AFGHANISTAN - Mar. 9 - Cabinet Rifts.

A former minister Mohammad Mohaqiq running against Pres. Karzai in the June elections says he was dismissed and did not resign as was announced this week. He describes deep divisions in Karzai's cabinet and says: "There were a lot of other problems in the cabinet. But because of the national interest we had to keep quiet". (His comments suggest ethnic divisions as well as tensions between former mujahedin like himself who stayed and fought Soviet forces and those who fled to relatively comfortable exile in the West. At a constitutional convention completed in January, disputes flared between Pashtuns, the country's largest ethnic group, and Tajiks and the Shiite Hazaras. Senior officials disclose that the FM and a leading Tajik, Abdullah Abdullah, was so angry at Pashtun actions during the convention that he briefly resigned. Signs of ethnic rifts among senior government officials are troubling while 11,000 US troops are battling remnants of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. A bitter civil war that spanned the 1990s left the country fractured along political and ethnic lines. Mohaqiq, a Shiite Hazara who fought the Soviets and Taliban, accuses Ashraf Ghani - an ethnic Pashtun minister and close ally of Karzai's who went into exile in the US - of undermining his authority as planning minister. Mohaqiq voiced a common complaint among veterans of the long struggle against the Soviets, saying: "Maybe there are some other circles who are destroying jihadis" - referring to those who fought the Soviets. "My dismissal is an illegal dismissal and Karzai has done it by force". Jawed Ludin, a Karzai spokesman, said Mohaqiq's departure from a cabinet meeting on March 7 after saying there was no place for him there, was taken as a "declaration of resignation". Asked about reports that Mohaqiq had raised ethnic differences at the meeting, Ludin said: "He raised inappropriate questions and addressed them to the president").