Speech Upsets Afghan Assembly

A female delegate was temporarily tossed out of Afghanistan’s constitutional convention Wednesday when she stood up and declared that the country’s warlords, some of them participants in the historic meeting, are criminals.

The loya jirga, or traditional grand assembly, that is debating a draft constitution erupted into shouting and shoving when Malalai Joya, a delegate from the isolated western province of Farah, complained that militia leaders who participated in the nation’s brutal civil war of the early 1990s now dominate committees debating the constitution.

“They were the ones who destroyed our country,” Joya shouted from the floor as hecklers denounced her. “They should be tried in international and national courts. If our poor people forgive these criminals, history will never forgive them, their criminal activities have all been recorded in history.”

Joya’s microphone was cut off, and the assembly burst into chaos when dozens of men rushed toward the chairman’s platform.

“Down to communism! Death to communism!” one delegate bellowed as the chairman called for order. “Kick the communists out of the tent, out of the jirga.”

“What’s happening? Sit down!” assembly Chairman Sibghatullah Mojaddidi appealed.

Mojaddidi, who was briefly Afghan president on the eve of the civil war in 1992, called for someone in charge of security to intervene, and at least one guard escorted Joya from the assembly.

During a news conference later, Mojaddidi said Joya had been removed for her own safety and because she had been impolite during the debate.

“In order to make her secure, I told her to get out of the tent,” he said. “As you know, our moujahedeen [holy warriors] are a different kind of people. Once they become upset, it’s very difficult to control them.

“It was only for her own security,” Mojaddidi repeated. “But then other women came and apologized for her, so I said it’s OK, she can sit [in the assembly], and I forgave her.”

The furor over Joya’s brief speech, and the hostile reaction to it, dominated questions from Afghan reporters afterward, and one suggested that the loya jirga was actually a loya jagla, or grand fight.

Mojaddidi, who helped lead the moujahedeen war against the Soviets in the 1980s, replied that “Afghanistan has passed through many years of war, so if they don’t fight this much in the loya jirga, then we can’t call them fighters. It’s impossible.

“I tell you there was no big fight,” he insisted. “It was just a simple discussion that happened. A lady said a few words that most of the men didn’t like, and they reacted. But there never was a fistfight and no one was killed or punched in the face.”

On the eve of the convention, a United Nations report warned that widespread abuses faced by Afghan women are among many problems the country faces as it tries to recover from nearly a quarter-century of wars.

“Intimidation, restrictions on movement, forced marriage, honor killings and ‘protective’ incarceration are realities, particularly in rural areas, where conservative social attitudes prevail,” the report said.

“Women are also threatened in these areas by local [militia] commanders who violate women’s rights and commit sexual abuse with impunity,” the report added.

Most Afghan men are so reluctant to give women any voice in government and politics that organizers reserved at least 89 seats for women delegates.

If ratified, the proposed constitution would guarantee that women sit in the country’s legislature.

The draft says women should get a minimum of one seat per province, or at least 32 seats, in the national assembly’s lower house. When future presidents appoint a third of the upper house, at least half of those members would have to be women.

The proposed constitution also would guarantee the right of girls and women to obtain an education.

But in the deeply conservative countryside, where most Afghans live, men and their interpretation of the Koran -- not the constitution -- probably will be the final word on women’s rights for some time to come.

Delegates to the constitutional assembly are also debating whether Afghanistan should have a strong president, as President Hamid Karzai wants, or more power sharing with a parliament, as moujahedeen commanders and their supporters are demanding.

Even Afghanistan’s national anthem is in dispute. The current anthem, which dates to the civil war, is sung in Dari, a minority language. Pushtuns, who make up Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group, want the anthem to be in Pushtu.

Despite Wednesday’s pandemonium, Mojaddidi said he was optimistic that, with God’s help, the assembly would complete its work and ratify the new constitution within a week.