MPs elect president for the lower house

Members of the Afghan parliament on Wednesday elected opposition leader Yunus Qanooni as the president of the Wolesi Jirga (lower house of the parliament) in the post-conflict country. Afghanistan’s first parliament was inaugurated on Monday, after three decades of conflict and MPs a day later elected ex-president Sebghatullah Mujadidi as the head of the 102-seat upper house of parliament, known as the Meshrano Jirga. Afghanistan has had no elected parliament since 1973. A succession of coups and a Soviet invasion plunged the country into anarchy, leaving more than 1 million people dead. Civil war raged in the early 1990s, followed by the hardline rule of the Taliban until December 2001. “Yunus Qanooni was elected as president for the Wolesi Jirga for the next five years,” Tahira Shirzoie, public information officer for the parliament explained, adding Qanooni was chosen to lead the 249-seat lower house of parliament with 122 votes against 117 for his closest rival, Abdul Rabb Rasoul Sayyaf. Qanooni has tried to form an opposition bloc called the National Understanding Front (NUF) and warned before the election that he might not support all of President Hamid Karzai's cabinet choices, which have to be endorsed by parliament. Yunus Qanooni is seen by many as the main challenger to the Afghan president. Qanooni was born in 1957 in the Panjshir Valley north of Kabul, which was the heart of opposition to Soviet occupation in the 1980s and Taliban rule in the 1990s. He was a senior leader of the opposition Northern Alliance that helped US-led forces topple the Taliban in 2001 and became interior minister in Karzai's interim government. “It is an astonishing moment in the history of Afghanistan that Afghans are gathered under one umbrella after suffering decades of brutal civil war and destruction,” Qanooni told the MPs in the parliament hall. “Parliament should not be the enemy or a hand tool of the government,” Qanooni noted. The 18 September election for the lower house and 34 provincial councils was a key step in Afghanistan’s transition to democracy. Of the country's 12.5 million registered voters, some 6.8 million Afghans took part in the polls to elect a national legislature and 34 provincial councils for a five-year term. Almost 5,800 candidates contested the poll, including over 2,700 for the 249-seat Wolesi Jirga and more than 3,000 for 420 seats in provincial councils.