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Afghans See Little Hope for Peace Despite Bonn Accord
MOSCOW, Dec. 7 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - While most of the world hailed this week's agreement in Bonn paving the way for a broad-based government in Kabul, Afghan refugees gathered at Moscow's rundown Sebastopol hotel Friday expressed only skepticism and weariness.
Whatever deal Afghanistan's political factions may have struck in Germany, the chances of lasting peace in their strife-torn country were still equally remote, they said, Agence France Presse (AFP) reported Friday.
General Gulam Mohammad, a 40-year-old former interior ministry official under Afghanistan's 1979-1992 Communist regime, simply could not bring himself to believe that peace was at hand.
"How many more wars will this country have to go through before it can really live in peace?" asked the exiled Pashtun, who fled to Moscow in 1993 and now co-heads the Afghan Business Center in Moscow.
His neighbor, Hamid, was even blunter in assessing chances for peace in Afghanistan. "I want to live in peace and peace is a word that simply does not exist in our country," he asserted.
Like Hamid, most Afghan refugees trying to eke out a living selling a myriad goods at hundreds of makeshift kiosks inside the hotel, said they could see no prospect of returning home in the near future.
"For a year now I've been living in Russia, a country which is at peace," said 27-year-old Mohammad, from a hotel room kiosk. "If I were ever to leave Moscow, it certainly wouldn't be to return to Kabul, where there's no work anyway," he added with a sneer.
Meanwhile, signs of a growing split are emerging within Afghanistan's dominant Northern Alliance over the new power-sharing agreement signed Wednesday in Bonn, reported BBC's online news service.
The latest commander to criticize the accord is the former governor of the western city of Herat, Ismail Khan, who accused delegates at the U.N.-sponsored conference of failing to take into account realities on the ground.
His comments follow similar ones by Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, who denounced the agreement and warned he would boycott the new government.
General Dostum - one of the most powerful commanders in the Northern Alliance - said his faction had been treated unfairly under the landmark power-sharing accord.
Of the four key factions within the alliance, all but the dominant Tajiks have expressed their disappointment with the composition of the cabinet. Between them, Generals Dostum and Khan wield significant power, but there is no sign yet that these complaints will turn into open conflict.
Representatives from other groups who do not belong to the alliance have also voiced concerns about the new interim administration.
"Our brothers in the Bonn Conference have just negotiated positions for themselves and have been unfair to others," said General Khan, BBC reported. "In allocating the key positions, as well as the whole of the interim administration, the ethnic and geographical realities on the ground, and the important role of those who have fought, have not been taken into account."
Dostum accused his partners in the Northern Alliance of reneging on an earlier agreement to give his mainly Uzbek Jombesh-e Melli faction the foreign ministry in the transitional government.
Instead, it got the portfolios of agriculture, mining and industry, and a rival alliance faction - Jamiat-e Islami - took foreign affairs, as well as defense and interior.
"This is a humiliation for us," Dostum said. He believes the alliance owes him for the capture of the strategic northern town of Mazar-e-Sharif, which he said triggered the collapse of the Taliban.
Sayed Ahmed Gailani, a Pashtun leader who participated in the Bonn talks, also said the new administration is not fully balanced.
Galiani, a supporter of exiled King Zahir Shah said many Afghans who had led the fight against the Soviets had not been considered.
In Iran, sidelined warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar accused the U.S. of imposing a deal "that puts in doubt the legitimacy of the authority which will emerge from this conference," he said.
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