By Carlotta Gall
The New York Times, 21 December 2005
KABUL, Afghanistan, Dec. 20 - The two houses of Parliament began their first sessions on Tuesday, and in just a few hours provided a glimpse of democracy Afghan style, with the upper house ignoring the rules of procedure and the lower house getting bogged down in debate.
A presidential appointee and close ally of President Hamid Karzai, Sebaghatullah Mojadeddi, was elected chairman of the upper chamber, the House of Elders, although he won only after shaming his main opponent into stepping down out of respect for his age and reputation.
The lower chamber, the House of the People, which approves the cabinet and senior appointments, spent the morning debating whether to agree on rules of procedure first, or to elect a chairman and deputies.
The discussions and votes were highly charged because of the rivalries between the presidential administration and the opposition, between the old guard of the wartime leaders and the younger generation, and between groups that can be roughly divided into reformists and conservatives.
In the House of the People, representatives warned that the chairman, once elected, would control the debate, including decisions on his own powers. "We should approve the rules of procedure first," a representative said. "Otherwise it means before you build the house, you are putting someone to live in it."
One candidate for chairman, the powerful Jihadi Party leader Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, tried to assuage concerns. "Some of you are afraid that the chairman will decide the rules of procedure," he said. "But it is not the role of the chairman to decide that; it is the decision of the people."
In the end they voted overwhelmingly - 167 to 76 - to debate rules of procedure covering the election of a chairman before choosing a permanent chairman and deputies.
In the House of Elders, the 102 senators, one-third of them presidential appointees, went straight to electing a chairman but swiftly reverted to the Afghan tradition of deference to one's elders. Of three candidates, President Karzai's preference, Mr. Mojadeddi, won with 50 votes. He had failed to win 50 percent of the vote, meaning the election should have gone to a second round between the leading candidates. Mr. Mojadeddi objected strenuously, however, insisting that as the first to declare jihad against the Soviet occupation 20 years ago, he deserved the post.
"If you respected me, you would not have run against me," he told the much younger Bakhtar Aminzay, a former university chancellor, who won only 27 votes but was poised to win in the second round through his alliance with another candidate.
But Mr. Aminzay withdrew, saying, "The elders advised me to step down."
The politics on Tuesday overshadowed the continuing violence.
Six people were wounded when a suicide bomber blew up his car and himself next to a NATO peacekeeper's vehicle in Herat Province, officials said. The wounded were three Italian soldiers and three civilians.
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Citation: Carlotta Gall. "Afghan Parliament Opens, and Finds Democracy Is a Bit Untidy," The New York Times, 21 December 2005.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/international/asia/21afghan.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1135176464-LeALCRmZz5BePW0cWhixgA
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