Summary: May 3, 2005: The President of Afghanistan, His Excellency Hamid KARZAI, will be in Strasbourg for a formal sitting on Tuesday May 10 where he will be addressing the European Parliament (Strasbourg)
Hamid Karzai was born in December 24, 1957 to a distinguished family of the Popalzai tribe. As a Pashtun from the Kandahar region of Afghanistan, he is from the same clan as the former Afghan King, Zahir Shah.
He served as Afghanistan's first deputy foreign minister in the post-Soviet mujahideen government from 1992 to 1994 after providing money and arms to the muhajideen to defeat the Soviet army. Initially a supporter of the Taliban regime, which came to power in 1996 after it overthrew the post-Soviet government of Burhanuddin Rabbani, he later rejected its rigid stance and the presence of foreign elements interfering in Afghan affairs.
When his father - a former parliamentary deputy - was assassinated while walking home from a mosque in Quetta in 1999 - a killing many, including Karzai, attribute to the Taliban - Karzai emerged as leader of the Popolzai tribe. Following the fall of the Taliban in 2001, he became Chairman of the interim administration. In June 2002, the Emergency Loya Jirga, or grand council, made up of 1,500 delegates, elected Hamid Karzai to serve as Chief of State and Chairman of the Transitional Authority
of Afghanistan (interim President). And on October 9, 2004, he was elected to a full five-year term as the first directly elected President in the country's history.
His vision of a stable, peaceful and democratic Afghanistan continues to make him a popular leader around the world, but with a three-year-old Taliban-led insurgency showing little sign of abating, and efforts to rebuild the war-torn country ongoing, the challenges are considerable.
Afghanistan, sharing common borders with six countries, has significant strategic importance. Since 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded, it has known little peace: from a decade of war against the Soviet Union, to a civil war soon after the Soviet-backed government was driven out of Kabul in 1992, to the American-led military operations in 2001 which ousted the Taliban regime, to the uneasy peace that exists today.
The European Union is a key player in helping to rebuild Afghanistan. It provides support under the Bonn Agreement, which provided for the future governance of Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban at the end of 2001. The EU provided substantial support for the elections process, amounting to around €80 million (of which around €24 million from the EC) - around half of all international support for the presidential election.
The EU as a whole, including contributions by Member States, disbursed around €800 million in 2002 and over €900 million in 2003 for reconstruction and humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. And at the Berlin conference in spring 2004, the EU updated its reconstruction pledge, committing $ 2.2 billion for the period 2004-2006.
| Top |
European Union Member States
Alerts by email
Email this page
Print this page