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Afghanistan/South Asia
Rights groups calls for Afghans to hold war criminals to account
2005-07-18
You know things are getting better when a human rights group issues a communique from the capital of the country in question.
KABUL - Afghanistan must call officials and commanders accused of war crimes to account for their violations of human rights, a rights group said on Sunday weeks ahead of the country’s landmark parliamentary elections.

In a report which documents war crimes and crimes against humanity in the 1978-2001 period, the Afghanistan Justice Project called on the Afghan government and the international community to take greater steps to bring war criminals to justice. The crimes documented included massacres, disappearances, and summary executions of tens of thousands of civilians, indiscriminate bombing, torture, mass rape and other atrocities.

“In September 2005, Afghanistan will hold parliamentary elections. The candidates for parliamentary seats include persons against whom there is credible evidence of responsibility for war crimes,” the group said in a 167-page report based on hundreds of interviews.
Funny, they never brought this up when the Taliban were in power.
Afghanistan will hold its first post-Taleban parliamentary elections on September 18, but only 11 candidates, out of a total of 208 who were investigated for their links with illegal armed militias, were struck off the ballot paper.

Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, a radical commander who currently advises Karzai and exercises major political power over the Afghan judiciary, has been implicated over a slew of rights violations but remained on the list.

Under the Afghan constitution, candidates cannot be disqualified unless they have been convicted of a crime in a court of a law but no functioning courts existed to deliver such convictions during the country’s 23 years of war.

While the Afghanistan Justice Project acknowledged the country still lacked the mechanisms to bring the perpetrators of crimes against humanity to justice, the group called for greater steps to be taken in that direction. “If Afghanistan’s political transition is to be guided by principles of good governance, including transparency, there is no need to bury the truth,” the report said.
"Be it totally impractical and not within the law, our demands should still be met."
Speaking to reporters in Kabul, Patricia Gossman, director of the project called the failure to question commanders for their rights violations “a missed opportunity.
Patricia, Patricia ... what tribe in Afghanistan names their women Patricia?
Electoral authorities had pushed aside “serious questions over who should be disqualified” from standing for the elections and had appointed many people with records of rights abuses to senior government positions, she said. Gossman said the recent appointment of an ally of Sayyaf, Shir Alam, as governor of the southeastern province of Ghazni was ”appauling given the amount of information that is already available about him and well-known to the international community.”

The report comes 10 days after US-based Human Rights Watch said many of those linked to the carnage that erupted from April 1992 to March 1993 in Kabul after the collapse of the Soviet-backed Najibullah government are now defense or interior ministry officials, or advisors to Karzai himself. “From the very start the argument was put forward that inclusion of these people was the best way to prevent further bloodshed... but we are three-and-half-years into that what we have seen is that inclusion has not led to greater stability,” Gossman said.
Posted by:Steve White

#1  Afghanistan must call officials and commanders accused of war crimes to account for their violations of human rights, because the Taliban are getting the shit pounded out of them and this has got to stop. Where is the balance?
Posted by: phil_b   2005-07-18 08:21  

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