Hundreds of Afghan refugee women took to the streets in Islamabad on international human rights day to demand that notorious warlords and fundamentalists in their country be kept out of the new cabinet in Kabul. Joined by men and children, the women said that Afghanistan's newly-elected President Hamid Karzai should not include the warlords or fundamentalists in the cabinet that is to be sworn in within days.
Members of the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), who, in the past, have been vocal against the policies of the Taliban government, are now demanding that Karzai exclude all such warlords from his cabinet.
Carrying banners and chanting slogans, they marched to the UN building in Islamabad on Friday.
"The presence of criminals in the government is treason to the vote of Afghan people," read one placard. "Bringing warlords in the new government is treason to Afghans," said another.
"Long live freedom and democracy!" they chanted.
Security was tight outside the UN building but that failed to deter the demonstrators.
"We want to say [to] the world, and especially to the government of Pakistan, that the fundamentalists are still in Afghanistan [and] in power and they should be disarmed," Danish Hameed, a senior member of RAWA, told reporters.
Karzai won the popular vote in the presidential polls on December 7 and was elected president for a five-year term.
If Karzai sticks to his vow not to form coalitions with his main rivals - regional strongmen whose power derives from ethnic loyalties and private militias - his new cabinet will look very different from that which it replaces, a foreign news agency reported.
But many Afghans are wondering whether Karzai will be able to deny positions to figures responsible for factional violence in the past three years, or tainted by association with the country's massive opium and heroin trade.
The makeup of his new cabinet is seen as crucial to whether the war-battered country, still racked by an Islamic insurgency, can chart a course away from regional warlordism, weak central control and an economy dominated by illicit drugs.
Analysts say the new cabinet lineup could be seen as more important than the outcome of the presidential elections and that this is Afghanistan's best opportunity to establish a reform-orientated government.
Exclude warlords from Afghan cabinet, women say
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