AFGHANISTAN: Finally, Taliban Prisoners Get Some Humanitarian Help

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

SHEBERGAN, Afghanistan, Apr 25 2002 (IPS) - The entrance to the second largest prison for Taliban fighters, on the outskirts of this town two hours west of the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, is a 30-foot high metal double door, flanked by several guards with Kalashnikovs patrolling the high wall that encircles it.

Last week, the Red Cross workers put up five giant white tents, designed to hold 128 men each, in the prison courtyard. Right away, they started emergency feeding of almost 100 prisoners who were chronically malnourished.

Shebergan is the headquarters for Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek warlord who controls much of northern Afghanistan.

The local prison, which is run by his soldiers, houses more than 3,000 Taliban fighters who were captured in the first phase of the war when the city of Kunduz fell to the joint Northern Alliance-United States alliance last year. Some 800 are from the neighbouring country of Pakistan.

A few alleged leaders were flown to the American base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in January after interrogations by the U.S. military, while 350 were released on the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha in February.

Those who remained have been badly underfed and cells are overcrowded, with 50 men or more crammed into a room. Dozens have died while in detention.

The humanitarian operation follows months of pleas for help by the local Afghan military doctors who work in the tiny three room infirmary here designed to hold about eight patients.

Pointing to the gaunt and dehydrated men, who were lying on cots, clothed in dirty nondescript cotton clothes and covered by thin dirty blankets, Haji Mohammed, one of the doctors, explained that at least half of the prisoners had some kind of illness and 500 have internal medical problems.

But, he said, he was given virtually no medical supplies for them. “First of all we need hydrogen peroxide, bandages, tetracycline, doxycycline and other kinds of medicines for stomachs. We also need medicines for skin diseases like scabies and other diseases caused by fleas here in the prison,” Mohhamed says.

Physicians for Human Rights, a group based in Boston in the United States, released a report in February supporting local doctors who charged that the prison had no medical supplies.

It also says the prisoners were subject to severe overcrowding, non-existent sanitation, exposure to winter cold, inadequate food, resulting in epidemic illness and deaths.

The report claims that dysentery and yellow jaundice, likely due to Hepatitis A, are epidemic. The report says that many prisoners complain of stomach and respiratory problems and several had itchy skin and rashes.

But General Jura Bek, who runs the prison, rejects charges that the food is inadequate and says: “The food is enough for them. They are not starving. They don’t work, they don’t use energy, so the food is enough for them.”

In the kitchen, a huge hangar-like building, Tureali, the prison cook, oversees workers at about a dozen diesel-fueled stoves where ‘khicchri’, a dark yellow rice and lentil mix, is being prepared.

Tureali, says that the food is adequate. “We give them two meals a day. In addition for breakfast we give them one loaf of bread with sugar and milk for tea. For lunch we give them ‘khicchri’.”

The soldiers, however, have allowed the Red Cross to supply the 100 most malnourished prisoners with milk containing vitamins and antibiotics three times a day. As many as 500 prisoners are expected to be fed and treated by the Red Cross in the coming weeks.

Meanwhile, many of the prisoners say that they are merely rank and file Taliban conscripts who never wanted to fight.

Naseeruddin, a prisoner from Spin Baldak in Kandahar district, says that during the Taliban’s reign, “I was forced to fight for a month or two every year. We were forced to do this. When the American air raids started (in October), we were sent to Kunduz and I had to surrender to General Dostum.”

Maksud Khan, from Rawalpindi in Pakistan, says he never intended to go to war either. “I first came here to work as a mechanic repairing cars for the Taliban. I returned home but then I came back when the war started.”

Khan, who has been cooperating with prison guards, is hopeful that he will be able to return home soon.

Indeed, this week Pakistani President Gen Pervez Musharraf told a big public meeting in the border town of Peshawar that he would bring back all the Pakistanis languishing in Afghan jails.

“I have talked to Hamid Karzai during my visit to Afghanistan and I will bring the arrested Pakistanis back to the country in a few days. I believe they have been misled by some elements and sent to fight in Afghanistan,” Musharraf said. “In fact these Pakistanis are innocent.”

The fate of the Afghan Taliban is a little more unclear.

Gen Jura Bek estimates that it costs about 3 dollars per prisoner per day, or about 10,000 dollars per day, to maintain the current inadequate conditions at the prison — much more than what the government can afford.

For the moment, however, many of the prisoners are thankful that they are still alive.

The first time the Taliban attempted to seize the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in May 1997, some 600 Taliban were massacred in the streets by the local population.

In the following weeks, some 2,000 Taliban members were killed in and buried in mass graves in the Dash-te-Laili desert near Shebergan alone by Gen Malik Pahlawan’s soldiers.

In some cases, the Taliban fighters were tossed into wells and grenades lobbed into the water before they were bulldozed over. In others, they were killed inside truck containers, their skin burned black by the heat and lack of oxygen.

And the Taliban themselves meted out similar punishment to the Hazara peoples of the region when they seized power in August 1998, killing some 6,000 people.