The Hizb-e-Islami party will not join the intra-Afghan talks until the government recognizes it as an opposition force, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Mujahideen militia-turned-party and an ex-warlord, told Sputnik in an interview
KABUL (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 01st July, 2020) The Hizb-e-Islami party will not join the intra-Afghan talks until the government recognizes it as an opposition force, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the Mujahideen militia-turned-party and an ex-warlord, told Sputnik in an interview.
Hekmatyar came third in the 2019 presidential election with 3.5 percent of the vote. His party repeatedly challenged the vote results, accusing reelected President Ashraf Ghani of fraud. The political force is now seeking to be included into the main body that will be in charge of intra-Afghan talks under an official status of the opposition. Until signing a peace deal with Kabul in 2016, Hizb-e-Islami forces were engaged in hostilities against the government forces and coalition troops.
"Hezb-e-Islami's participation in the High Council [for National Reconciliation] of the State is conditional ... Hezb-e-Islami should be invited to the council as an opposition," Hekmatyar said.
According to the Hezb-e-Islami leader, the High Council for National Reconciliation should consist of three 2019 election teams and ex-President Hamid Karzai and become the final decision-making body on national issues, such as peace, domestic and foreign policy policies.
Hekmatyar at the same time is skeptical that the incumbent cabinet would heed the demand to recognize his party as the opposition.
"The fact of the matter is that the government will never accept the party as an opposition, even if it accepts it, it will request from the party to be a minority in the formation and to include all sorts of people in it in one way or another," he said.
The ex-warlord suggested that Ghani agreed to strike power-sharing agreements with his main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, both after the 2014 and 2019 elections, only due to great pressure from several Afghan provinces as well as the United States, Iran and India.
He went on to accuse the Afghan government of corruption, failure to tackle security problems and poverty, as well as reliance on US support to cling to power. The Hezb-e-Islami leader noted that the 2019 election results have not been accepted by any major election team, but the US still threw support behind the Ghani team.
"Hezb-e-Islami has always insisted on the freedom of the land, the unconditional withdrawal of foreign troops, the provision of peace, and dialogue between the two countries without any foreign interference, transparent elections," he argued.
The ex-warlord reiterated that the pending negotiations must be fully "inter-Afghan, and no external party must act as a mediator or observer."
Intra-Afghan talks were to start in early March under a peace deal that the US signed with the Taliban in late February. The process has, however, stalled due to disagreements over prisoner release.
In mid-June, US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation Khalilzad said that the talks are closer than ever, praising Kabul for freeing over 3,000 Taliban prisoners and the Taliban for releasing more than 500 government prisoners. The radical movement has long insisted that the government free all 5,000 prisoners at once.
