A Woman Among Warlords by Malalai Joya

Author:Malalai Joya
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

House of Warlords

On December 19, 2005, the freshly elected members of Parliament were ushered into buses and paraded through the cold winter streets of Kabul on our way to the opening ceremonies. Before I could even sit down, one of my fellow MPs made a sarcastic remark. “Now I’m going to make trouble, too,” he said, laughing. I tried to brush him off and make a joke out of it, but some of the others joined in, criticizing me for being too outspoken before I had even said a word.

“You instigate rebellion in this country if you tell the truth!” I said.

I looked out the window at the rows of men lining the route, some of them holding the green, red, and black flag of Afghanistan. Some looked angry because they were forced to miss work to stand by the road. Others seemed filled with hope that maybe now we would have a government that would respond to the needs of the people. But I was not optimistic.

As I walked inside the recently rebuilt halls of Parliament, I saw mostly the same old faces from Afghanistan’s sorrowful past. Many warlords had once again strong-armed the process and forced their way into Parliament. Even though it was supposedly illegal for militia leaders or combatants to run for office, a Human Rights Watch report exposed that 60 percent of the new parliamentarians were either warlords or their allies. Many of these people either stole their places in Parliament at gunpoint or bought their seats with U.S. dollars—which they had in abundance because leaders of the Northern Alliance were paid with cash by the CIA for their support of the U.S. war. We heard reports that some warlords paid for the campaigns of sympathetic candidates and bought votes for them.

Even Hezb-e-Islami, or the Gulbuddin Party, the party of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—who is listed by the United States as one of its most wanted terrorists—was allowed to have thirty-four members in Parliament. Although the current party leaders try to say that they are no longer controlled by the black-bearded Hekmatyar, most believe there is no difference between the old party and the new, and they even fly the same green flag of Hekmatyar’s old faction. Their main leaders, such as Abdul Hadi Arghandewal, Attaullah Lodin (head of the judiciary commission of the Parliament), Khalid Farooqi, Mohammad Siddiq Aziz (an adviser to Karzai), and others, are the same people who for years were allied with Hekmatyar. In the past, these fundamentalists, and especially Hekmatyar, were saying that democratic elections were un-Islamic and a gift from the infidels. They are theocrats and fascists who have never believed in democracy. But today, under U.S. direction, every one of them acts like a mother-born democrat, and some of them even talk about secularism! For years we’ve known there have been back-channel negotiations to bring them and perhaps even elements of the Taliban into the Afghan government. In fact, there are some Taliban commanders already among the members of Parliament.

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