acting under heavy Western pressure, inaugurated the country’s new
parliament on Wednesday but made plain his pique over being foiled in
his efforts to delay the start of the session.
The swearing-in took place more than four months
after a fraud-riddled vote for the lower house of the legislature, with
no resolution in sight to conflicting claims over the election’s
validity. Karzai set up a special court to resolve dozens of disputed
races, but that move has been widely criticized as unconstitutional.
The Afghan leader last week tried to put off the
inauguration for another month, but lawmakers rebelled and threatened
to open the session themselves, even though the country’s president is
legally obliged to preside over the swearing-in.
Addressing lawmakers after administering the oath of
office, Karzai urged them to work together for the good of the country.
But he revived the contentious tone of the election by taking a swipe
at his Western patrons, who had strongly urged that the new session of
parliament begin as scheduled.
“During the election process, we faced serious
problems in safeguarding people’s votes, in preventing fraud and from
the interference of foreigners,” the Afghan leader said.
Critics said Karzai wanted to delay the opening session because he hoped to alter the outcome of the
vote, in which some incumbent lawmakers considered allies of the
president lost their seats. Now that the parliament has been sworn in,
it is unclear whether any lawmakers implicated in vote fraud by the
tribunal could be removed.
The parliamentary election was supposed to have been a centerpiece of Western efforts to help bring about better governance in
which is seen as a bulwark against the insurgency. But like the
presidential election a year earlier, it triggered a fresh wave of
bitterness and cynicism among ordinary Afghans about cronyism and
corruption in the government.
Karzai has sought to direct some of that public
anger toward the West, contending — as he did in the wake of the
presidential election — that foreigners had meddled improperly in the
parliamentary vote. The Afghan leader’s relations with the Obama
administration and other Western governments have been tense and
prickly since the
in which about one-third of the votes cast for Karzai were thrown out
by a U.N.-backed oversight commission.
Although the parliamentary vote was universally
acknowledged to have been deeply flawed, Western diplomats and the NATO
force praised election officials for managing to carry off the
balloting despite violence and intimidation and urged that the new
parliament swiftly begin legislative business. The parliament is
considered an important check on Karzai’s power.
The inauguration defused for the moment the
president’s standoff with lawmakers. But rulings by the special
election tribunal, the timing of which are uncertain, could once again
throw the political scene into turmoil. The new lawmakers had tried
unsuccessfully to get the president to dissolve the tribunal, whose
legality is considered questionable by constitutional experts.
In his speech, Karzai referred to the suffering
caused by the nearly decade-long war, which began with the U.S.-led
invasion of 2001 that toppled the Taliban movement. “Thousands of
people have been killed — women, children, our elders, soldiers,” he
said.
He was upbeat, however, about prospects that Afghan
security forces will be able to take the lead in safeguarding the
country by 2014, which could pave the way for the withdrawal of large
numbers of foreign troops. The NATO force now numbers about 150,000,
two-thirds of them Americans.
The Taliban, in a statement issued shortly after the
swearing-in, mocked the event, calling the parliament part of a “puppet
regime” and the inauguration a “drama meant to deceive people.”
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