Come One, Come All!

Pull the kids out of school early, tell grandma that she can't have that second dose of Cipro, put on your Friday's best and head on over to your local thoroughfare to find out all you need to know about the candidates.  It's election season and you can see and feel the buzz all around!  Over the past 2 weeks or so, campaign posters have started marring the beautiful Kabul landscape and they stand there tall and proud, ready to the tell the city who the best candidate is.  Since illiteracy is a huge problem here (close to 70% of the population is illiterate), the IEC (love them!) and the government have issued symbols for each candidate so that on election day, a few words won't get in the way of exercising democracy.  So while one candidate is 3 fish, another one is a desk, and yet another one is a lantern.  I have seen keys, swords, candles, light bulbs, bicycles, you name it.  And sometimes you have a guy with 3 fish instead of one or 2 keys instead of 3.  I am fascinated and in love and have vowed to take pictures of as many of these as possible.

So I started asking locals if they knew what in the hell these symbols represented.  No says they.  OK.  So I started asking if there was any kind of campaign for the campaign that explained what the symbols meant.  Again no.  So then I asked, where in the bloody hell do these symbols come from?  Well, apparently they are given out by the IEC when a candidate registers (click here for the final IEC list).  No rhyme.  No reason.  No meaning.  Just a symbol.  So if you can't read and you happen to like the way the guy or girl on the poster looks, then at least you know they're symbol so you can vote for them.  Too bad everybody I asked said that they wouldn't vote.  C'est la vie...

Thanks IEC

Oh. The IEC.  We got a contract to produce from public service announcements for radio broadcast about the upcoming Wolosi Jirga.  The parliamentary elections.  The messages were to deal with the nomination and complaints period.  The IEC set up a phone line where listeners could call in and voice their complaints.  Given all the controversy surrounding the last election, this was an important step forward.  We were slated to broadcast this message 160 times across 30 different stations nationwide.  Well.  After 48 broadcasts, the IEC called us and asked us to stop broadcasting.  Why?  Because they were getting TOO MANY COMPLAINTS!  What in the fuck did they expect?  Really?  That no one would call?  Uh? If I recall correctly, the last election was frought with accusations of vote-rigging and intimidation.  People are angry and they have lost faith in the process and the first thing that is initiated in an effort to combat this gets sacked before it even has a chance.  Since the broadcasts were only set to occur over the course of a month, we were never able to make up the missed ones.  Frankly, I hope that people rape, riot and pillage.

On another note, the picture below is of the Afghan parliament from way back in the day (about 79 years ago), where phone lines and complaint periods were probably non-existant.