Afghanistan's Chance to Heal

Diverse New Parliament Will Bring Together Former Adversaries

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Mamoor Shelgaray is a former fighter. He spent a decade battling Soviet troops as a member of one of the country's most hard-line Islamic parties. Wary of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, he said he believes his country should return to its religious roots by shielding its children from Western television and videos.

Roshanak Wardak is a healer. She spent five years defying Taliban authorities by providing medical care in one of Afghanistan's poorest provinces, while refusing to veil her face. A political independent, Wardak strongly supports the American role here and wants to expand the rights of women.

On the surface, the two Afghans share little. But as of Monday, they will have one thing in common. Both will become members of Afghanistan's new parliament, which will open more than three decades after the country's last freely elected legislature closed its doors. In between came unrelenting conflict, and each of the 351 new members bears its scars.

Like the country, the parliament is badly fractured. The 249 members of the lower house, who were elected in September, and the 102 members of the upper house, who were partly chosen by local councils and partly appointed by President Hamid Karzai, include Islamic scholars, communists, women, Taliban members and technocrats.

Most are people like Shelgaray and Wardak, little known outside their home provinces. But some are nationally known former leaders of factional militias -- such as Mohammed Fahim and Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf -- who are revered by their followers and despised by others for their bloody roles in the civil war of the 1990s.

When the first session convenes Monday, with Karzai, Vice President Cheney and other foreign dignitaries expected to be looking on, former oppressors will stand and take the oath beside former victims. But a question will hang over the ceremony: After a generation of violent score-settling, will such an eclectic array of people be able to resolve their differences through civilized debate?

"They're going to have to learn to tolerate each other and to cooperate with each other," said Musa Maroofi, a professor of law and political science at Kabul University. "They sense that conflict doesn't work, that fighting each other with weapons is not getting them anywhere. This is the best, and only, opportunity for them to work for a common cause -- for the public interest, rather than their individual interests."

Afghanistan's recent history -- especially the civil war that followed the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 -- suggests such hopes may be misplaced. But Wardak and Shelgaray, both elected members of the lower house, offer at least some cause for optimism. Both have sacrificed much to get to the parliament, and both say they do not plan to waste the chance to help reknit their broken country.

A Doctor and Politician

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In the past several months, Wardak's homestead of wheat fields and apple orchards in Wardak province, 25 miles southwest of the capital, has been sprayed by machine-gun fire and assaulted with rockets. It is the work, she suspects, of political opponents.

"Maybe," she said matter-of-factly, "I will lose my life."

Wardak, a serious woman of 49 with a sturdy build and dark green eyes, operates a rudimentary clinic -- a couple of beds, an IV drip and basic medical supplies -- out of her rural home. She was trained as a gynecologist, but in a province with so few doctors, she ends up handling any medical case that comes her way, day or night.

Wardak's grandfather and uncle both served as leaders of the former Afghan national assembly. As a student, she aspired to politics, but her father convinced her that medicine was more suitable for a woman. After the Soviet invasion in 1979, she spent years in Pakistan caring for Afghan refugees. She returned during the civil war and opened her clinic.