RIGHTS: Massacre Underlines Problems for Taliban in Afghanistan

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 24 1997 (IPS) - The Taliban Islamic movement is seeking greater action against its opponents in Afghanistan after an alleged massacre in the city of Mazar-i-Sharif, and U.N. officials are concerned that any blockade will result in mass starvation in the north.

The Taliban seized control of more than two-thirds of Afghanistan one year ago, but has produced only mixed results in winning recognition for its attempt to govern Afghanistan. A series of charges and counter-charges about rights violations has served to underscore how unpopular the radical, student-led Islamic group remains.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan agreed last week to authorise a special envoy, Algerian diplomat Lakhdar Brahimi, to lead an investigation into charges that as many as 3,000 Taliban supporters have been killed since May in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif.

Abdul Hakeem Mujahid, the Taliban representative to the United Nations, argued that such an investigation is necessary as a first step to obtain justice following what he claimed was the mass killings conducted by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance.

In particular, Mujahid accused the forces of Gen. Abdul Malik, who was reportedly ousted from northern Afghanistan by the Taliban, of shooting prisoners of war after Malik’s northern-based faction broke a short-lived alliance with the Islamists.

“The warlords had many prisoners tortured,” Mujahid argued. “Witnesses say that many more prisoners were savagely maimed and amputated before they were killed. Other prisoners had their bodies crushed by tanks. All their corpses were dumped into the ditches dug in preparation – the mass graves.”

Mujahid labelled the killings “genocide” and complained that, for months, the United Nations and most human rights groups ignored Taliban claims of atrocities in Mazar-i-Sharif. Yet the rights record of the Islamic movement in the period since they seized Kabul, the Afghan capital, last September has been equally poor, U.N. officials say.

“(The Taliban authorities) don’t care about the killings of all Afghans,” said one U.N. official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They’re shooting up the place.”

This week, the World Food Programme (WFP) urged Taliban leaders to allow food shipments through to the northern region of Bamyan, where a Taliban-imposed blockade has drastically cut food supplies.

“Although the entire population of some 1.2 million (people) is affected, about 160,000 risk famine and starvation unless food supplies reach them immediately,” WFP Executive Director Catherine Bertini warned in a letter to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar Mujahid. “With the winter on the doorstep within the next three weeks, the situation is becoming critical.”

Mujahid, however, denied that the halting of goods to Bamyan was a blockade, and argued that the Taliban was only opposed to the flow of arms shipments by Iran and other supporters of the Northern Alliance. “If these commodities can go to the needy or poor people of Bamyan, then we will not go against these supplies,” he said.

He added that the Taliban is ready to allow food shipments to Bamyan if the United Nations can provide “adequate guarantees” that the food would not go to the military, although Taliban officials have not specified what those guarantees would constitute.

Ever since the Soviet-backed Najibullah government collapsed in 1992, Afghanistan has been torn by factional fighting, mostly among Islamic militias and former Communist army leaders. The Taliban succeeded last year in using its appeal as a new force promising Afghan unity to sweep to power in Kabul, but it has since become as embroiled in factional slaughter as its predecessors.

The controversy over the alleged May massacres is itself bound up in factional disputes. For months, many rights groups believed the reports to be “just propaganda,” Mujahid conceded. However, in recent weeks, as Gen. Abdurrashid Dostum, a former Soviet ally and occasional supporter of the Northern Alliance, seized several major towns from Abdul Malik — driving Malik out of Afghanistan — Dostum’s forces verified Taliban accounts of atrocities.

According to Mawlawi Turkestani, Dostum’s representative in Pakistan, about 1,632 Taliban supporters were massacred in the Layli Desert after having been imprisoned in the northern town of Shiberghan. About 700 people in Mazar-i-Sharif and more than 300 others in Faryab were also killed, Turkestani reported. Dostum has offered to grant access to U.N. investigations to those sites.

Still, Taliban is unlikely to gain much international sympathy following repeated reports of its dismal record, including its segregation and persecution of women. Doctors Without Borders recently reported that women were allowed at only one, substandard hospital in Kabul – a claim Mujahid says is false.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said in Pakistan that Washington would oppose Taliban claims to govern Afghanistan as long as the movement continues to violate women’s rights and to mistreat ethnic and religious minorities.

Only three governments – Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – recognise the Taliban as Afghanistan’s government, while Rabbani’s government continues to be recognised at the United Nations.