KABUL: Amid fears over the low numbers of women registering to vote in Afghanistan, a tribal council in the conservative province of Paktia has provided a fearsome incentive.

Families that do not enroll women will have to forfeit 100,000 afghanis (approximately 2,000 dollars) and a bull. In addition, the family's houses will be burned down, said Haji Kala Khan Ahmadzai, the tribal leader of the Ahmad Abad district of Paktia.

Ahmadzai said the penalties had been approved last month at a meeting of the 50-member Ahmadzai council, which includes at least 10 religious scholars. Other tribes in the area have also agreed to enforce the punishment.

"Unless we take it this seriously, local residents will not take part," he said. "And since we are traditionally conservative village people, we have adopted these rigid conditions."

In Mazar-e Sharif, the capital of Balkh province, Nafisa Ghiasi, the headmistress of Hashim Barat High School, persuaded more than 500 women to march through the city to one of the registration centres.

Engineer Habibullah, the provincial governor, along with about 150 men, welcomed the marchers in a show of support for having women registered to vote in the upcoming presidential election, scheduled for June.

It must be said, however, that such occurrences are the exception rather than the norm. Despite the fact that registration efforts have been under way in major centres for the past two months, the results so far - for both men and women - are disappointing.

According to figures released through the first week of February by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan, UNAMA, only 796,875 people, out of an estimated 10.5 million eligible voters 18 or older have registered so far. Of these, only 176,562 are women.

There is now talk that the elections will have to be postponed. Manoel de Almeida e Silva, the spokesman for the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, said in January that the numbers made it "close to impossible to meet the June deadline."

However, some say the registration process is gaining momentum. Shamim Usmani, a female registrar in Mazar-e Sharif, said "in the beginning very few men and women were coming for registration, but the process has speeded up."

So far, the province of Bamiyan, dominated by the minority Shia Hazaras, has the highest proportion of women registered to vote, with 10,392 women signed up compared to 14,417 men.

It is followed by the cities of Herat, Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul. The cities of Jalalabad and Gardez have the lowest proportion of women registered. In Gardez, for example, 22,699 men have registered, but only 3,298 are on the voting rolls.

The head of the election process in the eastern provinces, Subahdayak Shah, who is based in Jalalabad, said that registration efforts have had to pay careful attention to Pashtun culture, which traditionally does not encourage female participation in public life.

Shah said that grassroots initiatives have been started to encourage families to get women out to enroll, including talking with Imams in the mosques and the Maliks, traditional tribal elders.

Noor Bibi, a member of the registration team, said registrars attempt to target locations where women are likely to gather. "We established our registration office in a health clinic so when women come in sick we write down their names," she said. -Dawn-IWPR News Service.