Cracks in Afghanistan's interim government:
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Tensions at the Top
Karzai’s foreign minister contradicts the Afghan leader’s version of last week’s cabinet killing
By Michael Hirsh
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Feb. 19 — In a serious blow to Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai, his foreign minister on Tuesday publicly disputed Karzai’s version of the shocking murder last week of Abdul Rahman, Afghanistan’s minister for Air Transport and Tourism.
THE FOREIGN MINISTER, Abdullah Abdullah, said that Rahman had been killed as originally reported—by a mob of Muslim pilgrims, or hajis, who were angry over delays in their journey to Mecca. Karzai has blamed the brutal murder on other government officials.
Abdullah, in an interview with NEWSWEEK at his foreign ministry office, also blamed Afghanistan’s interim government for mishandling arrangements for the pilgrims’ travel to Mecca, and for not intervening when delays endangered the hajis. “I’m not the foreign minister in a communist regime, to follow whatever is said. I will not do that,” he said. “There was a clear failure in our attitude as a government in regard to the hajis.”
By directly contradicting the version of events put out in recent days by Karzai, Abdullah exposed the Afghan leader to charges that he had shifted blame for the murder because of pressure from the politically powerful Muslim religious community. And though he did not say this outright, Abdullah’s comments also suggested that Karzai had publicly slandered senior members of his own government and ordered their arrests on trumped-up charges.
Rahman’s murder “was not a plot,” said Abdullah. His comments marked an unusual breach of unity by the foreign minister, who accompanied Karzai on a recent trip to Washington and stood somberly by the Afghan leader at Rahman’s funeral on Saturday. It was not clear why Abdullah decided to speak out now, although he expressed anger with the government’s handling of the case. “If this is our attitude in the future, we will be losers,” he said.
Rahman was beaten and stabbed to death at Kabul’s Bagram airport Thursday evening after his plane, which was scheduled to depart on official business abroad, was surrounded by a large crowd of enraged hajis forced to wait for days in freezing weather for a plane, with little food and no place to sleep. Though Karzai had said in recent statements that the hajis were not upset, Abdullah said three of them had died during the ordeal.
Eyewitness accounts from the hajis themselves at first laid the blame on the mob of religious pilgrims. But Karzai called a news conference late Friday night at which he said in a statement that those responsible for the killing “are not part of the hajis.” He then accused seven officials of taking part in the murder, including the deputy intelligence chief, Gen. Abdullah Jan Tawhidi; Gen. Qalanderbeg, a deputy to Defense Minister Muhammad Qassem Fahim; and Saranwal Haleem, prosecutor in the justice ministry. The three were said to have fled to Saudi Arabia with the hajis on one of two planes provided for the pilgrims soon after Rahman’s death.
At a news conference at the presidential palace on Sunday, Karzai reiterated the charges and said his cabinet was “fully united” in agreeing that the suspects should be arrested. “There will not be any lenient hand here,” he said. “They’ve committed a murder.” He said his government had requested their extradition from the Saudi government.
But Abdullah said Tuesday that no response had yet been received from the Saudis. And he said that the Karzai government had been hasty in naming the culprits. “The investigation was announced before there was any investigation,” he said. “As far as we know now,” the three accused senior officials who left for Saudi Arabia with the hajis—Tawhidi, Qalanderbeg and Haleem—were themselves taking part in the haj and did nothing more than pass on the mob’s demand to Rahman that he resign during the emotionally charged standoff, Abdullah said.
Late in the confrontation on the airport tarmac, the door to Rahman’s plane was opened and he sought to negotiate with the crowd. It was only when he apparently signed a hastily drawn-up resignation letter that he was rushed and killed.
Abdullah is not the only government official straying from the official view of the murder. A colleague of Haleem’s told NEWSWEEK over the weekend that he also believed the angry hajis were responsible. He said that Haleem had a good and clean record as a public prosecutor.
Abdullah’s charges threaten to open up a dangerous factional rift in the government between former Northern Alliance senior members and Karzai’s mostly southern Pashtuns, the majority tribe in Afghanistan. It was the Northern Alliance that, in coordination with U.S. forces, defeated the Taliban regime and occupied Kabul late last year while Karzai spent most of the war in exile in Quetta, Pakistan. But when the interim government was created at a conference in Bonn, Germany, last December, the Northern Alliance agreed to cede the nation’s leadership to Karzai even as it took most other senior posts. Karzai, like senior leaders of the Taliban, is an ethnic Pashtun, and conventional wisdom in Afghanistan is that only a Pashtun can run the country.
All of the accused are believed to be, like Abdullah, ethnic Tajiks who had served with slain Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Masoud. Abdullah, who was the Northern Alliance spokesman before the new government took power, told NEWSWEEK that his movement had never resorted to political assassinations of the kind that Karzai described. “There isn’t a single plot in our history,” he said.
Karzai himself is not unaware of these factional tensions in his government. At his news conference on Sunday, the Afghan leader made a point of saying that Defense Minister Fahim and Interior Minister Muhammed Yunus Qanooni, both of whom are also former Northern Alliance officials, were the ones who first came to him and fingered the conspirators.
But Abdullah suggested that many senior government officials, including Karzai, Fahim and Qanooni, were themselves partly to blame. He said the government had several chances to intervene during the mob scene at the airport on Thursday—which lasted a tense several hours. “Gen. Fahim landed at the airport the same day. He should have come and ended this thing. Mr. Qanooni and Chairman Karzai landed that same day, when the plane was surrounded. They didn’t end the issue,” he said. “The perception was that Rahman has got a plane for himself and not for the hajis. Nobody had instructed the security forces what to do with the hajis. Nobody. There was a lack of taking this case seriously by anybody,” said Abdullah.
A senior government official said that Rahman was widely disliked by members of the cabinet, in part for allegedly abusing his government post by using planes for personal travel.
Abdullah added that a former bodyguard to Commander Masoud, Abdul Rahim, who was also arrested and accused of being a provocateur in the Rahman killing, had only informed the haji mob that the air transport minister was on the plane. Rahim had been at the airport that day to see off his mother, who was among the pilgrims going on the haj. The others arrested were security officials “who did not carry out their duties,” said Abdullah’s deputy, Omar Samad.
Karzai was not immediately available for comment. |
