Human Rights Watch World Report 1999 - Afghanistan

  Afghanistan remained one of the world's most intractable human rights disasters in 1998. The war between the forces of the Taliban, an ultraconservative Islamist movement that has controlled the capital Kabul since 1996, and the coalition of opposition forces known as the United Front (UF) continued to wreak devastation in the north of the country. A bloody offensive that began in July left the Taliban in control of all but parts of central and northeast Afghanistan; during the battle for the city of Mazar-i Sharif, the Taliban massacred civilians belonging principally to the ethnic Shi‘a Hazara minority. Killings of civilians were also reported from Bamiyan, the main city in a predominantly Hazara region of central Afghanistan that fell to the Taliban in September. Afghans living in other Taliban-controlled areas continued to suffer under repressive policies that were particularly harsh on women and minorities. Those in areas controlled by the opposition were subject to abuses also, including extrajudicial killings, rape and arbitrary detention. Large numbers of civilians on both sides were killed in aerial bombardments. Refugees from the country who had fled the fighting and repression numbered between 1.5 and 2 million; the numbers of internally displaced were estimated in the millions.

Human Rights Developments

On August 8, Taliban forces captured the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif. As they entered the city, the Taliban troops opened fire indiscriminately in streets and market areas as panicked civilians attempted to flee. Over the next week, the Taliban conducted house-to-house searches, detaining Tajik, Uzbek and Hazara men and teenage boys and often shooting the Hazaras in the street or in their houses. Thousands were detained in the city jail and an unknown number transported to jails in Herat and Qandahar. Scores of prisoners transported in large container trucks suffocated. At least several hundred bodies, and perhaps many more, were reportedly buried in the desert outside the city. In addition, eight Iranian officials and a journalist were killed in the city. As they attempted to leave the city, Hazara civilians were stopped and taken away to unknown destinations for interrogation. A large number of civilians died in rocket attacks and aerial bombardments as they fled on the main road south of the city. The massacre was believed to have been carried out in large part in reprisal for the massacre of some 2,000 or more surrendered Taliban soldiers during a failed attempt by the Taliban to take Mazar-i Sharif in May 1997. By October, the Taliban controlled all of Afghanistan's major cities, imposing in these areas its own strict interpretation of Islam. Edicts governing social behavior were enforced by the Ministry for the Enforcement of Virtue and Suppression of Vice, whose vigilance squads exacted summary punishment by beating or detaining transgressors. Such abusive practices were more characteristic of the Taliban's administration in Kabul, where the population is ethnically mixed and less sympathetic to the Taliban's interpretation of Islam than in Qandahar and other areas in the south. There was no freedom of association or freedom of expression in Taliban-controlled areas. Given the deep suspicion that divides the members of the UF and the warlord nature of governance in much of the northern areas, there was little scope for any such freedoms there. Women were particularly targeted by the virtue and vice squads. They were not allowed to move outside their homes unless completely covered in a head-to-toe garment called a burqa and accompanied by a male relative. Those caught violating these requirements were beaten. As a consequence of these restrictions, women were sometimes unable to seek medical care. With few exceptions, women were not permitted to work. Entire families were driven into destitution as a result. Another group specifically targeted by the Taliban was the Hazaras, a Shi‘a minority, and to a lesser extent, other non-Pashtun ethnic groups, including Tajiks. Hazaras returning from Iran, where some two million had fled during the 1980s, were detained upon return, transported to Qandahar and jailed. At least 700 were reported to be jailed there in 1998 pending a prolonged screening process designed to identify supporters and members of Hezb-i Wahdat, the Hazara party that is part of the UF. As a consequenceof these detentions and the deteriorating relationship between Iran and the Taliban, repatriation of refugees from Iran virtually stopped in 1998. Tajiks and Hazaras featured prominently among the internally displaced. Beginning in 1996, large numbers of Tajiks had been forcibly relocated from their homes north of Kabul out of fear they might give support and cover to opposition troops trying to move south toward the capital. Another striking pattern of abuse institutionalized under the Taliban was the public display of summary, corporal punishment. Every Friday, thousands were pressured to witness public executions and punitive amputations in Kabul's stadium. As has been the case throughout the war, all parties to the conflict were responsible for violations of international humanitarian law. Over 180 people were killed in a barrage of rocket attacks fired on Kabul by UF commander Ahmad Shah Massoud on September 20-22. Reprisal attacks on civilians, indiscriminate rocketing and shelling of cities, and summary executions of captured prisoners were also reported. It was generally believed that all parties were laying new landmines.

Defending Human Rights

No human rights organizations operated in any part of Afghanistan, although some nongovernmental organizations based in Pakistan did conduct investigations and carried out some monitoring and documentation of conditions inside the country. They did so at considerable risk, and some received threats from members of the Taliban and from the Islamic Party (Hebz-i Islami). A number of women working for Afghan nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Peshawar, Pakistan who have been critical of the Taliban's policies also received threats. Najeeba Sara Bibi, a reporter with the British Broadcasting Corporation's Pashto Service in Peshawar, received threats after she spoke about women's rights at a gathering in connection with Afghan Independence Day. On October 5, two unidentified gunmen shot at her, but she was unharmed.

The Role of the International Community

Afghanistan had attracted l ittle international attention since 1992, when resistance forces succeeded in toppling the communist government and then embarked on the bloody civil war. Efforts in early 1998 to restart a process aimed at resolving the conflict took on new urgency after the Taliban's mid-year offensive, and the executions of ten Iranian officials in Mazar-i Sharif, raised the prospect of war with Iran. Humanitarian assistance to Afghanistan and to the 1.2 million refugees in Pakistan remained the principal basis for most countries' relationship with Afghanistan. Most neighboring countries also provided financial or military support to one or more of the Afghan factions, as did Saudi Arabia. The Taliban's gender policies continued to attract widespread international condemnation, particularly from the European Union and from women's organizations in the U.S. In response to pressure from such organizations, the U.S. also stepped up its criticism of the Taliban.

United Nations

Despite the Taliban's demands for U.N. recognition, member states continued to refuse to recognize it as a legitimate government. As of October, the ousted government of Burhanuddin Rabbani regime still held Afghanistan's U.N. seat — a fact that contributed to problems between the U.N. and the Taliban. The Group of Six-plus-Two, composed of all the countries bordering Afghanistan (Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and China) plus the United States and Russia, and operating under the auspices of the U.N., stepped up efforts early in the year to initiate talks aimed at a settlement between the UF and the Taliban. During a visit by U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Bill Richardson—the most senior U.S. official to visit the country in twenty years— in April, a cease-fire was announced, but plans for further talks between the two parties foundered almost immediately. The Taliban's mid-year offensive scuttled further efforts. Throughout the year, the humanitarian effort in the country was plagued with problems as the U.N. and nongovernmental relief organizations confronted new security concerns and the Taliban's restrictive gender policies. A stalemate between the U.N. and the Taliban over security and freedom of movement for female workers achieved some resolution in May when the Taliban agreed to guarantee the security of U.N. personnel working in the country. However, in a concession that appeared to undermine its own principles, the U.N. also agreed that women's access to health care and education would be "gradual." Although the Taliban also agreed to allow for the construction of schools for boys and girls, and to permit women to work in the health sector, it provided no assurances that girls would be allowed to attend the schools or that female health workers would be allowed to travel freely to work. In the weeks following the agreement, the Taliban closed all home-based schools and vocational training centers for girls and women in Kabul and ordered doctors not to treat women who were not accompanied by a male relative. In a dramatic development in July, thirty-five international NGOs operating in Kabul withdrew their expatriate staff from the country rather than comply with a Taliban demand to relocate to and rehabilitate a dilapidated dormitory that lacked electricity and running water. The Taliban ultimately agreed to allow the NGOs to return to their former offices, with the understanding that the relocation would take place in the near future. Among the groups affected were Save the Children, Care International, and Doctors of the World (Médecins du Monde). Some groups, including Care, were able to keep some programs running using local staff. Further negotiations between the NGOs and the Taliban were put on hold following the U.S. airstrikes on alleged training camps near the Pakistani border and the subsequent shooting by unidentified assailants of two U.N. workers in Kabul, one of whom died. In the aftermath of the U.S. action, the U.N. and virtually every relief group evacuated its staff from the country. The International Committee of the Red Cross maintained limited protection services and undertook the first visit to Mazar-i Sharif in August. As of October, the U.N. and the NGOs were negotiating the terms of their return. The U.N. was also negotiating to send a humanitarianmission to Bamiyan, which fell to the Taliban in September, as it was reported to be in urgent need of food and other relief supplies. As of mid-October, no agreement had been reached, and the Taliban claimed that the airport was too damaged to permit such a delegation to land. In his March report, U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in Afghanistan Choong-Hyun Paik stated that the human rights situation had continued to deteriorate, that people in Kabul lived in fear of arbitrary punishment and harassment by the religious police, and that a large number of people, particularly from minority groups, had been imprisoned in Kabul. Paik also visited the sites of mass graves of 2-3,000 Taliban prisoners who had been summarily executed in Mazar-i Sharif during a failed attempt by the Taliban to capture the city in May 1997; he recommended that a full investigation take place. The office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights also sent a mission to Afghanistan in May to assess the feasibility of conducting an investigation into the massacre. The team visited sites where bodies had been thrown into wells, buried in mass graves, and left lying in the open in remote desert areas. The subsequent massacre of civilians in the city in August 1998 was carried out largely in revenge for the killings of the captured Taliban troops. In a resolution passed on April 21, the U.N.Commission on Human Rights noted with concern the "ongoing further deterioration of the situation of human rights in Afghanistan," in particular violations of the human rights of women and girls and combatants' mass killings of civilians and prisoners of war. The resolution condemned interference by all factions with the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the civilian population. On August 28, the U.N. Security Council passed resolution 1193, expressing its grave concern at the continued Afghan conflict, which it said had caused "a serious and growing threat to regional and international peace and security, as well as extensive human suffering, further destruction, refugee flows and other forcible displacement of large numbers of people," and noted the "increasingly ethnic nature of the conflict, [and] reports of ethnic and religious-based persecution, particularly against the Shi'ites." The Security Council demanded "that all Afghan factions stop fighting, resume negotiations without delay ... and cooperate with the aim of creating a broad-based and fully representative government, which would protect the rights of all Afghans" and called for an end to all "outside interference in the internal affairs of Afghanistan," asking states to prohibit their "military personnel from planning and participating in military operations in Afghanistan and mediately to end the supply of arms and ammunition to all parties to the conflict." On September 15 the Security Council "strongly condemned" the murder of the Iranian officials and called for prosecutions of those responsible for those killings and for the attacks on U.N. personnel. On April 6 the Security Council expressed concern at the increasingly ethnic nature of the conflict and called for all outside states to cease their interference. The Security Council also stated that it "support[ed] the steps of the Secretary-General to launch investigations into alleged mass killings of prisoners of war and civilians in Afghanistan." The massacres in Mazar-i Sharif and the killings of the Iranian officials spurred Iran to mount military exercises along its borders. Escalating rhetoric between Iran and the Taliban led U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on October 9 to urge both countries to "exercise maximum restraint." On October 14, U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi traveled to Qandahar to meet with the head of the Taliban, Mullah Muhammad Umar, in an attempt to defuse tensions with Iran and also to press for action against those responsible for the attacks on U.N. personnel in Kabul. Umar agreed to a face-to-face meeting with Iranian leaders. Brahimi also held meetings with officials in Iran before arriving in Afghanistan.

Relevant Human Rights Watch report:

Afghanistan: Massacre at Mazar-i Sharif, 11/98