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KABUL, Nov 30: Afghanistan’s defence ministry has belatedly agreed to withdraw heavy arms and factional fighters from Kabul under an international agreement to demilitarise the capital, a ministry spokesman said on Sunday.
The demilitarisation of the city was part of Afghanistan’s Bonn peace agreement that brought to power the coalition government of President Hamid Karzai after US-led forces toppled the Taliban regime late in 2001.
But since then, thousands of fighters loyal to Defence Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim, whose Northern Alliance forms the backbone of the government, have remained in Kabul with their heavy weapons, including dozens of artillery pieces and tanks.
A commission formed of Afghan army chief of staff, General Bismillah Khan, and members of the Nato-led foreign peacekeeping operation in the capital is working to locate all the weapons and the fighters, ministry spokesman Mohammad Zahir Azimi said.
“We are fully prepared to demilitarise Kabul on the basis of the Bonn agreement,” he told Reuters. “The commission is trying to find suitable places to put the heavy arms and the armed men.”
A date would be announced next week for the actual start of the demilitarisation of Kabul, he said. The plan comes as Afghanistan prepares to hold elections in June 2004 in which Karzai is seen as the favourite.
It follows the launch of a UN-supervised drive to disarm 100,000 men loyal to regional warlords seen as the major threat to Karzai’s efforts to extend his writ into unruly provinces dogged by factional rivalry and Taliban guerrilla attack.
But many former Mujahiddeen of Fahim’s Shuraye Nazaar faction in the Panjsher valley to the north of Kabul have shown reluctance to give up their weapons.
Facing pressure from US-led forces, Fahim is required to surrender weapons from his Panjsher power base to a new Western-trained national army next month before the mainly Japanese-funded disarmament project extends to the strategic valley.
VOTER REGISTRATION: Afghanistan will launch a voter registration drive in the coming week ahead of presidential polls scheduled for next year which will mark the war-ravaged country’s transition to democracy, a UN spokesman said on Sunday.
“This registration starts in this first week of December,” Manoel de Almeida e Silva told reporters.
The first phase would cover the eight main regional centres of Kabul, Bamiyan, Jalalabad, Kunduz, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, Kandahar and Gardez, he said.
Weather, which with the onset of winter closes many highland regions, and security would pose challenges to the teams aiming to register some 10 million voters ahead of the election scheduled for June 2004.
RUMSFELD: The US favours eventually turning over the US-led coalition’s military operations in Afghanistan to Nato as the alliance expands its security role there, US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in Brussels on Sunday.
Rumsfeld said the idea of such an expanded role for Nato might come up in discussions at a two-day meeting here of alliance defence ministers but not as formal US proposals or requests.
Nato assumed controlled of the 5,300-member International Security Assistance Forces (ISAF) in August and has agreed to expand its presence beyond Kabul, mainly by deploying small provincial reconstruction teams.
ENGINEER FREED: Looking tired but relieved, a Turkish engineer kidnapped by the Taliban in southern Afghanistan a month ago arrived safely in Kabul on Sunday after being freed by the guerrillas.
Hassan Onal, 45, who had been working on a key US-funded road project when he was abducted in late Oct, looked pale and dishevelled at a news conference in the capital flanked by Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali and the Turkish ambassador.
Onal and his Afghan driver were abducted at gunpoint in the southern province of Zabul on the main road linking the capital Kabul with the southern province of Kandahar.
The driver was freed the next day with a demand for the release of six Taliban prisoners and a threat to kill Onal if this was not met.
Mullah Roazi, who said he was the senior Taliban official in Zabul, telephoned Reuters on Saturday and said Taliban leaders decided to free Onal after the government released two Taliban prisoners.—Reuters/AFP
