Afghan parliament unites former foes

KABUL, Afghanistan — Mamoor Shelgaray is a former fighter. He spent a decade battling Soviet troops as a member of one of the country's most hard-line Islamic parties. He is wary of the United States and thinks Afghanistan should return to its religious roots by shielding its children from Western television and videos.

Roshanak Wardak is a healer. She spent five years defying Taliban authorities by providing medical care in one of Afghanistan's poorest provinces, while refusing to veil her face. She is a political independent who strongly supports the U.S. role here and wants to expand the rights of women.

On the surface, the two Afghans share little. But as of today, they will have one thing in common. Both became members of Afghanistan's new Parliament, which opened more than three decades after the country's last freely elected legislature closed its doors. In between came unrelenting conflict, and each of the 351 new members bears its scars.

Like the country, the Parliament is fractured. The 249 members of the lower house, who were elected in September, and the 102 members of the upper house, who were partly chosen by local councils and partly appointed by President Hamid Karzai, include Islamic scholars, communists, women, Taliban members and technocrats.

Most are people like Shelgaray and Wardak, little known outside their home provinces. But some are nationally known, former leaders of Islamic factional militias — such as Mohammed Fahim and Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf — who are revered by their followers and despised by others for their bloody roles in the civil war of the 1990s.

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney flew in to attend the opening session, which began with a reading from the Quran. With Karzai and Cheney looking on, former oppressors stood and took the oath beside former victims. But a question hung over the ceremony: After a generation of violent score-settling, will such an eclectic array be able to resolve their differences through civilized debate?

"They're going to have to learn to tolerate each other and to cooperate with each other," said Musa Maroofi, a professor of law and political science at Kabul University. "They sense that conflict doesn't work, that fighting each other with weapons is not getting them anywhere. This is the best, and only, opportunity for them to work for a common cause — for the public interest, rather than their individual interests."

Afghanistan's recent history — especially the civil war after the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989 — suggests such hopes may be misplaced. But Wardak and Shelgaray, both elected to the lower house, offer some cause for optimism. Both have sacrificed much to get to the Parliament, and both say they do not plan to waste the chance to help reknit their broken country.

Gunfire in fields

In the past several months, Wardak's homestead of wheat fields and apple orchards in Wardak province, 25 miles southwest of the capital, has been sprayed by machine-gun fire and assaulted with rockets. It is the work, she suspects, of political opponents.

Wardak, 49, a serious woman with a sturdy build and dark green eyes, operates a rudimentary clinic — a couple of beds, an IV drip and basic medical supplies — out of her rural home. She was trained as a gynecologist, but in a province with so few doctors, she handles any medical case that comes her way, day or night.

Wardak's grandfather and uncle both served as leaders of the former Afghan national assembly. As a student, she aspired to politics, but her father convinced her that medicine was more suitable for a woman. After the Soviet invasion in 1979, she spent years in Pakistan caring for Afghan refugees. She returned during the civil war and opened her clinic.

She continued treating patients under the Taliban, despite its restrictions on women's public activities. She also refused to wear a head-to-toe veil, or burqa.

"I told them, 'If you can show me where the Koran says I should wear the burqa, I will wear seven burqas,' " she said.

Wardak said her decision to enter politics was a gamble: Can she do more for the people of her destitute province in the Parliament than in her clinic? As one of 68 women in the lower house, she said she hopes to help protect Afghan women from abusive husbands and to get more public facilities built in her long-neglected province.

"We depend on the central government. If the center decides to build schools for us, we have schools. If the center decides to build hospitals, we have hospitals," she said. "But right now, students are sitting under the rain, the sun and the snow."

Similar aspirations

Mamoor Shelgaray, 51, an imposing figure with jet back hair and a long, bushy beard, has similar aspirations for his constituents in Ghazni province, an hour's drive south of Wardak. But he is also realistic.

"I told the people, 'If I get to the Parliament, you should not think that the next day I will build a school for you. It will take a long time,' " he said. "Besides, the government doesn't have any money."

Shelgaray said he thinks a more achievable and urgent goal is to curb the import of racy Western television programming, which he thinks undermines Afghanistan's Islamic values.

The son of a tribal leader and Islamic scholar, Shelgaray was denied formal education because of the war with the Soviet Union that broke out in his country when he was a young man. Veterans of that war, known as mujahedeen, form the largest single bloc in the Parliament. Shelgaray, who killed countless Soviet soldiers, sees his mission as much the same today: to defend Islam.

Shelgaray is a longtime member of Hezbi Islami, an Islamic militia that received large amounts of covert U.S. aid during the war against the Soviets.

In more recent years, its leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, has been hunted by the U.S. military as a terrorist. Shelgaray said he and the 40 other Hezbi Islami members in Parliament have reluctantly broken with Hekmatyar.

Still, he questioned why Hekmatyar had not been invited to participate in Afghanistan's reconstruction. Shelgaray ran for Parliament on a platform of national unity, and he said that should mean allowing a public role for individuals who are now considered terrorists.

On that point, Shelgaray has a surprising ally in Wardak, who thinks that in Parliament she can stand toe-to-toe with commanders who once spread fear.

"The position of the warlord is much different than his previous position. Now he is the people's representative. According to the rules, there is no difference between him and me. Now we are equal," she said. "And today, or tomorrow, or maybe after a few months, he will learn that."