Afghan President Hamid Karzai's 17 rivals in the presidential race Wednesday threatened to boycott landmark October 9 elections unless he stepped down before the vote.
"Karzai misuses government facilities for his electoral campaign - all (17) presidential candidates have unanimously agreed to ask for his resignation," Abdul Satar Sirat, one of the candidates, claimed at a press conference in a Kabul restaurant. The candidates want Karzai to resign "within one week," Sirat said.
"All 17 presidential candidates would boycott the polls," he replied when asked what they would do if Karzai rejected their call to resign.
The call was the first joint statement by Karzai's rivals since they were confirmed as candidates last week by the electoral commission.
Sirat, a professor from the ethnic Tajik minority, had run against Karzai at the Bonn conference in December 2001 when delegates chose a leader of the first interim government after the US-led ouster of the Taleban regime.
He won 11 votes to Karzai's three, but later swung his support behind the president.
Sixteen candidates including his chief rival Yunus Qanooni, part of the powerful bloc of Tajik anti-Taleban commanders from the Panjshir valley, met to discuss pre-election strategies while the US-backed transitional leader Karzai addressed an independence day gathering at the National Stadium.
The only candidate absent from the session was northern Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostam, who was represented by his vice-presidential running mate Safiqa Habibi.
Under Afghanistan's electoral law all government officials are required to step down from their positions 75 days before polls, with the exception of the president.
Wednesday's meeting follows days of closed-door negotiations among candidates to establish how alliances might be made and whether some would step down in favour of others.
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