09 January 2004	Friday	16 Ziqa'ad 1424

KABUL, Jan 8: Afghanistan's first democratic elections are unlikely to take place in June as scheduled because of delays in voter registration, the United Nations said Thursday.

"The current rate of registration is far below the rate necessary to complete registration for election this year," UN spokesman Manuel de Almeida e Silva said.

"The right date remains June but it is close to impossible to meet the June date with the current security conditions which do not permit the registration to take place all over the country.

"It is necessary that registration teams have access to all areas of the country." He said every effort was being made to make the deadline. But the United States rejected the warning, with ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad saying "that's not my view, I think we need to take a look at the situation". Mr Khalilzad admitted that there had been "slower than expected registration" but pledged to assess whether it would be possible to speed up voter registration to compensate,

"I am not of the view at this point that elections cannot take place this June, or this summer," said Mr Khalilzad. Rising violence in the south and east, which has increasingly targeted aid workers and reconstruction teams, has led to a drastic reduction in the number of foreign aid workers in the regions.

So far 274,000 Afghans, of the 10 million eligible, have been enrolled on electoral lists and of these only 59,000 are women, Almeida e Silva said. However, the number of women participating in the process is increasing gradually, he said.

President Hamid Karzai has already said that elections might be held up for two months for logistical reasons. Under the Bonn peace accords, concluded at the end of 2001 following the ousting of the Taliban, elections were due to be held in Afghanistan in June following the adoption of a new constitution.

A grand assembly, or loya jirga, approved a new constitution for the war-ravaged country on Sunday. Voter registration has been going on under high security since the beginning of December in eight major cities around the country. It will then move to capitals of the 32 provinces and from there to the rural areas.

The eastern city of Jalalabad has the highest number of registered voters, at 28 per cent of those eligible on the books. The highest registration of females is in the central province of Bamiyan and western Herat which have 43 per cent and 29 per cent of women voters registered respectively.-AFP