December 6, 2001 - Omaha World Herald: RPCV has ties to several named to serve on Afghanistan's interim cabinet

Peace Corps Online: Peace Corps News: Headlines: Peace Corps Headlines - 2001: 12 December 2001 Peace Corps Headlines: December 6, 2001 - Omaha World Herald: RPCV has ties to several named to serve on Afghanistan's interim cabinet

By Admin1 (admin) on Saturday, December 08, 2001 - 9:38 am: Edit Post

Read the article from the Omaha World-Herald on RPCV Thomas Gouttierre and his ties to several people who have been named at serve on Afghanistan's interim cabinet at:

UNO has ties to several named to serve on Afghanistan's interim cabinet

UNO has ties to several named to serve on Afghanistan's interim cabinet

Dec 6, 2001 - Omaha World-Herald Author(s): Stephen Buttry

A former Afghan refugee living in Omaha balked at accepting a position as education minister in the interim cabinet that will run Afghanistan for the next six months.

Afghan delegates planning the provisional government at a meeting in Bonn, Germany, invited Abdul Salaam Azimi, a research associate at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, to be education minister.

Azimi, former president of Kabul University, said he did not reject the position, but suggested alternate candidates when he received a call from Bonn, Germany, to his Omaha home. Later Wednesday, Ghulam Muhammad Yailaqi was named education minister. Azimi would not comment further.

Thomas Gouttierre, director of UNO's Center for Afghanistan Studies, said Azimi came to Omaha as a refugee in the 1980s and was chief of UNO's education projects in Afghanistan. He became a U.S. citizen in 1990.

If he had accepted the appointment, Gouttierre said, "there couldn't be a better, more qualified person for the position."

UNO has ties to several people who did accept positions in the interim cabinet.

Dr. Abdullah, the foreign affairs minister, visited UNO in 1999 or 2000, Gouttierre said. "He's the right guy for that job."

Sima Samar, one of two women in the provisional cabinet, will be minister of foreign affairs and a vice chairwoman. She fled Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979 and worked as a doctor in a refugee camp in Pakistan, where she opened a hospital in 1987.

She also ran schools in rural Afghanistan for more than 17,400 students as well as a school for refugee girls in Quetta, Pakistan. Literacy programs established by her organization were accompanied by distribution of food aid and information on hygiene and family planning.

"She's great," Gouttierre said. "We were helping out her schools at one time."

After the severe persecution of women under the Taliban, "that's amazing to have these two women in the cabinet," he said. "That's a huge step forward."

Public Health Minister Suhaila Seddiqi is the other woman in the cabinet.

Information and Culture Minister Raheen Makhdoom lived in the United States and visited UNO in about 1980, Gouttierre said.

Hedayat Amin Arsala, the finance minister and a vice chairman, was Gouttierre's language instructor when Gouttierre was a Peace Corps volunteer. the two remain close friends.

Peter Tomsen, ambassador in residence at UNO, also knows many of the cabinet members. He met earlier this year in Tajikistan with Seyyed Hussein Anwari, the agriculture minister, and Ahmed Shah Massood, the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated Sept. 9.


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