KABUL, 8 May 2006 — Former warlords in Afghanistan’s Parliament hurled water bottles and rushed at a woman MP yesterday after she accused them of being involved in the deaths of thousands of people.
Malalai Joya said bearded and turbaned MPs who were once warlords in the country’s decades of conflict had to be restrained from physically attacking her after a heated session of the four-month-old Parliament.
The uproar, in which several MPs rose from their chairs shouting, was shown on television. A cameraman from a private television station said one of the MPs had slapped him across the face while he was filming the scuffle.
Joya, who has had death threats against her after a similar outburst during a meeting to draw up a post-Taleban constitution in 2003, alleged that she had heard a prominent former warlord telling his men “to stab me with a knife.”
Joya, in her late 20s, said the MPs had reacted angrily to her statement that some of the men who led the resistance to the 10-year Soviet occupation were responsible for the deaths of thousands of civilians in a civil war that erupted after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989.
Her comments were made in a debate about the anniversary last month of the defeat of communism in Afghanistan in 1993 when the government that replaced the Soviet administration was toppled.
“I told them that we have two types of mujahedeen — one who were really mujahed the second, those who killed tens of thousands of innocent people and who are criminals. My words sparked their anger,” she said.
