German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer saved the UN conference from regulation of the Afghanistan problem and prevented the failure of the discussion.
As RIA Novosti reported, Joschka Fischer had a phone conversation on Monday night in order to ask the Afghani President Rabbani to present the list of candidates for the new interim government to the United Anti-Taliban Front in Bonn. The list was presented to the conference about an hour after the phone conversation. This helped to prevent the Bonn conference from failure or another delay; the forum is supposed to finish up with its work this Wednesday.
You wish. The conference in Bonn resembles a market. Each of the parties is looking out for its own profit, and there is noone ready to make concessions. The Northern Alliance was not against the idea of the conference, but it was pessimistic towards its results.
Well, this is clear: the alliance has the real power in its hands and it does not feel like sharing it with someone else.
Spokesmen for the Pashtun tribes keep saying that they make the majority and, therefore, like they think that it is they who ought to rule the new country. The USA supports them. America insists on Hamid Karzai’s candidacy to become the head of the new government (Karzai is a well-known Pashtun leader). Mohammad Zaher Shah’s milieu is actively nominating Abdul Sattar Sirat for the position of the premier (who is the leader of his group in Bonn).
The next stage of the conference will be about distributing the posts among those who were offered in the staff of the administration. This is rather a delicate task in connection with a complicated national and tribal population of Afghanistan. The temporal administration will work for six months. After that, Loya Jirga, the traditional assembly of Afghanistan, will have to elect the interim government, which will rule the country for two years. This time will be meant for drawing up the Afghani constitution and holding elections.
The UN’s plan also stipulates the establishment of a supreme court, which will probably be presided over by Northern Alliance leader Burhanuddin Rabbani.
The participants of the conference agreed that the UN troops must be deployed in Afghanistan as soon as possible. The Pashtun representatives give a certain emphasis to this issue: they are afraid of going back to Kabul (which is under Northern Alliance control) without the stable safety guarantees.
Nothing extraordinary happened during the conference. The peaceful regulation schedule that was passed at the conference existed long before the discussion actually took place. All legitimate decisions will be made at the traditional assembly of Afghanistan. This is the place for the real struggle for power. It is just getting started.
Dmitry Litvinovich
PRAVDA.Ru
Reuters photo: U.N. spokesman Ahmad Fawzi speaks to journalists during a news conference in Koenigswinter near Bonn December 4, 2001
CNN : Factions agree on Afghan government
Chicago Tribune : Alliance endorses interim government
Financial Times : Afghan leaders want fast transitional government
Irish Times : Afghan delegations in Bonn for government talks
Kunduz falls; Rabbani okays some Taliban in new government
Read the original in Russian: http://pravda.ru/main/2001/12/04/34517.html
Translated by Dmitry Sudakov
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