KABUL: The militant government of Afghanistan has announced the formation of the “Hukumat-e-Islam.” The newly formed Islamic government has ordered women to cover their face in accordance with Islamic dress banned alcohol and narcotics and has also set up a people’s court to investigate charges against former members of ousted president Najibullah’s regime.
But the people would be given the right to defend themselves fully in the court of law. The Islamic leaders have also urged the traders not to “hoard essential commodities.”
However the head of the interim government Sibhghatullah Mojaddidi assured that Afghanistan will be a peace loving modem tolerant society rooted in Islamic values and it will stand for equality and social justice for everyone.
The Mujahedeen believe that Islam is the only cementing force which can keep the several ethnic tribal groups together in Afghanistan. Burhanuddin Rabbani the Jamaat-e-Islami leader said that everyone be he a Pushtoon Turkman Hazara Tajik or Uzbek a Shia or a Sunni has a share in “Hukumat-e-Islam.” By declaring Afghanistan an Islamic state the Mujahedeen Leaders are emphasizing an Islamic identity of the Afghans which they probably think would help bring unity.
But recent developments indicate that tribal identity is far stronger than religious identity. It has been the history of the Afghans that whenever there was any aggression by the Europeans on their soil they had immediately sunk their differences and united in the name of Islam But once the threat is eliminated their tribal differences re-emerge and come to the force This was what happened after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan when the various ethnic tribal groups started fighting among themselves for a bigger share in power.
Besides the Islamic Afghan government has other problems to the establishment for the Islamic government has come at a time when the major supporters of the Mujahedeen’s in the region –
Pakistan Iran and Saudi Arabia are not in a position to further back its Islamic campaigns. The recent Gulf War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union have completely changed the situation in the region.
For various reasons the Islamic Jamhoori Ittihad the ruling alliance in Pakistan is not backing the hard-liner Hizbe-Isamic leader Gulbuddin Hekmatya anymore.
As a result Jamaat-e-Islami withdrew its support to Nawaz Sharifs government. The Islamic government in Pakistan is also not emphasizing the “Nizam-eMustafa” nor the Islamisation of the country.
The governments in Iran is also taking a pragmatic line Domestic Compulsions are forcing Hashemi Rafsanjanis government to reestablish relations with the West.
The government is not in a position to back the Islamic fundamentalist organizations in Lebanon Sudan Algeria and elsewhere. Still Iran is interested in the stability of Afghanistan and would like to see a friendly regime with which it could develop cultural and commercial relations. The thrust of the government in Iran is to re-build its war-torm economy and industry and once again emerges dominant power in the region Therefore Iran will prefer a less fundamentalist Islamic regime in Afghanistan.
The Gulf War changed the situation in Saudi Arabia too. The clergy there is opposing the presence of the western troops in the kingdom and the monarch had to introduce reforms to woo the moderates who had supported the king in the fight against Iraq. Saudi Arabia’s close relations with the United States and other western countries are also forcing the kingdom not to support the hardliner Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan
The United States which provided the moral and material support to these Islamic fundamentalist outfits also abandoned the Afghans to their fate once the purpose of defeating the Soviets was achieved. Now the US policy in the region is to contain Islamic fundamentalism. The Soviet Union which was responsible for worsening the situation in Afghanistan has disintegrated and the new government in Russia has condemned the Soviets for invading the country. Moreover the Russians have neither the influence nor the capacity to help financially.
However it is to be seen how far the Americans succeed in their new mission because the base realities suggest that Afghanis will soon find new allies in the region. Their new allies may be the newly independent Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union The age old mercenary tradition of the Afghans might help these republics to rediscover their Islamic identity as well. The geo-political and ethnic composition of the country has much communality with these republics. The Tajiks Uzbek and Turkman minorities in Afghanistan will find more brothers in” these republics than in Afghanistan itself. Moreover both the Americans and the Soviets have provided enough weapons to sustain these war loads for a long time. Besides any group or alliance that comes to power in Afghanistan will have to govern the country in the name of Islamic laws.
All these factions have their powerful allies in the neighbor in countries as well. The Mujahedeen’s have close links with several non-official fundamentalist organizations in various Arab” and Islamic countries like the Jamaat-e-Islami in-Pakistan the” Ikhwans in Saudi Arabia Brotherhood in Egypt Hizbul Mujahedeen in India and several other such organizations in Asia and Africa. The governments in these countries may not support the Mujahedeen’s plan of Islami-sation of the region but powerful clergy in these places certainly back Afghans aspirations. Islam may have provided various ethnic Afghan groups a semblance of unity. But deep ethnic and tribal divide in the society will continue to haunt emergence of a modem united Afghan nation the new phase which has now began in the history of Afghanistan.
Article extracted from this publication >> June 26, 1992
