Islamabad, June 18: A statement purported to be from radical afghan guerrilla leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar slammed a draft constitution being drawn up in the war-torn nation as a game of the "puppet government," the Afghan Islamic Press (AIP) reported today. The private Pakistan-based news agency reprinted excerpts from the statement allegedly by Hekmatyar, a renegade Islamist warlord who was briefly prime minister in the early 1990s and is now believed to be leading a guerrilla campaign against Kabul and United States-led forces.
Hekmatyar, who was declared a terrorist by Washington last year, said the constitution was aimed at giving legitimacy to United States-led "occupation forces."
"The game of constitution making by (the) Afghan puppet government is a joke and farce like the Loya Jirga," the statement said, referring to the traditional tribal assembly which created the current 18-month transitional government last year.
President Hamid Karzai launched a nationwide public consultation on Afghanistan's new draft constitution on June 7. A constitutional Loya Jirga is supposed to approve the draft in October.
The statement carried by AIP said Afghanistan was not free as foreign troops were "occupying" it, therefore a constitution could not be drawn up.
"Under the Geneva Convention, no occupation force has the right to make changes in text books and the constitution of occupied countries," the statement's author said. Bureau Report