Afghan Majority Leader Voices Good Desire for Afghan Future

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Wednesday, November 28, 2001

Afghan Majority Leader Voices Good Desire for Afghan Future

A spokesman for the United Nations-sponsored talks on Afghanistan in Bonn said Tuesday that Sayed Hamid Karzai, senior Pashtun leader had expressed his willingness to rebuild his country for a better future.
Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for U.N. special envoy, told a press conference here that Karzai is a very influential person among leaders of Pashtun, an ethnic group accounting for 40 percent of population in the war-torn Asian country.

A spokesman for the United Nations-sponsored talks on Afghanistan in Bonn said Tuesday that Sayed Hamid Karzai, senior Pashtun leader had expressed his willingness to rebuild his country for a better future.

��"We are one nation, one culture. We are united, not divided. Weall believe in Islam that is a religion of tolerance," Sayed Hamid Karzai, the Pashtun leader in Southern Afghanistan, was quoted as saying by Ahmad Fawzi, spokesman for U.N. special envoy for Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi, who is chairing the Bonn talks that was started earlier on Tuesday.

��Fawzi told a press conference here that Karzai is a very influential person among leaders of Pashtun, an ethnic group accounting for 40 percent of population in the war-torn Asian country.

��According to Fawzi, Karzai said that all Afghan peoples "have been made extremely poor and vulnerable, but we are a strong people who would like to assert our will and our sense of self-determination .... so we can really live in an environment of brotherhood and mutual respect."

��Fawzi said Karzai's remarks were received through a telephone call to the second plenary session of the Bonn meeting, which is aimed at bringing factions of Afghanistan to negotiate political and security structures in the post-Taliban era.

��The U.N. spokesman regarded the remarks as one of the most encouraging developments at the first-day session of the Bonn meeting.

��Karzai also described the Bonn meeting as "the path towards salvation," saying that "all people I've talked to believe in a Loya Jirga as the vehicle for bringing in a legitimate government." Loya Jirga, local Afghan language, means a national assembly in which all peoples are appropriately represented.

��An international community expected interim authority in Afghanistan "is a means of getting to a Loya Jirga," Karzai was quoted as saying by Fawzi.

��German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, Brahimi and diplomats from a dozen countries, as well as more than 30 Afghan representatives of different factions attended the Tuesday's meeting at the Petersberg hotel near Bonn.