Historic Loya Jirga meets to debate constitution

Patriotic songs calling for unity by a choir of traditionally dressed Afghan children from the nation's component ethnic groups marked the launch on Sunday of the historic Loya Jirga, or Grand Assembly, bringing together 500 representatives, ranging from conservative, illiterate clerics to Western-educated exiles, to debate a post-conflict constitution. The Afghan Constitutional Loya Jirga (CLJ) was opened by Afghan former King Zahir Shah, after having been postponed twice last week for technical reasons, according to the CLJ commission. The CLJ has brought together 344 men and 64 women elected from Afghanistan's 32 provinces, 50 men and women chosen by President Hamid Karzai, and 42 chosen to represent various minority groups. A giant white tent at Kabul's Pul-i-Technic Institute hosted the second big Afghan gathering since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001. This time, the six- to 10-day meeting will debate, and hopefully ratify, the country's new 160-article draft constitution, which has been a key element of a UN-supervised two-year plan to stabilise the country. The Taliban have sworn to disrupt the CLJ, and security in Kabul was extra tight. But in a country emerging from a generation of conflict and still controlled by the gun, there was scepticism on the part of observers as to whether the most appropriate delegates had been elected to attend. "If we look at the Kabul Province delegates as an example, we realise that many of them are leaders or members of factions; they are not people of specialised knowledge," Shukriya Dawi Barekzai, a member of the Afghan constitutional commission, told IRIN during the CLJ opening ceremony on Sunday. Meanwhile, the New York-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) warned on 12 December that vote-buying and intimidation had undermined the assembly, in consequence of which the 500-member LCJ would be packed with proxies for rival warlords rather than genuine representatives of the country's complex ethnic mix. HRW's Afghanistan researcher, John Sifton, said his research showed that some of the most egregious examples of fraud and intimidation had occurred in the western province of Herat, controlled by warlord Isma'il Khan, in the Kabul area and in the eastern city of Jalalabad. "Candidates told us about being threatened and strong-armed, and some were bribed to drop their candidacies," he said. There has also been concern that the draft constitution places too much power in the hands of the president, and that women's rights do not feature prominently enough. "This is the time to ensure our long term fate with no fear and strong resistance," Latifa Sa'idi, a delegate from the central Parvan Province, told IRIN, adding that women would specifically try to ensure their place in the new law. "Woman had no proper place in Afghan society, and we have had to struggle to ensure that [she gains that place] here," she maintained. The United Nations in Kabul expressed optimism saying there were checks and balances that would ensure that the long-awaited CLJ would make progress. "The process this year has an executive committee comprised of various senior people, including the chairman of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and they can investigate any accusations or allegations of wrongdoing, and they have the power to take action," Manoel de Almeida e Silva, a spokesman for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan, told IRIN on Monday. He noted that the executive committee had already disqualified a number of candidates. The government said the process of drafting the constitution had been the most democratic in Afghanistan's history. The draft was backed by a 53-member commission appointed by Karzai, which had discussed it at more than 556 meetings with about 178,000 Afghans, 19 percent of whom had been women.