AFGHANS READY FOR THE EMERGENCY LOYA JIRGA
By an IPS Correspondent
KABOL 7 Jun. (IPS) "The Emergency Loya Jirga (ELJ), or Afghanistan’s grand assembly of elders, would start working on time, that is on 10 of June and would end its session on time, after naming a new prime minister to take over from the present interim government", assured Dr Abdollah Abdollah, the Foreign Affairs Minister.
The current government, led by Mr. Hamed Karzai, an ethnic Poshtoon, was selected by the United Nations in December in Bonn, following a meeting by several Afghan groups minus the Taleban, the sectarian Muslim fundamentalists that ruled the impoverished country and terrorised the population for six years.
The new transitional government will take charge of the country for a period of 18 months, until the end of 2003, when a Constitutional Loya Jirga will be held to decide the political structure of the country.
It is widely expected that the ELJ would be presided over by the 87 years-old Mohammad Zaher Shah, Afghanistan’s former king, who returned to his native land after almost 30 years of exile in Rome.
But after 23 years of constant civil war, which ruined this once prosperous and peaceful Asian nation, but made armed factions and their commanders extremely powerful, democracy is a struggle.
"Because this process is being monitored by the UN and by the independent Loya Jirga Commission, one has to be confident", said confidently Mr. Michael Semple, an official from the United Nations".
The elections are being run in two stages. In the first stage local representatives are being chosen by popular acclaim. "Most of them are coming through as local community leaders and there are some commanders pushing their way through", Mr. Semple explained, adding that in the second stage it would be by secret ballot.
Hamed Karzai confirmed on Thursday he would present himself to the ELJ to lead the new transitional government.
"If the Loya Jirga decides to elect me again to continue what the government called the transitional government, I will be honoured and accept it", he told journalists at a signing ceremony during which he signed two decrees to establish Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and Afghan Independent Judiciary Commission.
"I will go to the world with very, very strong demand to deliver the promises they have made, especially in the areas of reconstruction of highways and communications", he said. "Education has been done. More of education and more of health."
He also said that he was permitted by the Special Commission for the Loya
Jirga to invite 50 governors - leaders but not commanders, eminent personalities
and his advisers, including 5 women, as members of the Loya Jirga.
Karzai said that most of the Afghan people has strong desire for peace.
On the process of the ELJ, he stressed that though there are "some imperfect events" occurred during the district, local and provincial elections, the Loya Jirga was "an achievement" for Afghanistan.
Perhaps the most striking element of this Emergency Loya Jirga will be the presence, for the first time, of 160 Afghan women as delegates, many educated and all clamouring to have a say in how the new Afghanistan is run.
The presence of so many women will be an extraordinary sight, due to the stark contrast with the Taleban era, where, under Islamic laws, they have been robbed of their identity and civil rights, forced to wear the all-enveloping boorqa and were treated as virtual non-persons, without almost no rights.
So entrenched are attitudes in much of the country that only 20 women had been voted to the assembly by last night. The 21-strong Loya Jirga commission has had to make good its promise of 160 female delegates — roughly 10 per cent of representatives — by appointing another 140 to the assembly.
The United Nations is also determined that women will have a significant role in its vision of a new, democratic and inclusive Afghanistan. More than 200 women, the delegates and their advisers, are being coached during a seven-hour intensive session by UN women’s rights experts on the political skills that they will need to have their voice heard amid the din of the Loya Jirga’s 1,501 delegates, and the maelstrom of bargaining and deal-making.
"We will be imparting skills to help them build a coalition to influence the decisions," a UN spokesman said.
Two warlords, Tajik General Esma’il Khan, the Iran-backed Governor of the Western Province of Herat and General Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek, have been elected, despite clear rules banning from the assembly anyone with violent or warlord pasts.
Twenty three years of war, and then a grand alliance with the Americans against the Taleban, have given the armed factions the clout to try to rig the Loya Jirga. For democrats, the national gathering in June with mainly elected representatives, is an opportunity to forge a different kind of Afghanistan. But it has also brought danger.
"Since elections started a month ago, in any corner of Afghanistan where the gun is dominant, the warlords have been threatening people", one Afghan noted, adding: "People asked me to be one of their candidates, but the armed men warned me not to stand - or they would kill me".
"Not only us women, but men also, have been summoned again and again and asked who they're going to vote for and if they're going to stand. "After so much questioning, some people in our area who would have stood as candidates and had local support, have dropped out of the second round", one woman confirmed.
The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has said that Afghan warlords are trying to subvert the process of forming a democratic government in the capital.
"Local commanders have used violence and intimidation against independent candidates and have drawn up their own lists of delegates", HRW said, pointing out that tacit support for some warlords by the US-led military force has "inadvertently strengthened their influence in some regions".
The group also said that warlords had developed ties with the Taleban as well as with the Islamist movement led by warlord and former Prime Minister Golboddin Hekmatyar, a fierce opponent to the legendary Ahmad Shah Mas’ood, who was assassinated by two Arab terrorists on 9 September, dispatched by Osama Ben Laden, the man suspected by the Americans to have organised the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington.
The most celebrated Loya Jirga was held in 1747. After nine days of debates, Poshtoon tribal chiefs meeting in Qandahar elected as king the only man who had not said a word: Ahmad Shah Durrani, the founder of modern Afghanistan, whose Poshtoon dynasty ruled the country until the overthrow of Mohammad Zaher Shah in 1973, by his cousin, Daoud Khan, who held a Loya Jirga in 1977, making the nation a Republic. The last Loya Jirga set up a new constitution with a Dr. Najibullah as President. ENDS LOYA JIRGA ELECTIONS 7602