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Afghan War Criminals Still Unpunished

 Paul Anderson
BBC correspondent in Kabul

March 29, 2004

Human rights groups in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly frustrated at the lack of any process to investigate crimes against humanity committed during the country's 23 years of war.

So far there has been no move to forge national reconciliation by prosecuting those accused of the most heinous crimes. They range from the organizers of the murderous prisons in the Soviet-backed puppet government in the 1980s to the warlords involved in the 1992-1996 civil war against the Taleban. Their crimes were no less appalling than those committed in the former Yugoslavia or Rwanda . Yet no one has ever counted the deaths in Afghanistan .

In the civil war, the rival mujahideen commanders relentlessly shelled civilian districts of Kabul from mortar positions in the hills surrounding the capital. Thousands were killed. The ethnic Hazara minority, themselves victims of mass killings by the Taleban and ethnic Tajiks from the Northern Alliance , carried out what was termed "the dance of the dead". Victims had their heads severed while they were standing. Their headless bodies stumbled around, while the life flowed out of them.

Just ask the villagers in Shomali Plain, a short drive from Kabul .

The Taleban conducted a scorched earth policy, razing whole communities to the ground and driving out the inhabitants or killing those who dared to stay. Hundreds perished.

The rubble and bullet-ridden mud and brick houses still stand on the plain, testament to the brutality that one village elder, Mahmad Ajan, says cannot go unpunished. "I lost five members of my family," he says. "If there is to be peace in this world, of course we should bring those who committed heinous crimes to account."

Hanif Sherzad's father was considered a dissident as an army officer who served the deposed king. He was taken to the feared Pul-i-Charki prison, built in splendid isolation near Kabul . No one can hear the screams there. Thousands just disappeared. It is believed many are buried in yet-to-be-unearthed mass graves nearby.

"We used to have to take clothes out of the prison once a week to wash them. By smelling his clothes my mother could tell if they were my father's and so know if he was still alive," says Mr. Sherzad. His father was released but died two months later after his health deteriorated sharply.

Many people say that if past crimes are ever to be accounted for, the process should stretch back to the invasion of the Soviet Union and the brutal treatment of dissidents meted out by its puppet administrators. But according to Afghanistan 's Independent Human Rights Commission, no investigations have been carried out into these or any other incidents. These are crimes which should also be investigated. Not only the civil war and the Taleban.