KABUL: The United Nations has decided not to investigate two mass graves containing hundreds of war victims in Northern Afghanistan unless foreign soldiers protect the operation.
The UN demand for security comes from the ongoing violence in Afghanistan’s lawless north where fighting between rival militias has claimed more than 20 lives in the last two weeks. It also underscores the United Nations’ fear of what could happen in a country that has seen many atrocities over 23 years of warfare.
The recommendation that the graves be unearthed only under the protection of international troops was made in a feasibility study written by William Haglund, a noted forensic anthropologist, who will likely direct the investigation, a UN official in Kabul told the Los Angeles Times. The United Nations has accepted his recommendation.
Until the study was completed, the UN expected promises of protection from local authorities would permit the digging to start, possibly this month. But the volatile political scene and warnings from warlords that they “could not commit to 100 percent security” led the United Nations to insist on outside protection, the official said.
One of the sites to be unearthed is in Dasht-i-Leili near Sheberghan where hundreds of Taliban prisoners are believed to have been buried after they were suffocated in metal truck containers in December 2001. They died while being transferred to prison from the northeastern city of Kunduz after the overthrow of the fundamentalist regime.
Human rights groups have accused warlords in the victorious Northern Alliance of permitting the deaths and secretly burying the bodies. US human rights groups clamoured for an investigation last year because US soldiers reportedly were seen accompanying warlord Rashid Dostum’s troops during the prisoner transfer.
The exact number of victims may never be known because there was no count of those loaded onto the trucks nor of prisoners who made it to the prison. Dostum and a rival warlord issued a statement in August admitting that more than 200 prisoners died in the airless containers but blamed the deaths on wounds and illnesses before capture.
Others say the number of victims could be several times that amount. An estimated 2,000 to 4,000 Taliban were taken prisoner at the end of the fighting, and some observers say no more than about 1,200 were imprisoned. Preliminary work by Haglund at the Dasht-i- Leili site in December indicated a “large number” of bodies.
President Hamid Karzai last summer denounced the deaths as “atrocities” and said he supports the UN probe. The lead agency will be the Afghan Independent Human Richts Commission, which the UN will train in forensics. The plan is for Afghans to later use those skills to investigate hundreds of mass graves that human rights officials say exist here.
In a concession to the warlords, who are now officials of the Karzai government, the United Nations also plans to investigate a mass grave in Jaghalkani-i-Takhta Pul near Mazar-e-Sharif thought to contain hundreds of victims massacred by the Taliban after the Islamic radicals took the city in 1998.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times
