World

Government, Afghan-Style

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 25, 2002 / 8:49 AM EST / CBS

Afghanistan announced on Friday the line-up of a team that will take the first steps to forming a government. Afghan interim leader Hamid Karzai said the United Nations had completed a list of 21 people to organize a panel called a Loya Jirga.

U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan said the United Nations had started with a list of 300 nominations.

"It wasn't easy to put the list together," Annan said.

The panel is to be chaired by Ismail Kassim Yar, a well-known Afghan journalist and an expert in constitutional law. In keeping with plans to include women in the loya jirga for the first time, the commission's vice chair is a woman, Mahbouba Hukukmal.

The loya jirga, in which the nation's ethnic, regional and religious groups will participate, will chose a transitional government to rule for 18 months in the run-up to Afghan elections. It must convene before the interim government's six-month term expires.

The idea of having a loya jirga select the transitional government won the blessing of a power-sharing conference held in Germany, which also approved the creation of Karzai's government. But it could also prove a lightning rod for tribal and regional rivalries that are already threatening Afghanistan's fragile peace.

Karzai was asked at a joint news conference with visiting U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan whether loya jirga was a legitimate means of picking a government. He said it was, citing its hallowed place in Afghan tradition.

In order to ensure that Karzai's government did not exert undue influence, the commission was set up under the auspices of U.N. special representative Lakhdar Brahimi. When he read out the names, Karzai noted that he knew half a dozen of them, but not the rest.

Brahimi had acknowledged in advance that the commission's makeup would be open to criticism. There are 30 provinces in Afghanistan, he noted, and only 21 members of the commission, making complaints about under-representation inevitable, he said earlier this month.

The loya jirga itself is expected to be convened by Afghanistan's exiled monarch Mohammed Zaher Shah. The last jirga he convened was in the 1960s, and many Afghans regard it as the last legitimate ones, despite attempts in the 1980s and 1990s.