The Afghan warlord Hekmatyar gives up armed conflict and goes in for politics
written by Enrico Piovesana, taken from PeaceReporter.
“The Hezb-i-Islami members (the Islamic Party, editor’s note) have stopped brothers’ killing and have chosen politics instead. Americans, like English and Russians in the past, will be off. Now we must join to build a system in tune with Islam and start a political commitment in order to guarantee a quiet living and peace to our Muslim citizens”. With this statement, broadcast by a private Afghan TV, the jihad veteran Gulbuddin Hekmatyar announced his permanent abandonment of armed conflict in favour of political commitment.
A foretold turn. The decision of this powerful warlord – one of the most important, bloodthirsty and fickle characters of the recent Afghan history – has been around for months.
Already last March, during a video interview granted to Associated Press, Hekmatyar announced his permanent break-up with Talibans the almost complete stop of armed conflict and to be open to dialogue with Karzai, at the condition that the Karzai government would define an ultimate date for the withdrawals of foreign troops. Furthermore, between May and June his party, already regularly registered and with about thirty militants elected in Parliament, started opening bases all over the country – Kabul, Jalabad and Herat have been the first – and resumed the publication of its newspaper, the Shahadat (Martyrdom) with the editorial staff based in Peshawar (Pakistan).
A political challenge to Talibans. Hekmatyar, who has his strongholds in eastern provinces and in those around Kabul, tried since 2002 to build a common front with Talibans who are active in southern provinces around Kandahar. But mullah Omar always refused flatly and so during 2006 he tried to compete with the “Koranic students” playing the al Qaeda’s ace – during May 2006 he declared he received orders from Osama bin Laden – and calling the Afghan people to jihad. A disastrous strategy: for Hekmatyar’s militias was by then impossible to compete with the Taliban’s military power. Hence the decision of Hezb-i-Islami’s leader to bring the challenge to his everlasting rival, mullah Omar, on political grounds leaving his Talibans to carry out the country “Liberation” and hoping to be able to present himself as future leader of a super-Islamic, but not Taliban, Afghanistan.
Also a personal issue. Hekmatyar, who is as good as the Talibans when it comes to fundamentalism and disdain for human rights, is competing with mullah Omar since when Pakistan and US intelligence services, after having generously financed him during the anti-Soviet jihad in the 80s, decided to bet on the Talibans instead of Hezb-i-Islami to take control of Afghanistan. On February 14th, 1995, mullah Omar’s army attacked and harshly defeated Hekmatyar forces that were besieging and bombing Kabul from his strongholds in Charasayab and Maidanshahr.
Hekmatyar escaped to Iran where he stayed until 2002, when he was expelled by the government as a troublesome visitor. An humiliation that “the engineer” – as he was named after because his academic studies before the war – always wanted to be redeemed from, trying to steal the scene to mullah Omar. Without ever succeeding.
