The Ulema Council is behind the demand to re-establish a police force to better enforce Sharia law. Karzai has not opposed the proposal. Human rights activists are worried despite government's assurances that all it will do is encourage people to follow Islamic ways.

Kabul (AsiaNews) – Afghanistan's Ulema Council has called on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to re-establish the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, a religious police force that existed under the old Taliban regime. On Saturday, the government's spokesman Mohammad Asif Nang announced that President Karzai did not reject the request telling clerics that he would submit the proposal to parliament. This has started worrying human rights activists.

Under Taliban rule, the religious police monitored the streets, punished women who did not wear the burqa in public, beat men with unorthodox beards or anyone who listened to music, all this in order to enforce their fundamentalist interpretation of Islamic law.

When the Taliban regime was overthrown in 2001 the Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice was disbanded.

In his statement, spokesman Nang said that the country's clerics wanted to re-establish the department to enforce Sharia rule, but he could not say when the proposal would go before parliament.

Human rights groups have expressed apprehension over the issue. "Our concern is that the Vice and Virtue Department doesn't turn into an instrument for politically oppressing critical voices and vulnerable groups under the guise of protecting poorly defined virtues," said Sam Zia Zarifi of Human Rights Watch. "This is especially true in the case of women, because infringements on their rights tend to be justified by claims of morality."

However, the Minister for Haj and Religious Affairs, Nematullah Shahrani, defended the proposal. "The job of the department will be to tell people what is allowable and what is forbidden in Islam," he said, stressing that the department would not have police powers but would oppose the proliferation of alcohol and drugs and speak out against terrorism, crime and corruption, encouraging people to behave in more Islamic ways.

Some Afghan analysts contacted by AsiaNews said that the Ulema's initiative has to do with the Talibans' violent spring offensive that is still going on in Afghanistan, an offensive that was not only military but also political and religious.

Sources told AsiaNews that fundamentalism is gaining ground in the country without any opposition from the authorities, who are caught between the United States and its expectations and the more extremist factions within the government itself.

Karzai, who has a reputation of being a moderate Muslim, has more recently tried to give the country a more conservative outlook after Taliban propaganda tried to depict him as leading a pro-Western and unislamic government.

• afghanistan
• religious
• police
• repression
• human
• rights
• islamic
• ways