US, UK responsible for Qala-i-Jangi massacre: Amnesty
LONDON, Nov 29: The killing of hundreds of Taliban prisoners at the Qala-i-Jangi fort in Afghanistan raises questions on the exact circumstances surrounding the massacre and on the role played by British and US forces in the killings.
Whatever happened the US and Britain bear the brunt of the responsibility as they sent soldiers to coordinate with the Northern Alliance the quashing of the “rebellion”.
According to the British war journalist Robert Fisk, the western soldiers bear a moral responsibility. It means that “British troops are now stained with war crimes”.
And Amnesty International is talking of legal responsibility. It means, the Amnesty emphasizes, “the governments (British and American) cannot hide from saying simply ‘that’s war’”.
Amnesty International has called for an international inquiry, an appeal supported by several British politicians, but which neither Washington nor London has yet answered.
According to the Alliance version, the fighting began on Sunday after the rebellion of hundreds of armed, foreign pro-Taliban fighters — imprisoned in the fort near Mazar-i-Sharif since they gave up Kunduz.
The prisoners either acquired weapons at the fort or hid the weapons they already had, supposedly justifying the quelling of the mutiny by Northern Alliance forces, supported by bombing raids by American bombers.
The Northern Alliance on Wednesday regained control of the fortress, now transformed into a battlefield, following the fighting which left at least 450 prisoners dead.
As it is, this version already poses serious human rights issues, experts here underlined. The clearest is that of proportionality of action stipulated by the 1949 Geneva convention on rights in war time.
“An urgent inquiry should look into what triggered this violent incident, including any shortcomings in the holding and processing of prisoners, and into the proportionality of the response by the United Front, US and UK forces,” said Amnesty.
Article 51 of protocol A bans explicitly all indiscriminate attacks. A 1977 protocol to the Geneva convention makes it illegal to order that there shall be no survivors.
A more complex issue is whether the foreign volunteers should be regarded as prisoners, and therefore treated as such, or as fighters if at least some of them had taken up arms again.
“There are of course a lot of legal questions about the status of the people in the fort,” Amnesty spokesman Kamel Samari said.
But for the London-based human rights lawyer Sadiq Khan, quoted in the Guardian, “there is no doubt that the prisoners’ human rights were violated.”
The legal debate faces another larger question: did the Northern Alliance, the US and Britain not have an interest in the deaths of these pro-Taliban fighters, who no one in the world wanted to see free, but whose trial would have been almost impossible to organize?
“It’s so much neater that they are dead - victims, the official story goes of their own desire for martyrdom,” said Isabel Hilton in her Guardian editorial.
She asks herself if the volunteers “were led into a trap in the fort, then provoked into rebellion once they realized that the promises they had been given were hollow?”—AFP
