UNICEF builds school named after a criminal

It’s so good to hear schools are being built in a country with some of the worst literacy indicators in the world.

UNICEF has just completed spending US$60,000 on a school in the northern Balkh Province which has been named “Shaheed Mazari School”.

For a brief profile of Mazari’s criminal activities in Kabul in 1992-1993, see Human Rights Watch’s Blood-Stained Hands.

Two things are interesting about our warlords: alive they want private TV stations, mini palaces and ministries when dead their cronies name public schools, roundabouts and streets after them.

Daudzai: “We’re accountable to Iran” for bags of money

Two days after Waheed Omar was quoted in the local media as saying the President’s Office will soon provide accounts/details of the Iranian cash, Umar Daudzai, Chief of Staff, invited a few local journalists to his secretive office and repudiated the promise.

Daudzai said he keeps records of the payments to his/President’s Office and regularly reports invoices to his Iranian donors. “I can show you the files,” he told reporters.

He tacitly accused US government agencies of trying to abuse his authority.

“One day before the New York Times story, a person contacted my office and said if until tomorrow I don’t change the President’s decision about private security companies – I should read New Times tomorrow,” he cynically alleged referring to President Karzai’s adamant decision to disband all private security firms.

MPs, among many Afghans, had demanded the President to declare details of cash payments to his office by Iran. The scandal was disclosed in a NY Times story in October in which Mr. Daudzai was accused of promoting Iranian interests at the Presidential Palace in return for bags of cash.

Mr. Karzai has been on a highly confrontational mood towards US and NATO since Daudzai took charge of the President’s Office in 2007. Kai Eide, a former UN envoy who maintained friendly ties with Karzai, described Daudzai as an “unconstructive force” to BBC.

Karzai – unsurprisingly – defended Daudzai and called him a “patriot”.

The question vexing me is: why are our alleged patriot officials accountable to Iran?