LAHORE, Oct 17: The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has expressed grave concern at the situation in Afghanistan and its fallout in Pakistan.

In a statement issued here on Wednesday, it stated: “While the logic underlying the US action against those it believes to be responsible for the terrorist attacks of Sept 11 and against the regime that defies the UN can be recognized, the conduct of this operation and its consequences raise issues of moral propriety and humanitarian concerns that cannot be ignored.”

It said HRCP “joins the human rights organizations, both national and international, that have pleaded for sparing the lives of civilians, and calls for resisting attempts to extend the scope of collateral damage to include extinction of innocent life”.

“In any case the use of warheads and explosive devices that destroy or harm innocent populations around military targets must be avoided. The utmost care needs to be taken to abstain from what is unacceptable from humanitarian point of view. HRCP also adds its voice to the call of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to facilitate supply of relief goods to the Afghan people and ensure their access to them without fear of getting killed. The whole world has a duty to protect the 100,000 or so Afghan children who face a cruel death by starvation and disease.”

The HRCP statement noted with dismay that in the rhetoric about the post-war Afghanistan due attention was not being paid to its women’s right to be protected against the outrages that they had to suffer over many years under successive waves of Kabul’s conquerors. “The objective of allowing the Afghan people to reconstruct their state and society must include, in the wider context of a rule based on respect for human rights, the ideal of establishing the rights of the Afghan woman and the dignity of her person.”

It went on to say: “HRCP is committed to peace but it must be a peace that does not legitimise a status quo based on denial of justice and the people’s democratic, civil, political, social and economic rights. There can be no peace without accommodating the interests of the federal units and various ethnic communities, nor if reason is devalued and abuse of religious sentiments allowed. The dangers in limiting one’s choice to the options being offered by the establishment and the violent conservatives can only be avoided by upholding the rights to democratic rule, justice, peace, and human rights as an indivisible set of interdependent values Pakistan cannot afford to deviate from. Certainly not at the present moment of reckoning when the truth has to be faced squarely, in its wholeness and in its entire majesty.”