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.
The Philippines yesterday said its coast guard would acquire 40 fast patrol craft from France, with plans to deploy some of them in disputed areas of the South China Sea. The deal is the “largest so far single purchase” in Manila’s ongoing effort to modernize its coast guard, with deliveries set to start in four years, Philippine Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Ronnie Gil Gavan told a news conference. He declined to provide specifications for the vessels, which Manila said would cost 25.8 billion pesos (US$440 million), to be funded by development aid from the French government. He said some of the vessels would
CARGO PLANE VECTOR: Officials said they believe that attacks involving incendiary devices on planes was the work of Russia’s military intelligence agency the GRU Western security officials suspect Russian intelligence was behind a plot to put incendiary devices in packages on cargo planes headed to North America, including one that caught fire at a courier hub in Germany and another that ignited in a warehouse in England. Poland last month said that it had arrested four people suspected to be linked to a foreign intelligence operation that carried out sabotage and was searching for two others. Lithuania’s prosecutor general Nida Grunskiene on Tuesday said that there were an unspecified number of people detained in several countries, offering no elaboration. The events come as Western officials say
A plane bringing Israeli soccer supporters home from Amsterdam landed at Israel’s Ben Gurion airport on Friday after a night of violence that Israeli and Dutch officials condemned as “anti-Semitic.” Dutch police said 62 arrests were made in connection with the violence, which erupted after a UEFA Europa League soccer tie between Amsterdam club Ajax and Maccabi Tel Aviv. Israeli flag carrier El Al said it was sending six planes to the Netherlands to bring the fans home, after the first flight carrying evacuees landed on Friday afternoon, the Israeli Airports Authority said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also ordered
Former US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi said if US President Joe Biden had ended his re-election bid sooner, the Democratic Party could have held a competitive nominating process to choose his replacement. “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said in an interview on Thursday published by the New York Times the next day. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she said. Pelosi said she thought the Democratic candidate, US Vice President Kamala Harris, “would have done