Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Afghanistan:


Violent end for Kabul's 'man of peace'

Former Afghan President Rabbani killed
KABUL: Burhanuddin Rabbani , Afghanistan's one-time president who was assassinated on Tuesday, was an elderly scholar and politician given the Herculean task of searching for peace with the Taliban. 
As head of state during the anarchic days of civil war from 1992-96 and head of the High Council for Peace since October, Rabbani was an ethnic Tajik whose power was always in question in the Pashtun-dominated Afghanistan.
Although like other prominent Afghans, he was implicated in human rights abuses by rights' groups, he embodied the Western-backed government's determination to find a political solution to 10 years of war with the Taliban.
Rabbani was elected chairman of the peace council set up to broker an end to the war with theTaliban in October 2010, shortly after its inauguration . Delivering his acceptance speech, Rabbani said he was "confident" that peace was possible.
Human Rights Watch has listed Rabbani among prominent Afghans implicated in war crimes during the brutal fighting that killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans in the early 1990s. But as president and as possible negotiator, Rabbani suffered from being an ethnic Tajik in a country dominated by the majority Pashtun group - one reason why his presidential rule was never recognized inside the country. 
After the 2001 US-led invasion ousted the Taliban, he returned as president of the first UN-recognized "government" . But he fast handed power to the Pashtun tribesman Karzai, taking a backseat - although he was elected an MP in the first-post Taliban parliament.
Born in 1940 in Faizabad in the northeastern province of Badakhshan, Rabbani left the shadows of the Hindu Kush mountains for an academic career. He studied in Kabul and then in Cairo's Al-Azhar university, and then took the helm of the moderate Islamist and anti-communist campus movement in the 1960s and 1970s. AFP

Who was Rabbani? 

Burhanuddin Rabbani, 

an ethnic Tajik, was senior leader of the mujahideen who fought against the Soviet occupation ofAfghanistan in the 1980s He was president of Afghanistan from 1992 to 1996 when mujahideen factions waged war for control of the country after Soviet withdrawal After he was driven from Kabul in 1996, he became the head of the Northern Alliance Rabbani was back as president when Northern Alliance swept to power after Taliban's fall in 2001 He headed the High Peace Council, set up by Karzai in 2010 for talks with Taliban He graduated in Islamic law and theology from Kabul University, where he was hired as a professor in 1963. He did his Masters in Islamic philosophy in Egypt.
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