Violence raises concern about the Loya Jirga

The recent murders of Loya Jirga, or Grand Council, delegates, along with complaints about improper representation of various ethnic groups and a terrorist threat has raised concerns about the key event set to determine Afghanistan's political future in less than two weeks. Eight candidates have been murdered, four in the southern province of Kandahar, one in the capital Kabul and three in the central province of Ghor. "We are deeply disturbed and profoundly regret that several people have been killed," the spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA), Manoel de Almeida e Silva, told reporters in the capital, Kabul, on Tuesday. He also expressed concern over the detention of several delegates in the western province of Herat. UNAMA is facilitating the process towards holding the Loya Jirga. With eight people murdered in different parts of the country, in incidents described by Almeida e Silva as "related to the current political process", the arrests of Loya Jirga delegates Muhammad Rafiq Sahir, Abdul Latif and Ghulam Faruq and a number of incidents of intimidation in Herat have raised concerns about attempts by regional warlords to derail the process. Also in the run-up to the Loya Jirga, scheduled to open on 10 June, provincial authorities loyal to Jehansad, the regional warlord and governor of the northeastern Konar Province, have arrested some 24 Loya Jirga delegates in the district of Marawaray on charges of stirring up trouble. Last week, ethnic Pashtuns from the county's southern and eastern provinces voiced concern in Kabul over their representation in the upcoming event. They are the majority ethnic group in the country. With the US-led coalition's mopping-up operations continuing in eastern Afghanistan, Maj-Gen Frankline L. Hagenbeck told the New York Times newspaper that Al-Qaeda and Taliban were planning to sabotage the event. Painting a grim picture of the political scenario, Abdul Rashid Waziri, a former Afghan minister in the 1980s, told IRIN that the Loya Jirga was a traditional institution and needed the support of the people to succeed. "Warlords and their militias all around the country are trying to disrupt the process by buying people or enforcing their will at gunpoint," he said. "First collect the Kalashinkov [assault rifle] and than expect people to decide fairly," he maintained. Six people selected for phase one of the Loya Jirga in the district of Karuk in Herat Province decided not to participate in the second phase after receiving death threats from their district chief. Waziri, an exile in Pakistan's northwestern city of Peshawar, stressed that the international community should ensure a fair outcome for the process. "If left to Afghans, the process will go nowhere," he said. His faction of the defunct People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, which ruled the country for 14 years after the 1978 communist coup, was not involved in the Loya Jirga process. Commenting on the issue, Shahzada Mas'ud, an adviser to the interim Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, told IRIN that in most of the country the process was going well. "Our country has been devastated by 23 years of war, and some incidences of violence even occur in stable countries during similar processes," he said. Asked whether the warlords would accept the Loya Jirga's decisions, he maintained that the international community should guarantee their enforcement. In a recent interview with IRIN, Gul Agha Sherzai, a powerful regional warlord and governor of the southern Kandahar Province, said he believed that the Loya Jirga would succeed in ultimately bringing peace and stability to his war-torn homeland. "Loya Jirga is about consensus building. Under the present circumstances, where the international community is backing Afghans, I am sure the Loya Jirga will deliver broadly acceptable results," he said. Reacting to the arrests in Herat and Konar, Muhammad Ismail Qasimyar, the head of Afghanistan's Loya Jirga Commission, told IRIN from Kabul on Wednesday that they had contacted the authorities at the highest level to resolve the issue. "Such incidents make us unhappy," he said. The 21-member independent commission is responsible for organising the event. Qasimyar explained that the killings of the eight people during the process were unrelated to it. "There might be other reasons for some of these murders," he said. He called incidents of violence "minor turmoil causing some delays". The commission had allocated 11 seats to mollify Pashtun resentment over representation. Asked whether the outcome of the Loya Jirga would be acceptable, he maintained that in the past, most of the decisions of such events had been accepted. "The decisions will be accepted by an overwhelming majority of the Afghans," he said, sharing Sherzai's optimism.