Afghan Delegates Approve Charter

Following Bitter Debate, Assembly Clears Path To Democratic Elections

Delegates to the constitutional assembly read copies of the new charter, which lays out a system with a strong president and a weaker parliament. (Ahmad Masood -- Reuters)

After three weeks of raw emotional debate and intense private negotiations, members of a constitutional assembly in Afghanistan agreed yesterday on a new charter for the volatile postwar nation, clearing the way for its first democratic elections in 25 years.

The 502 delegates accepted a political system with a strong president and a weaker parliament, similar to the version sought by President Hamid Karzai and backed by the Bush administration, despite vehement objections from ethnic minority leaders and Islamic fundamentalists at the historic meeting.

"There is no winner or loser. . . . This is the success of the whole Afghan nation," Karzai told members of the assembly, or loya jirga, shortly after they stood en masse to endorse the new constitution in a huge white tent on a university campus in Kabul, the capital.

President Bush praised the outcome in a statement from Washington, saying the new constitution "lays the foundation for democratic institutions" in Afghanistan and will thus "help ensure that terror finds no further refuge in that proud land."

The adoption of the charter comes two years after U.S. and Afghan forces routed the extremist Islamic Taliban movement. It clears a major hurdle in the political transition that was mandated by the United Nations in late 2001. The government now hopes to hold presidential elections this summer, and Karzai is widely viewed as the favorite.

But the loya jirga, composed of delegates from across the ethnic and political spectrum, came close to collapsing several times after it opened Dec. 14. Repeated bitter confrontations among delegates laid open deep fissures in Afghan society on such issues as religion, women's rights and regional dialects. Several contentious issues were left unresolved in order to salvage the assembly.

In comments yesterday, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, was critical of the obstructionist role regional Islamic militia leaders had played during the assembly, and he said there would be little point in holding elections this summer if adequate security measures were not instituted throughout the country.

As a result of compromises between Islamic hard-liners and moderate government reformists, the final charter did not include a reference to sharia, or Islamic law, saying only that no Afghan law "can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions" of Islam. But some observers said the strength of religious law would depend partly on who controls the Supreme Court.

The 162-article constitution grants men and women equal rights, a dramatic advance in a conservative rural society in which women have traditionally been subjugated to decisions by their male relatives, with little access to legal protections.

"There are still some problems with the constitution, but the process was very positive, because people came together despite their differences and came to an agreement without violence," Nader Naderi, a spokesman for the Independent Afghan Human Rights Commission, said in a telephone interview from Kabul yesterday. "This is a major change in the traditional way of doing politics in Afghanistan."

The loya jirga, which lasted 22 days, erupted in ugly confrontations several times and nearly collapsed toward the end. Delegates from ethnic Tajik political groups, including former Islamic militia leaders, repeatedly denounced the process and charged that Karzai was manipulating the constitution to establish a dictatorship.

Women at the meeting complained that they were given no leadership role, and chaos erupted during the Dec. 17 session when one female delegate angrily protested that "criminals" from Islamic militias should not be allowed to participate. Militia leaders in turn denounced her as a communist, and several threatened to attack her.

Finally the assembly chairman, an elderly former Afghan president, Sebqatallah Mojadedi, lost his temper and tried to throw the female delegate out of the tent, saying her vote was worth only half a man's anyway.

In the past week, as major issues were gradually resolved, new stumbling blocks emerged over what status, official or otherwise, should be given to the country's various regional ethnic languages, and whether government officials should have the right to hold dual citizenship.

The meeting nearly collapsed again Saturday over the language issue, but after intense private negotiations involving U.N. and U.S. diplomats, a compromise was reached. The government agreed to designate both Dari and Pashto, the major dialects, "national languages," and to refer to the minor dialects of Uzbek and Turkmen as "official" languages in their respective regions.

The sensitive issue of dual nationalities for officials, which was raised by government opponents to undermine several of Karzai's top aides who hold both U.S. and Afghan citizenship, was reportedly postponed for future parliamentary debate.

"I'm extremely happy," Qayum Karzai, a delegate and the president's brother, said by telephone yesterday from Kabul. "I wish it had not taken so long, and that the last three days had not gone into such emotional issues, but the most important parts of the constitution, the presidential system and the principles that matter, are still intact."

President Karzai said repeatedly before and during the assembly that Afghanistan needed a strong presidential system. Otherwise, he argued, it would bog down in the same kinds of bitter ethnic disputes that led to ruinous civil war in the early 1990s. He scaled back some of the executive powers he had initially demanded in order to win support from opponents at the meeting.

But some observers said that the vehement public confrontations at the assembly could cast a pall over plans for national elections, and that delegates from both major ethnic groups -- Pashtuns and Tajiks -- feared that they had made too many concessions.

Perhaps the best illustration of the depth of ethnic divisions was the fight over the national anthem, which Pashtuns and Tajiks adamantly argued should be in their respective dialects. Under a compromise agreement, the anthem will be sung in Pashto, but will refer to other ethnic groups and include the phrase, "Allah is great."

There was no formal final vote on the charter, which the exhausted delegates approved yesterday merely by rising to their feet in silence for 30 seconds.