Afghanistan needs people to hold pens not guns, UN envoy tells ex-soldiers

Some 1,000 former combatants, marching without their rifles thanks to a United Nations disarmament programme, paraded in front of Afghan President Hamid Karzai today, in what he called "one of the best days in Afghanistan," according to a UN dispatch from the capital Kabul.

The UN's top envoy said the soldiers had a new jihad - to reconstruct Afghanistan.

The ex-soldiers, parading in the northern province of Kunduz, were the first in what the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) said would be a total of 100,000 soldiers to turn in weapons in a $134 million disarmament, demobilization and re-integration (DDR) programme.

According to the UNAMA report, "President Karzai…described it as one of the best days in Afghanistan after more than two decades of war."

The DDR programme is being run by Afghanistan's New Beginnings Programme, with the support of the UN Development Programme (UNDP).

Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Special Representative for Afghanistan, Lakhdar Brahimi, said: "Today peace is returning to Afghanistan...but there is another jihad waiting for those being demobilized, that jihad is for the reconstruction of Afghanistan."

Mr. Brahimi said, "Afghanistan does not need people to hold guns and fight, it needs people to hold the pen…people to work in the fields to produce food, and people to work in the factories that I hope are going to be built."

Mr. Karzai ceremoniously locked a container of weapons, and gave one key to the Japanese Ambassador in Afghanistan, Kinichi Komano, as a representative of the International Observer Group, and another to the Vice-President and Minister of Defence, Marshall Mohammed Fahim. Japan is the largest donor country to the DDR effort.