Restoration of peace pledged

Rabbani takes over as President

KABUL June 28: Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, a 50-year old Islamic scholar and guerilla leader, was named President of Afghanistan in Kabul on Sunday, the fourth man to hold the post in ten weeks.
Rabbani is the second president of the Islamic Government of Afghanistan, established by rebel forces in April after they captured Kabul in the climax to 14 years of civil war.
He took over from Sibghatullah Mujaddedi, who served two months under an agreement signed by resistance leaders in Peshawar prior to the fall of Kabul. The Peshawar accords provide for Rabbani to serve for only four months. Mujaddedi's supporters brand Rabbani an extremist and say his call for the radical transformation of Afghan society on the basis of Islamic law and Quranic principles and has no popular support. Mujaddedi, a moderate, refused to transfer the presidency directly to Rabbani, as called for under the Peshawar agreement, and tried instead to vest executive authority in two government councils. But Rabbani arrived at the presidential palace on Sunday with the political support and military muscle needed to gain office, regardless of Mujaddedi's reservations. Immediately upon receiving Mujaddedi's resignation, a council composed of 10 major guerilla leaders transferred presidential power to Rabbani. Only five were present. Mujaddedi spent his last minutes in office accusing the Peshawar accord signatories of undermining his brief term in office. He denounced Defence Minister Ahmad Shah Masood, a Rabbani ally, saying he had allowed law and order to deteriorate in Kabul. Rabbani faces enormous problems in restoring order and stability to Afghanistan. More than a million were killed in I he civil war and war injuries ha\ e disabled more than twice that number An estimated ten million mines litter the country, claiming, dozens of victims every day. Most of the six million Afghan refugees in Pakistan and Iran are expected to head home in coming months, straining the nation's nearly bankrupt treasury amid the donor fatigue hitting relief agencies. Afghanistan has the world's high est infant mortality rate and its lowest literacy rate. The capital is ruled by a patchwork of rival guerilla groups and former government militia. Rocket and artillery duels and gunbattles in the street have left residents wary of leaving their homes. President Rabbani acknowledged Kabul's severe security problem and said establishing the security and dignity of Afghanistan's citizens wash is foremost priority. "We must not instigate ethnic, religious and tribal sentiments in Afghanistan", he warned, "Whatever we say and do, we must think of their aftermath". A slight, btiokish man, Rabbani heads Jamiat-i-Islami, one of the most successful of the myriad guerilla organisations that battled Kabul's communist regimes over the past 14 years. Rabbani, an ethnic Tajik, was born in 1942 in Yaftal, a town in the northeastern province of Badakhshan. He studied theology at Kabul university, where he later taught after taking a degree at AlAzhar university in Cairo. Rabbani's political organisation, the Jamiat-i-Islami, grew out of the political unrest on the Kabul university campus in the 1960's and early 70's. Jamiat's mission has been to craft a political ideology, based on Islam, to support a new Afghan state. Gulbuddin Hekmatyar has said he would support the new interim government. Hekmatyar, speaking to reporters at this base 15 kilometers (nine miles) South of Kabul, said the Prime Minister appointed by his Pashtun-controlled Hezb-i-Islami faction would come within a week to assume his post under the new interim government. Hekmatyar said the new council under Rabbani must hold elections within four months of his mandate and insisted that "all armed forces should withdraw from Kabul," a reference to Uzbek militiamen who have occupied parts of the city in the last two months.AFPReuter