Constitutional Decisions Delayed

The debate by the 502-member Loya Jirga over crucial pieces of the draft constitution has been delayed while the coordination committee wrestles over its recommendations.

Members of the panel said 38 of the 160 articles that make up the draft constitution were still being debated Saturday afternoon.

The coordination committee “is still working”, said Safia Siddiqi, one of the deputy chairs of the Loya Jirga. “They have agreed on 122 articles and the remaining 38 will be finished soon”, she said, possibly in time to begin the Loya Jirga debate Sunday.

The committee was to have begun its presentation to the entire Loya Jirga Saturday. Instead, ministers spend the day presenting reports on the government’s accomplishments and obstacles in the past year. Previously, the session has been taken up by speeches from individual delegates concerning problems in their provinces.

The 38-member coordination committee includes the chairmen, deputies, and secretaries of the Loya Jirga’s 10 working committees, as well as the elected leadership of the Loya Jirga. In addition, a group of observers from the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan and members of the commission that drafted the constitution attend the meetings of this committee.

Committee delegates have described several significant changes in the draft document that would increase the authority of Islam in the government. They said these were already approved by the panel.

Some delegates, however, have complained about how the 10 committees have dealt with some of the more controversial subjects under consideration.

Dr. Ulum Kabir Ranjbar, head of the lawyer's association and a Kabul delegate, said the chairmen of some committees controlled the debate and squashed opposition by referring to Islam as the ultimate authority. "When they recite hadiths and Koran, you cannot say anything," he told IWPR.

Ranjbar said that delegates who compared notes from different committees found that this reflexive response, as well as the reasoning for arguments in some debates, followed a consistent pattern – as if they were following a script.

A delegate from Paktika, who did not want to be named, agreed with the suggestion made by Farah delegate Malalai Joya – that all the jihadi leaders should have been appointed on a single committee – was a good one. “Since they were distributed among all the committees, they had influence in every committee and suppressed opinions of the delegates”, he said.

Others, however, disagreed. Ghulam Rabbani Rahmani, a delegate from Takhar province in northeastern Afghanistan, told IWPR, “The secretaries who were elected by the delegates transmitted the opinions correctly and honestly, but the secretaries who are chosen by the secretariat [of the constitutional commission] only brought in the opinions they chose”, he said.

Siddiqi agreed that there were some differences in the way secretaries reported the committee work, but said the mistakes were not deliberate and not of any substance – only errors in the wording of statements by delegates. She said the differences were due to the rush and heavy workload, and that the work of the secretaries is being checked.

Rahimullah Samander is a local editor/staff reporter for IWPR in Kabul. Rahim Gul Sarwan, an independent journalist in Kabul, is participating in IWPR's Loya Jirga reporting project.