KABUL: President Hamid Karzai could inaugurate Afghanistan's new parliament on Jan. 20, officials said Monday, after months of uncertainty triggered by widespread fraud during elections in September. “I think we can expect the new parliament to be inaugurated on 20th of January,” said Karzai's chief spokesman, Waheed Omer. “The constitution requires the parliament to be inaugurated on the 20th of January, after the (winter break) period ends,” the spokesman added. The president's spokesman also said that Karzai was consulting his aides to pick 34 appointed members of the 102-member-strong of the upper house of the parliament. Afghans voted in their second post-Taliban parliamentary election on Sept. 18 but the attorney general's office has called on the Supreme Court to cancel the results of the vote, released last month. Electoral authorities disqualified 24 early winners, including allies of the president, and threw out around a quarter of about five million votes cast. Karzai has so far refused to endorse the election outcome, which appears to have sapped his traditional Pashtun powerbase. But he has urged hundreds of losing candidates, who have demonstrated across the country demanding the cancellation of the results, to take their complaints to the Supreme Court.
