La crisis en Afganistán
| Autor | Ahmed Rashid |
| Páginas | 137-143 |
Page 137
In December 2005 I spent several hours a day in Kabul seated on a sofa in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel interviewing whoever passed by. The hotel, perched on a hill at the edge of the city and long ago written off by the Intercontinental chain as a bad loss, has taken some bloody knocks in Afghanistan's 23 years of war. The most notable were in 1992 when I spent more than a month using the hotel as a bunker to avoid getting hit, first as the communist regime crumbled and then as the civil war unrolled across the city below me. For more than a decade the hotel was without regular electricity or running water and it was always a male abode. You never saw an Afghan woman there.
Now I was squeezed tight on the sofa having an animated conversation. On my left was a former Taliban commander with a beard down to his waist and on my right, a young and beautiful Afghan woman from Herat, whose only concession to «covering up» was a very loose and flimsy head scarf. They were both members of Page 138 the new Afghan parliament that had been elected on September 19 and for the past week they had been receiving instruction from UN experts as to what a parliament was and how to behave in one. The two hour lunch breaks allowed the Members of Parliament (MPs) to meet each other informally. As he argued with the woman, I could see that the former Taliban was still suffering from culture shock.
An even bigger shock must have been the seating arrangements on December 19, when the Parliament was inaugurated by President Hamid Karzai in the presence of US Vice President Dick Cheney -who arrived 20 minutes late. Men and women MPs were seated next to one another in alphabetical order -and there were no complaints. That does not happen in Iran or in the Arab world, where the Muslim world's largely rigged parliaments enforce strict segregation.
The parliament has proved to be no rubber stamp for Karzai or the Americans. It set about its first task in March 2006 with the kind of earnestness and professionalism reserved for much older bodies. In Afghanistan's presidential system of government, the country's new Constitution gives parliament the power to vet the president's cabinet and the MPs did just that. They politely demanded that each of Karzai's 25 cabinet ministers present their credentials, say what they had achieved and hoped to achieve and then answer blistering, rapid fire questions from the MPs.
Even more remarkable was that the proceedings were broadcast live on TV and radio. The entire population was glued to these unprecedented hearings. For a month work came to a standstill as mesmerized Afghans heard tribal and warlord ministers fumble for words as they sought to explain themselves. Eventually on April 20 parliament approved only twenty ministers, forcing Karzai to sack five of them.
It is difficult to minimize the importance of such a free wheeling parliament and the first general elections ever experienced by Afghans. 6.6 million Afghans had cast their vote and 41 percent of them were women. Women hold 68 seats or 27 percent of the 249 seats in the Wolesi Jirga or lower «House of the People» and one sixth of the seats in the Meshrano Jirga the upper house or Senate called the «House of the Elders.» It is by far the largest number of women parliamentarians in any Muslim country or for that matter many Western countries. Yet an estimated one third of the male MPs are either warlords, gross abusers of human rights or involved in drugs smuggling. That's what you get after two decades of war.
The voter turnout last September was only 53 percent, compared to 70 percent for the presidential elections in 2004. There hangs a tale -the reasons for the low turn out have everything to do with the perilous state of Afghanistan today, the lack of security and voter disillusionment.
The elections bought a conclusion to the UN sponsored Bonn process which had begun in December 2001 after the UN's Lakhdar Brahimi and Francesc Vendrell finalized an agreement between...
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