Sun, Nov 25, 2001 page5

• Ground being laid for Afghan summit

  POSTPONED Although the former president has called the conference ``insignificant,'' most involved feel that the country's future will be hashed out at the negotiating table

  • AFP
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  The "battle of the conferences" on Afghanistan has been postponed by one day as participants require more time for preliminary discussions, a conference spokesman said here Friday.

  Representatives from Afghan groups seeking to oust the Taliban militia were to meet starting tomorrow in Bonn, Germany, but "the talks will now open on Tuesday, not on Monday," spokesman Ahmad Fawzi said.

  Fawzi is a spokesman for Lakhdar Brahimi, the UN special representative on Afghanistan, who convened the conference to bring the triumphant Northern Alliance together with three other Afghan groups.

  The delay "will allow the delegations to confer bilaterally, so we will have time on the UN side to confer with delegations, and the delegations can prepare among themselves before the official start of the conference on Tuesday," Fawzi said.

  Others represented at the conference will be former king Zahir Shah, the Pashtun tribes in southern Afghanistan who make up most of the population, and some four million refugees, most of whom live in Iran and Pakistan.

  The spokesman said he expected as many as 30 Afghan participants, but was as yet unable to name any of them, nor say how many would represent each group.

  "Mr Brahimi is organizing a conference on Afghanistan for Afghans," he said.

  "We are not telling them who should attend. It will be a very flexible, very open conference."

  Both the Alliance and Shah have polished their credentials with the UN by saying their delegations at Bonn will include women.

  Fawzi also declined comment on how many other countries would send delegations and their status at the talks.

  From Berlin, a German government spokesman said Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer would attend the opening ceremony at the invitation of the UN, but otherwise only Afghan representatives and UN officials would take part.

  Fawzi said he expected most of the Afghan participants to arrive today at the Petersberg hotel that is hosting the event near Bonn.

  Asked what Brahimi hoped would come out of the talks, he said: "The measure of success will be if we can come up with a formula for a transitional government" for Afghanistan.

  Brahimi had earlier telescoped the agenda, saying the creation of a small administration for the capital, Kabul, should take priority over the larger provisional council that had been slated to choose its members.

  But Fawzi stressed Friday that even if the talks did succeed "it will only the first step in a long road towards achieving good governance for Afghanistan."

  Forces of the alliance, which ignored the urgings of the US and seized Kabul on Nov. 13, have expressed willingness to share power with everyone but the Taliban.

  But the alliance's political figurehead, former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani, disagreed that it was necessary to set up an administration in the capital without waiting for talks in Germany.

  Rabbani told the Moscow daily Vremya Novostei that the talks -- to be held at the isolated mountain-top hotel overlooking the river Rhine -- were "insignificant," expressing the hope they would be the last negotiations to be held outside Afghanistan.

  Brahimi brushed aside the inferred slight, telling reporters "that is not what they told us," although if the Alliance doesn't send senior negotiators, it will bode ill for the talks.

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