The Senate's meeting on Monday turned violent as differences over the issue of whether or not ethnicity should be written on new electronic ID cards for citizens boiled over.
Although representatives in Parliament have engaged in heated debate over the issue, which touches on the sensitive issue of ethnic division in Afghanistan, Monday was the first time any such discussion turned violent.
The meeting began to devolve after a Senator from Khost province accused the speaker of ethnic discrimination and another senator attacked him with a bottle.
"Mr. Ezedyar, you're escalating ethnic discriminations, please leave your chair...you can't manage the house meeting," Senator Arifullah Pashtoon told the senate speaker Mohammad Alam Ezedyar
Khan Mohammad Khagai from Paktikia province then threw a bottle at Ezedyar and later on a number of senators tried to attack him.
Eventually the chamber settled down and the Senators moved on to discuss next year's budget.
At end of the Senate session, the Ezidyar appeared in a news conference and assured that the quarrel was a brief incident and had no political agenda. He stressed that the escalation of ethnic differences would never be in the national interests of Afghanistan.
"We need national unification, the growth of ethnic discrimination never supports our national interests," he said. "We ask all members of the National Assembly to come forward and respect each other's rights."
Hours before the Senate quarrel, the Senate Chairman Fazl Hadi Muslimyar announced that ethnicity, class and religion were all included in the national database of the Ministry of Interior (MoI), but that this information would not be written on the new electronic ID cards.
Previously, the Lower House approved the inclusion of ethnicity, class and religion on the electronic ID cards by a majority vote.
Ethnic tensions in Afghanistan have a long history of conflict around them, with the civil war of the 1990s largely having been fought along ethnic lines.
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