even an election in September will be somehow soon and some would say premature when it comes to proper public information to the public at large about what it means to have parliamentary elections, what it means to have presidential elections, what are the parties suppose to do, what are the candidates. I think that everything that the media can do towards bringing this information not only to those in the population centers, in the cities but to the countryside about the meaning of these elections would be extremely important. Public education and civic education by the professionals of the Secretariat of the Joint Electoral Management Body will be a contribution but clearly it will be only a minor contribution. I think that most of the information that people will be receiving in Afghanistan in the next few months will be coming from you. We hope that you will be able to play this important role and we will certainly be at your disposal to help you play it.

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