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Blood-stained hands: Afghan officials implicated in war crimes, says HRW

* Rights group report names several former Northern Alliance chiefs

NEWYORK: Numerous officials in Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s government are implicated in war crimes that took place at the start of the country’s bloody civil war in the early 1990s, Human Rights Watch said in a report released on Thursday.

While some are dead or in hiding, many of those linked to the carnage that erupted from April 1992 to March 1993 after the collapse of the Soviet-backed Najibullah government are now defence or interior ministry officials, or advisors to Karzai himself, the report said.

Others are running for office in Afghanistan’s landmark parliamentary elections scheduled for September, while warlords control local administrative officials, Human Rights Watch said.

“This report isn’t just a history lesson,” said Brad Adams, executive director of the group’s Asia Division. “These atrocities were among some of the gravest in Afghanistan’s history, yet today many of the perpetrators still wield power.” The 133-page report entitled “Blood-Stained Hands: Past Atrocities in Kabul and Afghanistan’s Legacy of Impunity” is based on two years of research including interviews with witnesses, survivors, officials, and combatants.

During the time covered by the report whole sections of Kabul were reduced to rubble, tens of thousands of civilians were killed and wounded, and at least half a million people were displaced during the period, the rights group said. Various groups were fighting for control of the country in the power vacuum that followed the bloody Soviet occupation and the fall of President Najibullah.

Among those mentioned in the report are several former chiefs of the Northern Alliance, which later helped the US-led coalition topple the hardline Taliban regime at the end of 2001, following the September 11 attacks on the United States. Human Rights Watch cites the example of notorious warlord Abdul Rashid Dostam, who now holds a senior post in the ministry of defence and exercises political control of several provinces in the north of Afghanistan.

It also mentions Karim Khalili, a former militia commander and now one of Karzai’s two vice-presidents, and Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, a radical Islamist commander who currently advises President Karzai and exercises major political power over the Afghan judiciary.

“If Afghanistan doesn’t begin a process of addressing its history now, the past may repeat itself,” said Adams. Human Rights Watch also urged the government to accelerate efforts to reform the judicial system and set up special courts to try alleged rights abusers.

“In Afghanistan today, alleged war criminals - Taliban, mujahideen, communist - enjoy total impunity in the name of national reconciliation,” Adams said. “This is an insult to victims and an affront to justice.” afp

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