The Afghan government on Saturday announced the removal of the powerful governor of Herat, in western Afghanistan, one of the country's longest-standing warlords. The move appeared to be designed to undercut the governor, one of the major opponents to President Hamid Karzai, before the Oct. 9 presidential elections.
The removal of the governor, Ismail Khan, is momentous for the central government, which has tried without success to reduce his power or remove him for the last two years. After Karzai's removal of the defense minister, Marshall Muhammad Qasim Fahim, from the presidential ticket last month, the action on Saturday was one of the boldest moves by Karzai in nearly three years in office to reduce the power of the warlords.
The government announced the removal as a promotion, saying Khan was being appointed the new minister of mines and industries, but the governor was clearly reluctant to leave and told local radio that he would not accept the ministerial post but would remain in Herat as a private citizen.
Khan has dominated western Afghanistan for more than 20 years -- as a mujahedeen commander fighting the Soviet army and later the Taliban, and as undisputed ruler of Herat for a period in the 1990s and for nearly three years since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. He has resisted any control by the central government and has kept a tight hold on the local political and economic scene.
Weakened by two military attacks against his soldiers this year and the assassination in March of his son, Mirwais Siddiq, the government's minister of Civil Aviation, he finally gave in to government pressure last week.
He told a local radio station on Saturday that he had accepted the government's decision to replace him but probably would not go to Kabul, because it was not a post for which he was qualified, said Muhammadullah Afzali, chief of the government's foreign department in Herat.
"He has said that he will stay where he is right now, not as a governor but as a private citizen, and that he will work for the security and prosperity of Herat," said a Western diplomat, who was in telephone contact with Khan on Saturday. Discussions would continue about a future post, the diplomat said.
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