The soul of the killed Afghan minister cries for revenge

The investigation of Air Transport and Tourism Minister Abdul Rahman's assassination, who was allegedly murdered by the pilgrims in the Kabul airport, is getting more and more of political character.

The head of the Afghan interim government, Hamid Karzai used this situation rather skillfully, and now he is carrying out the global cleansing of the Afghan administration. In the beginning, the investigators said that the minister was killed by the pilgrims, who had spent several days, waiting for a plane to travel to Mecca. The situation was getting really tense, when someone said that Rahman was going to use one of the planes to take his family to India. “Four men got in the plane, took the minister out and killed him,” – one of the pilgrims said in an interview.

The authorities rejected that version afterwards and concentrated their attention on the major one of them, according to their opinion – the assassination for political reasons. They did not spend much of their time, looking for suspects, but simply charged the members of the party Jamiat-e-Islam, the leader of which is Afghanistan’s ex-president Rabbani. Abdula Rahman used to be involved in that group too, but he left later and became an ally of the former king of Afghanistan.

Rabbani is a political leader and the head of the Northern Alliance. The executive committee of Modjaheds elected Rabbani for the position of the president of the Islamic council for the period of one year. However, Rabbani remained on that position until 1996, when the Talibs seized Kabul. His followers presumably take the key posts in the Afghan administration, which is surely not good for Hamid Karzai and other Pashtun leaders. They are widely represented in the defense ministries, in the intelligence departments, home and foreign ministries. The majority of the security service attendants are the former commanders or warriors from Jamiat-e-Islam.

Rabbani was criticizing Karzai’s interim government, urging to withdraw the American troops from the country as soon as possible, and claiming that their presence was another attempt to occupy the country. Now Hamid Karzai decided to use such a banal way to settle all the problems: to get rid of the ex-president's followers on the one hand and to weaken the influence of the Northern Alliance on the other hand. The disproportionate presence of the Northern Alliance representatives in the Afghanistan government did not comply with the reality. There are more of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, than the ethnic Uzbeks and Tajiks. So there is a chance for Karzai to win back.

It has recently become known that the government of Saudi Arabia was sending three Afghan men to Afghanistan, who were suspected of assassinating Abdul Rahman. Those three men were taking important posts in the interim government of Afghanistan. Seven officials more have also been detained, they are currently being interrogated by the Saudi authorities.

Not everyone is going to pass Karzai’s test. Who is going to be the next?

Dmitry Litvinovich PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov