Zalmai Rassoul registers as 5th presidential candidate

Monitoring Desk

KABUL: Zalmai Rassoul on Tuesday registered his candidacy with the Independent Election Commission in Kabul to contest the July presidential election.

As fifth presidential hopeful, Zalmai Rassoul picked Abdul Jabbar Taqwa as his first and Ghulam Ali Wahdat as his second vice-president.

Rassoul was born in 1954 in capital Kabul. He is graduated from Istiqlal High School and pursued his higher education up to Ph.D in Paris, capital of France.

He can speak Dari, Pashto, English, French and Italian languages. Rassoul also served as aviation minister in 2002 later worked as security advisor with the president until 2010. After 2010, he served as foreign minister.

Talking to media today afternoon, Zalmai Rassoul said, “With the help of God and support of people of Afghanistan, I promise to stand against any type of discrimination and inequality and work for peace, stability and democracy under my slogan ‘National unity, justice, security, peace, balance and equality’”

He said that bringing peace to the country would be in his priority but hoped the peace would establish in Afghanistan before the elections. “Election is meaningless without peace,” he said.

Rassoul asked the IEC to observe full transparency in the upcoming presidential elections and the commission was responsible for any possible problems during the election process.

Earlier, Abdul Latif Pedram, Mohammad Hakim Torsan, Sayed Anwar Jalili and Enayatulla Hafiz have registered as presidential candidates for July 20 elections.

According to the IEC, the canddiates registration process would continue until July 20 and there was no plan to extend this process.

A presidential candidate should be a Muslim, Afghan citizen, having completed the age of 40 and should present 100,000 supporters and pay a million afghanis to the commission based on the electoral law. (Pajhwok)