Islamic Scholar New President of Afghanistan

With a handshake, a blessing and a thousand-gun salute, religious scholar Sibghatullah Mojaddidi was installed Tuesday as president of an Islamic Afghan government, after three days of fierce urban combat by a moderate coalition of guerrilla fighters cleared the last Kabul strongholds of fundamentalists long enough to usher in the nation’s latest hope for peace.

Just hours after Mojaddidi’s convoy of several dozen troop trucks, jeeps and cars careened into the shell-shocked capital with joyous cries of “Allahu akbar!” and blazing guns directed skyward, Mojaddidi declared a general amnesty and appealed to all guerrilla followers of fundamentalist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar to “lay down their arms and join us as Muslim brothers.”

“We hope our brothers who resorted to this fighting will stop and instead help our people, who already have suffered so much in the past many years of war,” Mojaddidi declared, his voice calm, hands folded before him, after the last vestiges of Afghanistan’s fallen authoritarian regime had handed over power to his moderate, 51-member Islamic coalition.

“Ease the people’s pain,” he appealed in his impromptu address to Kabul’s diplomatic and press corps during a hastily arranged ceremony in the cavernous conference room of the regime’s Foreign Ministry.

Within an hour, Hekmatyar’s forces answered his call with long-range artillery, rocketing the city’s airport and several residential neighborhoods from the fundamentalists’ stronghold just southwest of Kabul.

But there were indications that Mojaddidi’s dramatic arrival in a city desperate for peace--at the end of a grueling two-day road journey from Pakistan--could signal the end of one of the world’s bloodiest and most protracted conflicts, a 13-year religious crusade by Muslim holy warriors that degenerated into internecine combat.

Just before Mojaddidi’s 10:55 a.m. arrival--his first glimpse of the capital in 19 years of exile--guerrilla fighters loyal to moderate commander Ahmed Shah Masoud blasted the last of Hekmatyar’s tank positions out of the strategic hilltop Cemetery of the Martyrs. And, just moments after Mojaddidi officially took power, the last of Hekmatyar’s forces in Kabul gave up after an intense attack aimed at driving them from the downtown Interior Ministry complex. Some of them grabbed priceless carpets, car batteries and other accessories as they fled.

Despite the artillery barrage from the southwest, a spokesman for Hekmatyar’s Pakistan-based Hezb-i-Islami party indicated a willingness to compromise.

“Praise be to God, there is peace now in Afghanistan,” said Mohammed Musa, a bearded and broken-toothed old man seated on a stoop in the Jada-i-Maiwand neighborhood, which was devastated by the three-day tank battle to clear the Cemetery of the Martyrs.

“There is peace today because the president of the country, Professor Mojaddidi, has come.”

Confirming the new mood of hope and peace, as Mojaddidi’s Toyota Land Cruiser sped from the Foreign Ministry to a downtown building commandeered as his temporary headquarters, the antiaircraft guns, assault rifles, rocket launchers and tanks that had provided the city’s soundtrack of war shot off thousands of rounds of celebratory fire.

Masoud pledged his key support to Mojaddidi’s council on Tuesday, and he was joined by several former regime generals, important rebel commanders and most of the collapsed regime’s bureaucratic leaders.

The ruling coalition that was rushed in to fill the 13-day-old power vacuum left by the ouster of President Najibullah and the collapse of his Marxist regime clearly remained a fragile one. Mojaddidi is to govern for two months, then hand power for an interim period to another former resistance leader. Elections are planned within two years.

Several factions staged press conferences in the capital Tuesday to declare their political neutrality, among them the leader of a Shiite Muslim political party that controls the road between downtown Kabul and the Defense Ministry.

Afghanistan’s neighbors and the international community in general reacted positively to Tuesday’s ceremony, urgently seeking stability in a strategic nation that is the linchpin of South and Central Asia.

The United States welcomed the formal transfer of power from the old Soviet-installed regime to the Muslim rebel forces, which Washington backed throughout the civil war.

Secretary of State James A. Baker III said it appears that rival guerrilla factions “are beginning to get together on the mechanics of a transition government, and we hope that is the case. Afghanistan has suffered enough.”

And Pakistan, whose fundamentalist factions backed Hekmatyar with sizable amounts of the U.S.-financed weaponry that was sent through Pakistan during the years that the rebels resisted the Soviet occupation force, quickly backed Mojaddidi’s interim council. Pakistani President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, who has been a staunch Hekmatyar supporter, called it “the beginning of a new era of peace and progress” in his war-ravaged western neighbor.

Most diplomats and other analysts who witnessed the dramatic takeover ceremony said the fear of an ethnic civil war is likely to give the council enough short-term power to rule.

“I have a feeling it will hold for a couple of weeks,” said one of the senior diplomats in the room after the 63-year-old bearded and turbaned Mojaddidi had left. “But then, I think, they’ll have to come to terms with reality--the political reality, the military reality and the ethnic reality.”

In an impassioned plea to the nation’s long-ruling and largely southern-based ethnic Pushtuns and the many non-Pushtun ethnic groups in the north, Mojaddidi addressed the looming ethnic crisis during his brief address, which was later telecast to the entire nation.

“Our Prophet Mohammed had instructed us that all mankind are equal,” the new leader declared. “Pushtuns and Tajiks, Sunni and Shiite and the nation’s many tribes have for centuries lived as brothers and sisters in Afghanistan without any animosity towards each other.

“We’re all Muslims, and for us the best person is the one with the highest moral character.”

Already, the past two weeks of plots and counterplots that ousted Afghan dictator Najibullah and triggered the violent power grab for the capital have left the nation deeply divided and heavily armed.

Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i-Islami guerrilla fighters and the paramilitary forces loyal to the old regime, who were chased from their positions during the street fighting, remain underground in the city, a potential urban guerrilla force that could sabotage the new coalition.

The regime generals and politicians who joined with Hekmatyar in an ethnic Pushtun coalition after Najibullah’s ouster remain at large, according to coalition commanders who concede that the military force now backing Mojaddidi has a distinctly non-Pushtun face.

And a large armored force under Hekmatyar’s command is camped just outside the city, controlling the strategic road from Kabul to the Pushtun-dominated south.

On the whole, though, it appeared that Masoud’s moujahedeen (Muslim holy warriors), who have claimed the majority of the city, were restoring law and order.

With most taxis and private cars taken by the various rebel groups, traffic was light Tuesday--and directed by guerrillas holding AK-47 assault rifles in one hand and stop signs in the other.

Most shops remained closed, with the fear of looting still a common concern. But all neighborhoods were carefully patrolled by armed moujahedeen squads.

Chicken Street, a well-known, 10-block stretch of carpet shops, antique stores and small grocers selling imported goods, was under the firm control of a 40-man team of coalition fighters. The first of the shops opened their shutters Tuesday for the first time since the turf war broke out Sunday morning.

There were also signs that the security imposed by the holy warriors was taking on a distinct Islamic tinge.

One brave merchant who had opened up shop on a street known for its imported alcohol was asked if he had any beer in stock.

“No beer. No vodka. No whiskey,” he said, as the rebel peace committee marched by with shouldered assault rifles. “This is a Muslim shop now. Now, this is a Muslim country.”

The day ended with perhaps its strongest image of hope. Amid yet another rocket barrage by Hekmatyar’s forces aimed at the airport shortly after Mojaddidi took power, a rainbow suddenly appeared against the muddy Hindu Kush range from one edge of the sprawling, battered city to the other.