Two days of official mourning for martyrs of the first 20 months of communist rule are over. The Council of Ministers has also decided to build a minaret and a mosque in remembrance in Pol-e-Charkhi.
Two days of official mourning for martyrs of the first 20 months of communist rule are over. The Council of Ministers has also decided to build a minaret and a mosque in remembrance in Pol-e-Charkhi. Will there be justice for tens of thousands of other victims of nearly three decades of repression and conflict?On Sep 30 and Oct 1 fatehas were held by families and flags flew at half-mast on all government buildings and the president’s office. The nation paid homage to 4,785 people – students, professionals, workers and government officials – whose names appear on a list of Afghans detained and killed by the state that was released by the Dutch prosecutor’s office on Sep 17.
The names are from especially brutal purges ordered by the post-coup d’etat governments of Nur Mohammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin. Both Taraki and Amin were to become victims of the mindless bloodletting. The former was killed by his protégé Amin in September 1979, and the latter in December the same year during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
The government’s decision to honour the martyrs has sparked demands for justice for all people reported missing and murdered by intelligence agents, military and warlords since 1978. Demands that the guilty should be punished were raised by the relatives of victims and others at every event held to mark the martyrdom of those on the Dutch list. Human rights activists want the immediate publication of a report prepared by the Independent Afghanistan Human Rights Commission (IAHRC) called the Mapping Report.
Condoling not convicting
The government has chosen to deal with the deaths in 1978-79 through the offer of prayers in memory of the martyrs.
Activists believe the decision of the Council of Ministers may have been in response to a call from AIHRC chairperson Dr Sima Samar to “condole” the deaths. The AIHRC republished the Dutch list. Samar said the nearly 5,000 people were not “too few”. Among them were “lecturers at university and apprentices in shops. They were brutally killed, and their families have been waiting for (news of) them,” she said at a press conference.
Civil society activists wonder how come AIHRC under Samar has been sitting on the 1000-page Conflict Mapping Report, which has documented in detail torture, custodial deaths and war crimes by successive regimes from 1978 to December 2001 and the transition of power to Hamid Karzai. Work on the report began in 2005.
Khushal Jawad, a civil society activist in Nangarhar, insists the AIHRC has enough evidence to be able to prosecute war criminals – some of whom have remained in positions of power in the government – but has chosen not to rock the boat.
“There have been 1.5 million deaths of innocents but their murderers are free. They should be convicted,” he says.
Jawad lashed out at Samar. The commission has chosen expediency over pursuing its goal. “You saw how Dr Samar just complained to the president (at the press conference) for not condoling the deaths (after the publication of the Dutch list) and not for convicting the criminals,” he adds.
On the backburner
Some Afghan lawmakers have asked AIHRC to publish the Mapping Report before next year’s presidential and provincial elections so “nomination of war criminals can be prevented”.
Shukria Barakzai, Member of Parliament (MP) from Kabul, says the publication of Mapping Report would have a positive outcome on the elections. “Justice has been a victim of expediency,” she observes. “The human rights report has been compiled. Why is it not published?” she asks.
Barakzai says there are two groups of “criminals”: the “green” (mujahedin) and the “red” (communists) who fought against each other now sit next to each other.
Presidential spokesperson Emal Faizi says the publication of the Mapping Report is not the job of the government. “There is a human rights commission (AIHRC). It can disseminate any type of report or document that is the result of its research when it sees it as necessary. The president has never prevented publication of any report,” he says.
Meanwhile, AIHRC has off the record said delay in the publication of the detailed war crimes report was only because the government has not been able to guarantee safety of its staff.
In June this year after a 16-month delay the president filled up vacancies in the AIHRC, and the appointments were immediately declared partisan and compromising the publication of the Mapping Report. (See, ‘War crimes report may be too hot to handle, Killid 572.)
Abdul Satar Saadat, head of the Afghanistan Lawyers Network then told Killid, “We are concerned about the presence in the human rights commission of people involved in the civil war which is a black part of Afghanistan’s history. The Transitional Justice Process was prepared during Sima Samar’s first term, and then she was the one that postponed it. The selected people are related either to Ittihad-e-Islami led by Abdul Rasul Sayyaf or Jamiat-e-Islami (a party led by Rabbani the former president).”
The Mapping Report has been on the backburner ever since the Karzai government refused to renew the terms of three commissioners – Nader Naderi, Fahim Hakim, and Mawlawi Gharib – whose five-year terms ended on Dec 16, 2011. Naderi and Hakim were part of the Mapping Report project.
