The government peace negotiating team chief will address members of the upper house via a video conference on Tuesday to assuage their concerns about the ongoing parleys.
About a month ago, the intra-Afghan talks were inaugurated in Doha, the capital of Qatar, but both sides are yet to reach an agreement on negotiations’ procedure.
The Meshrano Jirga or upper house discussed the peace talks and related issues in today’s session.
Muhiuddin Munsif, a lawmaker from central Kapisa province, said no progress in the procedure had worried people and they must work to ensure that the opportunity was not lost.
Rahmatullah Achakzai from Kandahar expressed his concern over the surge in violence, in which Afghans were killed, saying no renunciation of conflict, increase in violence and prolongation of work on procedure for talks had sparked people’s concerns.
Without going into details, he said both the teams must lead the negotiations in accordance to Islamic principles.
Fazel Hadi Muslimyar, chairman of the house, called lawmakers’ concerns as appropriate, saying that chief negotiator Mohammad Massoum Stanikzai would provide details of the last one month to the house through a video conference.
He said the senators could ask Stanikzai questions about the peace process.
However, Formal meetings between both sides of the Afghan peace negotiations in Doha have been suspended for the past 10 days and it is not clear when the meetings will be resumed.
Despite recent efforts in the diplomatic fronts in the past two weeks, the two sides of the negotiations have not managed so far to reach a conclusion about the procedural rules intended to kick start the direct peace negotiations aimed at ending the decades-long war in Afghanistan.
The two sides have agreed on 18 out of 20 articles for the procedural rules, but two main articles—religious basis for the talks and connection of the US-Taliban deal with the negotiations—remain unsolved. The Taliban insists that if a dispute emerges during the negotiations, the solution must be sought in the Hanafi jurisprudence and that the foundation for the talks should be the peace deal that the group signed with the US in late February. But the Afghan republic team has rejected the Taliban’s demands and has suggested some alternatives to the demands.
