KABUL, Feb 9: Around 270 Taliban prisoners were released in a ceremony at the presidential palace on Saturday night under the watch of interim leader Hamid Karzai.
The ragged prisoners from all over Afghanistan were delivered by bus to the palace grounds and then allowed to walk free.
Wrapped in blankets against the bitter cold, some of the prisoners smiled as they filed past Karzai, appointed in December to lead a six-month interim administration. While the US military hunts down Taliban leaders and foreign soldiers of the Al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, thousands of rank and file Afghan Taliban conscripts have already been released.
“We decided some time back we should release everybody who did not have a bad record, who were not terrorists but just ordinary people,” Karzai said.
“I asked them if they wanted to be soldiers and they said no. I asked them if they wanted to work in the fields and they said yes. It was fun,” he said.
The prisoners would be given accommodation for the night and would then leave for their homes on Sunday morning with an allowance of 500,000 afghanis (around $17), officials said.
MOUNTING CRITICISM: The US on Saturday held its most senior Taliban official to date in its five-month-old war on terror, but faced growing international criticism of its widening campaign.
As Karzai released the prisoners, there was growing international disquiet about the US treatment of its own captured Al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners.
AT ODDS WITH ICRC: In Geneva the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said it and Washington were at odds over Washington’s decision not to recognise captured Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters as prisoners of war.
“There are divergent views between the US and the ICRC on the procedures which apply on how to determine that the persons detained are not entitled to prisoner of war status,” the ICRC said in a statement. “The US and the ICRC will pursue their dialogue on this issue.”
US President George W. Bush decided Thursday that the 1949 Geneva Conventions would apply to captured Taliban fighters taken from Afghanistan to a US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but not to Al-Qaeda members there. However, Washington said that neither group would be accorded prisoner of war status. New arrivals at the detention centre in Cuba on Thursday brought the number of people being held there to 186. Another 269 prisoners are being detained by the US military in Afghanistan.
CONCERN OVER EXPANSION: Concern also continued to flow over signs that the US was expanding its war on terror to other countries.
While taking care to avoid directly criticizing Bush’s recent statements describing certain countries as an “axis of evil,” UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said it was unrealistic to see the world in terms of good and evil states.
In an interview published by the Swiss daily newspaper Blick on Saturday, Annan was asked about Bush’s statement describing Iran, Iraq and North Korea as part of an “axis of evil.”
Annan said, without specifically mentioning the US: “You cannot divide the world between the good and the evil, because between them there are shades of grey.”
The secretary-general, whose remarks were published in German, also said that the United Nations had a shared basis for the fight against terrorism and that no decision had been taken to extend the international fight against terrorism to any country other than Afghanistan.
EU commissioner Chris Patten, also speaking in a newspaper interview, accused Bush’s administration of a dangerously “absolutist and simplistic” stance.
“It was time European governments spoke up and stopped Washington before it went into “unilateralist overdrive”, he told the British newspaper The Guardian. Britain has been the chief ally of the United States in its “war on terrorism”, but has been cautious in endorsing the “axis of evil” tag applied to Iraq, Iran and North Korea.
CIA MISSILE STRIKE: About 50 US soldiers searched the remote mountain district of Zawar Kili in eastern Afghanistan on Saturday after a CIA missile strike hit a group of suspected senior al-Qaeda members, apparently including a tall man who was being treated with great deference by those around him. A US official refused to say whether the man may have been Osama bin Laden.
Kabul, meanwhile prepared to welcome home former king Mohammed Zahir Shah, who was overthrown in a 1973 coup, but is seen as seen as a uniting symbol in a country rife with factional and ethnic fighting.
The 87-year-old, who has lived in exile in Rome for 29 years, will return late next month and intends to stay in Afghanistan for the rest of his days, his personal physician said.
Ahead of the former king’s return, Karzai continues to wrestle with security problems as rival warlords try to fill power vacuums left by the fall of the Taliban. On Saturday he met representatives of two warlords who clashed violently last week over who should be governor in eastern Paktia province.
“This is a very serious matter and Karzai wanted himself to be involved in finding a solution,” Deputy Border Affairs Minister Mirza Ali told AFP.
Fifty people were killed in a two-day battle when Karzai’s appointed governor, Padsha Khan, sent his forces to secure the governor’s house in the provincial capital Gardez.
They were driven out by rival warlord Saif Ullah, who has refused to give up power.
Karzai has blamed Khan for the fighting and said it was “one more reason why we should finish warlordism in this country.”
The clash has called into question Karzai’s ability to govern beyond the Kabul area and underpinned his appeal for the deployment of more international troops in his country.
TO GUANTANAMO BAY: Meanwhile, the former foreign minister for Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban regime will be transferred to the US military base on Guantanamo Bay, the Iranian news-network Khabar reported Saturday from Kabul.
However, Afghanistan’s new rulers branded the highest-ranking Taliban official yet to fall into US hands a war criminal who should be put on trial.
A Pentagon spokesman said Friday the former foreign minister had turned himself in voluntarily to the US military in Kandahar.
KARZAI FOR UAE: Interim leader Hamid Karzai will pay a one-day visit to the United Arab Emirates on Sunday, Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah said.
Karzai will visit Abu Dhabi, an important trading partner for Afghanistan, where many exiled Afghans have set up import-export businesses.—Agencies
KABUL, Feb 9: Around 270 Taliban prisoners were released in a ceremony at the presidential palace on Saturday night under the watch of interim leader Hamid Karzai.
