KABUL – Afghan President Ashraf Ghani launched new electronic ID cards onThursday and faced immediate opposition in his own government towards asystem that has fuelled bitter rows over ethnic politics only months beforeparliamentary elections are due.
The much delayed “e-tezkera” system, named after the local term foridentity cards, is intended to reduce fraud, streamline publicadministration and give a clearer picture of the population by centralizingdata on one digitized card.
“E-tezkera will help security in the country,” Ghani said at a ceremony atwhich he received the first card to be issued. “The problem with thetraditional ID card was that the foreign terrorists could easily make fakenational Afghan IDs and challenge our security.”
But the inclusion of a national identity denomination that is rejected bysome groups in Afghanistan has laid bare the persistent ethnic divisionsthat have widened sharply over the past year.
The new system has been the subject of furious argument because itdesignates a holder’s nationality as “Afghan”, a term used in the past todenote Pashtuns, traditionally the most politically powerful ethnic group.
Some members of other groups, notably Persian-speaking ethnic Tajiks, saythat use of the term on the cards is intended to entrench the power of thePashtuns by suggesting that their identity is equivalent with that of thenation as a whole.
Like almost all kings and presidents of Afghanistan, Ghani is an ethnicPashtun and he has faced increasing opposition from Tajiks as presidentialelections next year approach.
Shortly after the ceremony, Ghani’s partner in government, Chief ExecutiveAbdullah Abdullah, whose Jamiat party mainly represents ethnic Tajiks fromnorthern Afghanistan, rejected the new cards.
“Large national processes need more work and strategy that can achievepeople’s satisfaction,” he told a news conference. “There are far importantpriorities.
“I am not against electronic ID cards, but this was not the time for it,because there are disagreements among the people about the e-ID cards.”
The new cards have faced long delays for both technical and politicalreasons and Ghani’s original intention of using them to register voters andreduce fraud in parliamentary elections scheduled for October has beenabandoned.
Registration will be based on the old paper ID cards, although as manyAfghans do not even have one of these, millions will have to be issued byOctober for sufficient numbers of voters to be included, a process alreadybehind schedule.