written by Salih Dogan printable version send your friend

Saturday, 24 September 2011

Burhaniddin Rabbani, a former President of Afghanistan and the leader of Afghan High Peace Council (HPC), was killed in a suicide attack in the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul on September 20, 2011. The suicide attacker, with a bomb in his turban, thought to be “very trusted” and has visited Rabbani to negotiate on behalf of the Taliban by bringing “special messages,” a member of the High Peace Council said. Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s younger half-brother Ahmad Wali Karzai, a senior adviser to Karzai Jan Mohammed Khan, and the mayor of Kandahar Ghulam Haidar Hamidi were all killed in last July. This attack, the latest in a chain of high-levelkillings in recent months, was another sign of the Karzai government’s incompetence of guarding the key historical and present-day figures of Afghan politics.

Rabbani has been the president of the country during the civil war from 1992 to 1996 until Taliban pushed out his regime. He was one of the two Tajik presidents in the Afghanistan history and has led the Northern Alliance which fought the Taliban following the end of his presidency. During these 5 years till the fall of Taliban regime he was the self-claimed president of the country and handed in power to Karzai in 2001.

Rabbani was a controversial figure –seems just like everyone in the Afghan politics– as we can figure out from his statements. While President Karzai appointed him to the head of High Peace Council, he didn’t abstain from calling Taliban as a "catastrophe-creating movement" by declaring on Afghan national hero Ahmed Shah Massoud’s death anniversary that “the people are justifying the war they have waged and say that they are fighting the war because of the presence of the foreigners. This is not the case actually. This war was going on prior to the presence of the foreigners here and will continue after the foreigners go from here.” Following his statement, a Taliban official told Anand Gopal –an independent journalist covering Afghanistan and the Middle East – that "these people don't represent Afghanistan, we can't ever have peace with them around. " Even these reciprocal comments leave a question mark over minds that if Rabbani was the right person to carry out the peace negotiations with Taliban.

U.S. and Afghan officials including the presidents Barack Obama and Hamid Karzai condemned the attack immediately and put the blame on Taliban by stating that “Taliban leadership do not want peace, but rather war.” However, Taliban’s newly released statement on the death of Rabbani declared, “all the reports by the local and international media attributing the responsibility to us are baseless and false. We ask the local and international media, in particular the (Reuters) to back off the fact that we claimed the responsibility as we have never claimed it,” even though the Taliban had announced last spring that they would attack and kill the High Peace Council members.

Whereas Rabbani is acknowledged as a hero of the fight against the Soviet Russia within some groups, he is a human rights abuser for others. In any case, Afghanistan’s yet already violent political environment hit the brick wall by the death of ex-president Rabbani. The Afghan people’s faith in peace was blown away very seriously at this time.


* Salih Dogan is an Afghanistan expert and a PhD candidate at the School of Politics and International Relations at Keele University, UK. He can be reached at salihdogan52@gmail.com.