President Hamid Karzai said yesterday that a marathon constitutional council has overcome the chaos of an ugly boycott and is close to agreement on a draft installing the strong central government he is seeking.
Karzai declined to forecast when the constitution might finally be ratified.
But council spokeswoman Safia Saddiqi issued a ringing warning to the delegates, telling them that yesterday's session should be decisive.
"Don't let enemies celebrate the failure of this jirga. You have been elected by the people and hold the destiny of the country in your hands," she said. "I think in any case that today will be the last day."
But rebel delegates were holding out against a clause that allows dual citizenship for top officials -- an apparent shot at liberal ministers who have returned from exile in the US to take up key Cabinet posts, but have been unwilling to give up coveted American and European passports.
Some 500 members of a grand council, or Loya Jirga, have spent three draining weeks arguing over a new constitution that is supposed to lay the foundations for stability and reconstruction after more than 20 years of fighting.
The debate has exposed fault-lines between modernizers and Islamic conservatives and along the raw ethnic divisions left by the country's recent civil war.
Karzai had insisted that the constitution could be ratified even with a narrow majority. But with the powerful presidency he wants apparently secured, he adopted a more conciliatory tone yesterday.
"Lots of solutions have been found for the problems and there are one or two other matters that are going to be worked on this morning," he told reporters outside his palace in Kabul. "It is important to have a constitution that comes with near consensus if not total consensus."
In the huge jirga tent erected on a Kabul college campus, delegates milled around frustrated at the slow progress.
Mohammed Gul Yunisi, a prominent critic of the US-backed government's plans, said the citizenship issue was the last remaining stumbling block and accused ministers unwilling to give up their foreign passport of lacking patriotism.
"We say keep your Afghan passport and drop your foreign one," he told The Associated Press. "This is betrayal."
Finance Minister Ashraf Ghani, a former World Bank official, and Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, once a Voice of America reporter, both spent many years in the US and are believed to still hold American passports.
Neither could be reached for comment yesterday.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS