Sat, Oct 13, 2001 page6

• Pashtuns should have leading role

  TROUBLES Because the war-torn country contains many competing tribal interests, forming a coalition government is a near-impossible task

  • REUTERS
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  In the jockeying for power in post-Taliban Afghanistan, almost everyone agrees the new government should be a multi-ethnic coalition with a leading role for the dominant Pashtun tribes.

  Former King Zahir Shah, the last of the great Durrani dynasty of Pashtuns that ruled Afghanistan from 1747 to 1973, is currently struggling to define a formula to give all the main groups in the multilingual country their due.

  But who is to say where the real balance lies in a country that has never conducted a modern census, has been torn apart by two decades of war and has millions of its citizens living as refugees abroad?

  Are the Pashtuns really a majority? Is the minorities' role really so minor? Like so much else in Afghanistan, no one is really sure.

  "The Pashtuns make up 40 percent of the population, but if you ask them, they will say they're 60 percent," said exiled journalist Zahur Afghan. Hardcore Pashtun nationalists will push the estimate up to 70 percent.

  "It's not clear because there are no census statistics in Afghanistan," explained Abdullah Jan Khalil, a professor of Afghan studies at Peshawar University's Russia and Central Asia Area Studies Center.

  So what's his guess? "I don't even want to get into that controversy," said Khalil, a Pakistani from the Pashtun city of Peshawar.

  The Pashtuns, a fiercely independent tribal people who speak a language distantly related to Persian, live as far east as the Indus River. The 1893 Durand line split them into the Afghan Pashtuns -- who consider both words to be synonymous -- and Pashtuns under British, and later Pakistani, rule.

  Afghan Pashtuns, living in the east and south of Afghanistan, make up some 40 percent of the 25 million or so people in the country the size of Texas, most Afghan watchers estimate.

  In the north, Persian-speaking Tajiks make up around 25 percent and Uzbeks, who speak a form of Turkish, account for roughly 10 percent. The Hazaras, Persian-speaking Shiites in central Afghanistan, can claim about 15 percent. Dozens of other groups and tongues make up the rest.

  Juggling these demographics could make or break whichever government emerges if the Taliban is defeated and toppled by attacking US-led forces and Afghan opposition groups gearing up for a battle against the fundamentalists.

  From his exile home in Rome, Zahir Shah has already stirred up concern in Peshawar by proposing that a 120-man council be formed to help call a Loya Jirga or traditional grand assembly to elect a new leader.

  Some Pashtuns fear being under-represented in the council, which the king's family says should have 50 members picked by Zahir Shah, 50 by the Northern Alliance controlling part of northern Afghanistan and 20 by other groups in the country.

  Sensing the concern, the king's supporters in Peshawar have sought to play down the issue.

  "I think it's too early to talk about the details," said Hamid Gailani, son and top aide to religious leader Sayed Ahmad Gailani.

  For many tribesmen, the Northern Alliance -- for now the main military force opposing the Taliban -- represents the Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other minorities whom they would never accept as their rulers. With the possible exception of the Tajiks, they may not even see them as their equals.

  They remember how the northerners, led by Alliance head Burhanuddin Rabbani and his fellow Tajik commander Ahmad Shah Masood, took control of Kabul in 1992 and fought a devastating civil war against Pashtun-led forces that opened the door for the Taliban to finally take control in 1996.

  Their mistrust of the northerners is so great that most tribes were ready to tolerate the Taliban and their draconian Islam -- including its ban on opium production, key in the economies of many tribes -- because at least they were fellow Pashtuns.

  "Many Pashtuns hate the Northern Alliance," Khalil said. "They either don't know or don't want to know that there is a large group of Pashtuns in the Northern Alliance.

  "And Zahir Shah is the biggest Pashtun of them all. So if a government comes in under guidance of Zahir Shah, it will be dominated by Pashtuns."

  Even if that issue is settled, there is still the question of the relative strengths of the minorities, who in some cases fought more valiantly than the proud warrior Pashtun against Soviet forces in the 1980s.

  In communist-held areas, Soviet-style policies catapulted them into higher official positions than ever before.

  The Hazaras -- ethnic Mongols who used to be the street-sweepers of Kabul -- even boasted a prime minister, Sultan Ali Keshtmand, in the mid-1980s.

  In their rugged mountain homeland around Bamiyan, their mujahidin groups thrived with weapons and money from Iran, which wanted to boost the Shiites in mostly Sunni Afghanistan.

  "Now you cannot ignore the Hazaras," said Syed Fida Younis, a Pakistani historian of Afghanistan. "They used to be the lowest of the low, but now they must be given their due."

  With so many conflicting interests, Zahir Shah and his supporters will have to build a coalition with the help of such un-Afghan virtues as trust, compromise and interest in the common good.

  Khalil, who proudly calls himself "an Afghan from east of the Durand line", said his decades of dealing with Afghans had taught him one thing.

  "The sun may rise in the west and a eunuch may give birth to a baby, but you must always remember one thing," he said.

  "Never trust an Afghan."
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