KABUL, Sept 18: The powerful police chief of Kabul was sacked on Thursday, a week after the United Nations accused him of involvement in a land grab scandal.
President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman Jawed Ludin and interior ministry official Mohammad Daud said Basir Salangi had been dismissed, but declined to give the reason.
“Any decision the government makes has links to other things going on,” Mr Ludin said.
“New appointments and reshuffling are normal in any administration and in any government for the betterment of affairs.”
State television said on Wednesday that Mr Salangi was removed at the urging of the interior ministry.
“These appointments were suggested by the interior ministry and president Karzai approved it,” the report said.
Mr Salangi has been replaced by the director of police operations, General Baba Jan.
The former police chief was criticized by the United Nations last week for “excessive use of force” during evictions earlier this month in Kabul’s Shir Pur district, next to the upmarket Wazir Akbar Khan neighbourhood.
“He played a very active role in this episode of Shir Pur village that prompted significant degrees of criticism both public and private,” UN spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva told reporters.
Dozens of poor families were forcibly removed from Shir Pur and more than 30 homes were bulldozed.
Witnesses and residents said Salangi led the eviction, in which some homes were destroyed while people were still inside. Evicted locals said they were beaten by police during the evictions.
They said authorities gave them no advance notice and offered them no alternative accommodation.
The UN’s special rapporteur on housing rights, Miloon Kothari, urged the government to sack Mr Salangi, telling a press conference last week that he was a “human rights violator”.
Miloon Kothari, concluding a two-week visit to Kabul, also accused Defence Minister Mohammad Qasim Fahim, Education Minister Yunus Qanooni and top military commanders of land-grabbing.
Plots of Shir Pur land, valued at between 70,000 and 170,000 dollars, were given to most of the Afghan cabinet, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission said.
UN special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi on Monday slammed the demolition of homes and forced evictions as “wrong and unacceptable”, and said he had received no credible explanation for the move.
“You don’t destroy houses on the heads of women and kids inside,” he said.
President Karzai has set up an independent commission to probe the forced evictions and destruction of houses.
NATO MISSION: Nato took a preliminary step on Thursday towards extending its Afghanistan peacekeeping mission to areas beyond Kabul, where tribal warlords are undermining both security and development.
Sources said the alliance agreed — after no objections were raised within a set timelimit by any of its member nations — to seek advice from military experts on how to expand the 5,500-strong International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).
“The military authorities are now being asked to give advice,” said one source.
The ISAF has supported the Afghan authority’s efforts to ensure security in Kabul since the United States ousted the Taliban in 2001.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Afghan President Hamid Karzai have long called for ISAF’s reach to be extended. They are now backed by Washington and Berlin, which believe it should also protect so-called Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRTs).
“We’ll be asking the military authorities to look at the security situation, report on how to fill shortfalls in the current force and examine options for extending support for the government’s security efforts beyond Kabul,” one diplomat said.
“In particular we will be looking at how the PRTs should be linked to ISAF.”
A policy brief released this week by the aid agency Care and the New York-based Center on International Cooperation said Afghanistan would be on a “road to hell” unless the outside world provided more reconstruction funds urgently and improved security by deploying peacekeepers around the country.
The PRTs already deployed by the United States and Britain come under the command of Operation Enduring Freedom, a US-led mission of some 11,500 troops, which is still hunting down Taliban and Al Qaeda diehards.
Germany wants to deploy a reconstruction team made up of several hundred civilians and protected by 230 military personnel in the region of Kunduz, but will only do so if it is linked to the UN-mandated ISAF mission. Indeed, it refers to its proposed team as an “ISAF island” rather than a PRT.
NATO took command of the Afghanistan mission last month, deploying troops outside Europe or North America for the first time in its 54-year history.
The European Union’s special envoy to the country, Francesc Vendrell, said this week that “a few thousand” extra Western troops were needed to extend security beyond Kabul and prevent next year’s elections turning into a fiasco.—AFP/Reuters
