In May and June 2002 I oversaw the holding of elections in Kandahar, Helmand, Zabul and Uruzgan. I was the only UN political/civil affairs officer in south-west Afghanistan and had to single-handedly support – I barely had office staff – the Afghan team in charge of organizing the elections. This meant

• planning elections in about 40 districts;
• hosting three to five international observers;
• making sure the Afghan team and an international observer could get to each district, hold the elections and return (helicopters flown by drunk Moldovan pilots only arrived in the last few days of the electoral process);
• troubleshooting problems with Afghan strongmen opposing the elections (this meant traveling to see them, as there were not yet mobile phones or internet);
• fixing a location and accommodation in Kandahar to host over a thousand district delegates during a few days for the second round of the electoral process, and organizing the latter;
• obtaining funding for all these activities from a reticent and bureaucratic UN headquarters;
• reporting on the elections by Thuraya satphone when that worked, otherwise by flying to Kabul and delivering my reports on a USB stick, and bringing back a bag of cash to pay for everything.
• and dealing with security for the electoral process.

I only received support for security, from a team of 4 SAS commandoes, although of course these guys, who went by names like ‘Nick’ and ‘Chris’, denied being SAS. They were anyhow not under my command and did their own things to ensure nobody would violently disrupt the elections. In all other things I was completely on my own. I didn’t sleep more than 4-6 hours every night. There was no security officer from the UN to stop me from getting in a car, driving myself to a neighbouring province and holding my meetings there to convince a governor to allow the elections. It was exhilarating.

I recently found this plate I made at the time, sticking pictures made with our brand new ‘internet camera’s’ that made digital pictures, a novelty in that time. Image resolution maxed out at 640×480 pixels, so the image quality is very poor. But, besides the movie ‘Of Course I Voted for my Uncle‘ that I made with my friend and international observer Cyrus Hodes, this is the only tangible memory I have of those exciting days.