Uproar Likely in Afghan Parliament

Most Afghans thought they had seen the last of former President Najibullah and his Communist supporters nine years ago, when the Taliban lynched the former dictator and hanged his corpse from a traffic police tower.

But in recent weeks, Najibullah’s political heirs have been riding through Kabul on campaign minibuses wired with loudspeakers, seeking to resurrect his image and win votes in Sunday’s parliamentary election.

When the results are tabulated, Communists are likely to end up in the national legislative body alongside Muslim extremists and former mujahedin, or Muslim holy warriors, who drove out Najibullah’s Soviet backers in 1989 and still decry him, and his Afghan supporters, as godless infidels.

Former officials in the Taliban regime, which executed Najibullah, are also expected to be elected. They have formed new conservative Islamic parties after rejecting an insurgency that is believed to have killed more than 1,100 people this year. At least five of the dead were candidates assassinated by suspected Taliban militants.

The volatile mix of leftists, hard-line Islamists and longtime warlords expected in the National Assembly almost guarantees a paralyzing political catfight among factions and members of parliament, political analyst Taher Hashemi said.

“For the first phase, forget about enacting laws in parliament,” said Hashemi, a law professor at Kabul University who returned from exile in Los Angeles to help draft Afghanistan’s new constitution in 2003. “They will just fight among themselves.

“And in the second phase, they will turn against the government [of President Hamid Karzai] and criticize it. Why? Because that is the easiest way to put the government in a bad situation -- a dangerous situation.”

When the Soviet Union lost its war of occupation after almost 10 years, it left Najibullah, a former head of the secret police, to govern a fracturing country.

Guerrilla factions toppled his regime in 1992. Najibullah took refuge in the United Nations compound in Kabul until September 1996, when Taliban forces seized the Afghan capital. They stormed the U.N. building and killed Najibullah and his brother.

Candidate Hakim Tursan, a former major in Najibullah’s police, tells voters that he and other supporters of the late Communist leader will stand up for ordinary Afghans against corrupt officials and brutal warlords.

His Hizb-e-Mutahid Milli, or National Unity Party, has more than 200 candidates running across the country.

“Dr. Najibullah has an honorable place in the hearts of Afghans,” insisted Tursan, who fled the Taliban takeover through India and Russia before settling in Germany. “He always said, ‘If I leave government, terrible things will happen to you,’ and he predicted exactly what happened.”

Not so fast, say former mujahedin who helped oust the regime. Anyone who campaigns with a Communist dictator’s picture can hardly call himself a good Muslim and Afghan patriot, said candidate Ahmad Shah Ahmadzai, a former mujahedin commander.

“The Communists have always been responsible for the destruction of Afghanistan,” said Ahmadzai, who was a deputy chief of two militia factions that fought the Soviets, then waged a savage civil war after Najibullah fell.

“Now that Western countries have come here, they say the mujahedin and ‘warlords’ are to blame. We are always trying to explain that the people who really did this were Communists, and they have no place in parliament. They killed millions of Afghan Muslims.”

It’s an argument that probably will rage in the National Assembly, and Afghans will consider themselves lucky if it ends there.

Election organizers hope to have more than 30,000 polling stations open across the country Sunday, including tents pitched more than 13,000 feet up a mountainside and heavily guarded compounds threatened by Taliban attack, especially in eastern and southern Afghanistan.

More than 30,000 Afghan police officers and 10,000 Afghan soldiers will provide security, backed by U.S. and NATO troops.

The latest election-related death occurred Friday, when suspected Taliban militants fatally shot National Assembly candidate Abdul Hadi in the southern province of Helmand, Reuters reported.

Australian James Grierson, who heads the electoral board’s logistics effort, called it “the most logistically challenging election the world has ever seen.”

After polls close, the ballots will be delivered during the night to regional counting centers, a high-risk errand in many parts of the country. Organizers expect to take about 16 days to count the votes, but they will provide running totals before the final results are released.

Voters will elect 249 members of the lower house of parliament, called the Wolesi Jirga, or House of the People. The Afghan Constitution stipulates that at least 68 seats must go to women.

Almost 2,700 candidates from 76 parties are running in the parliamentary election. Voters will also choose from more than 3,000 candidates for councils that will govern the country’s 34 provinces.

Each provincial council will then elect a single representative to parliament’s upper house, called the Meshrano Jirga, or House of Elders. District councils, which have yet to be elected, will choose another third of the upper house, and the president will appoint the final third.

No party or alliance is expected to win enough seats to dominate the lower house, analyst Nasrullah Stanekzai said.

“That’s very normal in Afghanistan, and we should all be prepared to see big battles in the parliament,” he added. “These could be fistfights or real, logical discussions.”

A democratic parliament is a new concept to Afghans, so it’s too early to tell whether it will present problems for Karzai’s government, said Stanekzai, who doubted that it would.

Afghanistan’s new constitution established a strong presidency, without a prime minister. The lower house of the National Assembly will elect its own leader, who will have his or her hands full trying to keep order, Hashemi said.

Following the American model, the Afghan president is commander in chief of the armed forces and has the power to declare war or a state of emergency “with the endorsement of the National Assembly.”

The president also appoints the Cabinet, but the House of the People must approve his choices. That could set up a showdown with the new assembly, whose faction leaders can be expected to demand positions for their allies, Hashemi said.

Karzai’s current Cabinet is a dysfunctional mix of warlords and technocrats, few of whom do a very good job, Hashemi said. A power struggle with parliament could further weaken the government, he added.

Hashemi said Karzai should appoint a minister of parliamentary affairs, someone from outside the National Assembly who is politically neutral and respected, to act as the president’s political flak jacket, absorbing the blows. “That would slowly make the relationship smoother,” he said.

Just as they did during last year’s presidential election, Afghan voters frequently say they want Sunday’s voting to end the factional conflicts that have been battering their country for 25 years.

They also hope for a parliament and government that will end the Taliban-led insurgency, root out corruption and speed reconstruction, while ensuring that its benefits are distributed more evenly.

But many Afghans are confused by the long lists of candidates, most of whom they had never heard of before, so it will be difficult for voters to sort the good from the bad, Hashemi said.

Whoever they choose will quickly face their own crucial choice: to resolve political conflicts the old way, with blood in the streets, or by reasoned debate and compromise.

Hashemi believes it will be healthy for ordinary Afghans to hear warlords, Communists, Islamic extremists and a few intellectuals squabble in parliament, exposing weaknesses in arguments that weren’t as visible when factions were shooting at each other.

That’s how voters will learn to spot the best leaders, Hashemi said, and when it’s time to vote again, they’ll be wiser.

“Democracy is like a journey,” he said. “You have to start with the first step and go a long way.”