On the eve of the universal day of human rights there are still major human rights violations in Afghanistan, but some improvements have been made in the post-conflict country.
Abdul Sabour Babai was celebrating his freedom two weeks after he was released from a private jail in the northwestern Faryab province. The 35-year-old returnee was arrested and tortured by a local commander when he tried to get back his confiscated land in Pashtun Kut district on the outskirts of Maimana, the provincial capital of Faryab. Sabour returned from the western city of Herat where he spent three years as an IDP [internally displaced person]. The father of five left Pashtun Kut following the increasing number of violations by local commanders after the hardline Taleban was ousted late 2001. However, when he came back he found out that the rule of the gun was still in place in his isolated, mountainous home town. "We were told that all the commanders had been disarmed but that was not true," Sabour told IRIN. "I had all the documents and when I insisted on getting my own land back, the commander put me in his private jail and after three weeks of detention the local elders helped me to run away," he said. Sabour said local police could not do anything to stop the commanders from harassing and intimidating civilians.
As Kabul marks the International Human Rights Day on Friday, rights activists at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said the top human rights concerns in the country, still reeling from decades of conflict, were; land grabbing from farmers by local commanders; arbitrary killing and torture; and the general state of impunity. Moreover, violence against women continued unabated. But despite existing challenges, AIHRC believes there has been some improvement in the state of human rights in the country this year.
Mighty generous of you to admit it. Mighty generous...
"There have been some encouraging signs of improvement in the human rights situation in Afghanistan this year, however, the situation on a number of issues remains concerning," Nader Nadery, a commissioner of AIHRC, told IRIN on Thursday in the capital, Kabul. According to Nadery, in the first six months of 2004 land grabbing accounted for 31 percent of all violations that AIHRC had investigated, while currently that figure has dropped to 18 percent. Some improvement has also been observed regarding the issues of torture, forced migration and forced marriages.
Posted by: Fred ||
12/11/2004 9:29:04 PM ||
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#1
Regarding the second page, Mr Shahin. What the hell is it with linguistics professors and their need to defend the indefensible?
I guess the fact that the guys speaking out, few as they are, aren't getting fatwas on them or killed immediately after saying their "heresy" is a good sign.
#2
aren't getting fatwas on them or killed immediately after saying their "heresy" is a good sign
Just wait. Fatwa in 5..4..3..
Seriously, though it is a good sign that these things are getting some airtime (in their home countries) at last. If you talk to a MEasterner after getting his trust, like I have been for the last decade or so, they have been saying this among themselves very quietly since at least the early 90's.
The problem was that anyone who brought this sort of topic up (in their home country. In public) tended to end up having an extended discussion of their views with "Large Mustachioed Men With Trunchions" who worked for the local thugocrat.
Keep in mind that in the Islamic world to question Islam is to question the legitamacy of the last 1600 odd years of evrything. Its easer to get an old marxist to admit that he/she was wrong about how she/she spent most of their life.
Interesting times indeed.
Posted by: N Guard ||
12/11/2004 8:11 Comments ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
