Dismissed officers demonstrate in Kabul

While the Afghan government has yet to meet the challenge of reintegrating thousands of former combatants, about 1,000 former officers of the Afghan army on Monday held a protest in the capital, Kabul, against their dismissal - the fourth demonstration this month. They are demanding reinstatement and payment of wage arrears. "There has not been any criterion for our dismissal. Those unqualified, but linked with high authorities, remained, and professional neutral and poor officers were dismissed," Col Abdul Matin, one of the protesters, told IRIN. Matin said he was one of 42,000 former officers who had been either suspended or dismissed outright. "We are talking about over 300,000 people's destiny, which includes our families and children," he said, noting that they had not been paid for months before being finally dismissed. The demonstration was more aggressive than previous ones, with banners and slogans condemning the defence ministry and the Afghan government. The protesters started from the city centre and marched towards the office of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan. Maj Mohammad Arif told IRIN he had left his business in neighbouring Pakistan and returned to country a year ago, believing that he would be able to resume his job as an air defence officer. "Why did they [government] invite all Afghan professionals to the country if they could not give them jobs?" Arif wanted to know. The government told IRIN that the officer dismissals had taken place over the past month as part of reforms aimed at establishing a professional army. "Of course, when reforms come there may be short-term losers, but people who lost their jobs have to realise that in the long term they are the winners," Javid Ludin, a government spokesman, told IRIN following the demonstration. He noted that President Hamid Karzai had received representatives of the protesters and would discuss the issue with them. But the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said the dismissals should have been conducted in a more orderly way. "There should be a mechanism foreseen prior to sacking employees to ensure that they will have another job," Nader Naderi, an AIHRC spokesman, told IRIN. He went on to say that the AIHRC welcomed the reform process within the Ministry of Defence (MoD), "but AIHRC is concerned about the transparency in the process of reform". "We appealed to MoD and Ministry of Finance that however these officers are sacked, they should be paid for the months that they officially carried out duty before they were dismissed. Their salary is their legitimate right," Naderi stressed.