Word: shuras
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Meeting in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi, Muslim delegates to a shura, or consultative assembly, appeared set to nominate as Prime Minister of their "interim" government Ahmat Shah, 44, a U.S.-trained engineer and hard- line fundamentalist. Muhammad Nabi Muhammadi, 68, a former member of Afghanistan's parliament, was named to fill the largely ceremonial office of President. The shura thus managed to bridge, for the moment, the principal issue dividing the rebel side: whether post-Soviet Afghanistan should be governed as an Islamic revolutionary state, on the Iranian model, or as one that is moderate and secular. Shah strongly...
Still another weakness of the team is that it was being advanced without the agreement of Afghanistan's Shi'ite Muslims, who are boycotting the shura...
Afghanistan's only hope for a halt to the savagery rests with the shura, or consultative council, that convened in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi last Friday. The 526-member council is composed of representatives from the seven- party mujahedin alliance that operates out of Pakistan and the eight mujahedin parties based in Iran. Their aim is to designate an interim - government that would supplant the Najibullah regime. But last week's meeting, attended by 420 delegates, gave little cause for optimism. The council's session lasted just 40 minutes, then disintegrated into chaos over the question of just...
...factions disagreed over everything, from the role that ex-King Zahir Shah should play in the rebuilding of war-torn Afghanistan to the composition of the shura itself, some spectators had the eerie feeling of watching a car accident taking place in slow motion. "This is the last chance for Kabul," says a Western diplomat based in Islamabad. "If it collapses, Afghanistan will collapse into fratricidal bloodshed...
...capital began about three weeks ago, even as Yuli Vorontsov, the Soviet Ambassador to Afghanistan and a Deputy Foreign Minister, threatened that Moscow would halt the withdrawal if the mujahedin leadership did not accept some participation by Najibullah's People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (P.D.P.A.) in a shura, or council of leaders, that would choose a new government. The mujahedin, smelling a bluff, would not budge, and the pullout from Kabul continued...