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TechnoratiAs Possible Afghan War-Crimes Evidence Removed, US Silent
When the trucks arrived at a prison in the town of Sheberghan, near Dostum's headquarters, they were filled with corpses. Most of the prisoners had suffocated, and others had been killed by bullets that Dostum's militiamen had fired into the metal containers.
![[]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/afghanistan-1212.jpg "afghanistan-1212.jpg")
Dostum's men hauled the bodies into the nearby desert and buried them in mass graves, according to Afghan human rights officials. By some estimates, 2,000 men were buried there.
Earlier this year, bulldozers and backhoes returned to the scene, reportedly exhumed the bones of many of the dead men and removed evidence of the atrocity to sites unknown. In the area where the mass graves once were, there now are gaping pits in the sands of the Dasht-e-Leili desert.
A U.N.-sponsored team of experts first spotted two large excavations on a visit in June, one of them about 100 feet long and more than 9 feet deep in places. A McClatchy reporter visited the site last month and found three additional smaller pits, which apparently had been dug since June.
Faqir Mohammed Jowzjani, a former Dostum ally and the deputy governor of Jowzjan province, where the graves were located, told McClatchy that it's common knowledge that Dostum sent in the bulldozers.
He speculated that Dostum wanted to destroy the evidence because of local political trouble that could have made him more prone to prosecution for the killings.
Last year, Dostum and the then-Jowzjan governor became embroiled in a feud that killed seven people and wounded more than 40. This year, Dostum and his men kidnapped and reportedly beat a rival Afghan leader.
"Maybe General Dostum did it because of a fear of prosecution in the future," Jowzjani said.
Another local Afghan official said that Dostum had begun to worry that the 2001 killings could come back to haunt him. "Everyone in the city (Sheberghan) knows that the evidence has been removed," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of worries about being killed for talking about the subject.
"When the crime happened, (Dostum and his commanders) didn't think they would ever be prosecuted," the official said. "But later they began to worry . . . they have taken all the bones and thrown them into the river" that's about half a mile from the graves.
NATO — which has command authority over a team of troops less than three miles from the grave site — the United Nations and the United States have been silent about the destruction of evidence of Dostum's alleged war crimes.
"The truth is that General Dostum went out with bulldozers and dug up those graves," Jowzjani charged. "I don't know why UNAMA" — the U.N. mission in Afghanistan — "hasn't said anything in this regard . . . maybe because of fears about his power, or maybe they made a deal."
Gen. Ghulam Mujtaba Patang, the commander of Afghanistan's national police in the north, said that he knew that the graves had been emptied. He noted that "the digging was done very professionally" and said that U.N. and NATO-led teams in the area were also aware. (While provincial reconstruction teams are led by individual nations, their military components are under NATO command.)
"I don't understand why they didn't secure the area," Patang said in an interview. Perhaps, he said, Western officials "are nervous" about the power that Dostum has locally and don't want to upset local security by pushing him on the matter.
Dostum was unavailable for comment, and one of his senior aides, Gen. Ghani Karim Zada, declined several interview requests.
The Bush administration, too, has remained silent. U.S. officials claimed that they had no knowledge of the deaths of the prisoners in the convoy until the news media revealed them in 2002, and now the administration has remained silent about Dostum's reported effort to destroy the evidence of them, which also would be a major violation of international law.
American officials say that Dostum's alleged war crimes are a matter for the Afghan authorities. But the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai is weak and depends on American and NATO troops to fight a growing Taliban insurgency that now operates in most of Afghanistan and all but surrounds Kabul, the capital.
However, the fact that U.S. special forces and CIA operatives were working closely with Dostum in late 2001, when the killings took place, has fueled suspicions that the warlord got a free pass.
The U.S. Defense Department has said that it found no evidence of American involvement or presence during the 2001 incident. If there was an investigation, however, its findings have never been made public.
"At the time, we had a handful of special forces and CIA, and there was no way we could have exercised any oversight" of the thousands of detainees under Afghan control, said Joseph Collins, who was then the deputy assistant secretary of defense for stability operations.
When he was asked about the detainees suffocating in metal shipping containers, Collins, who's now a professor at the National War College, said that "I think most people just took for granted what he (Dostum) said: that it was a horrible accident."
McClatchy interviewed eight Pakistani men last year who said that Dostum's gunmen had stuffed them in the containers. The men, mostly low-level Taliban volunteers, said they'd had to climb over dozens of dead bodies to get out of the containers.
"We were all sitting on the dead bodies which were lying on the floor; they were lifeless," said Abdul Haleem, who said that many of the approximately 200 men in his container died. "An arm was sticking up in the air here, a leg was sticking up in the air there."
Another man who said he'd made the trip to Sheberghan in a container full of dead and dying men was Tariq Khan. He said that when Dostum's men shot into the metal box, "some people were shot in the eye; some were shot in the neck."
Dostum offered to take Pierre-Richard Prosper, who was then the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues, on a tour of the grave site in late 2002, but Prosper declined. He was pressing a reluctant Afghan government and the U.N. to take the lead in investigating the killings.
"We felt the Afghans needed to play a role," Prosper said in a telephone interview. "If you're a new government, and you want to move forward, you have to deal with the past."
However, no investigation was likely without strong U.S. backing, and Prosper said that he couldn't recall whether Washington ever gave funding for a probe.
Farid Mutaqi, a senior investigator for the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in the nearby city of Mazar-e-Sharif, said that it was almost impossible to visit the site because of Dostum's power in northern Afghanistan.
Mutaqi said there'd been threats on his life and those of his staff members from Dostum. There are rumors that the site was mined and that Dostum's men would torture or kill people if they were caught researching in the area. At least three Afghans who witnessed the original digging of the mass grave or who investigated it later reportedly were killed, and a handful of others were beaten.
Mutaqi said that he told officials at the United Nations and the local provincial reconstruction team that Dostum's men had disturbed the mass graves this year. They did nothing, he said.
Now, Mutaqi said, "You can see only a hole. In the area around it you can find a few bones or some clothes. The site is gone . . . as for evidence, there is nothing."
A spokesman for the United Nations in Afghanistan, Adrian Edwards, acknowledged in an e-mail statement that the U.N. had known that the graves had been dug up but had kept quiet.
"You're right that we don't always make public statements, but that's because we're in a conflict environment and have to weigh up whether doing so will stall chances of progress against impunity in other areas or put lives at risk," the statement said. "It's a judgment call we constantly strive to get right, and this is not the only instance where the choices we have to make can be extraordinarily tough ones." Edwards noted that the U.N. is awaiting a report about the site by a forensic specialist.
The spokesman for the U.N.'s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Rupert Colville, said that while he didn't know the details of the digging at the site, "there cannot be impunity for war crimes of this nature and scale . . . it's a real shame."
Spokesmen for NATO and the U.S. Embassy in Kabul denied knowing that the remains of hundreds of men had been removed from the site, and had no further comment.
"We have no information about bulldozers or digging at the site," said Lt. Cmdr. James Gater, a spokesman for the NATO mission in Afghanistan. The U.S. general who heads NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, wouldn't do an interview, Gater said.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Mark Stroh said that he'd checked with several officials at the embassy and "nobody seemed to have any visibility on this." Stroh added that "We don't necessarily monitor all of Dostum's behavior."
A McClatchy reporter, traveling without official escort, took GPS readings of the open pits last month, and a forensic investigator with Physicians for Human Rights, a group contracted by the U.N. to examine the site, confirmed that they were in the same area where the grave site was found in early 2002.
In May 2002, the U.N. announced that a Physicians for Human Rights team had dug a test trench in the area and found 15 bodies, three of which had been exhumed and found to have died recently of asphyxiation
In November 2002, amid the Physicians for Human Rights findings and news reports, a top-secret cable from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research said that the number of people killed during transport to Sheberghan "may approach 2,000."
The cable also said that while there was no security at Dasht-e Leili, U.N. personnel from Mazar-e-Sharif were monitoring the grave " 'every few days' for signs of tampering." There'd been plans for a detailed forensic investigation of the site in spring 2003.
"The hope had been to do a full exhumation in 2003," said Nathaniel Raymond, a senior investigator at Physicians for Human Rights. "It didn't happen."
The U.N. monitoring of the site stopped. Edwards, the U.N. spokesman, said that he was still trying to reach officials who'd been present to get an explanation. The U.N., NATO, U.S. forces and the Afghan government never took any formal responsibility for patrolling the grave site.
Physicians for Human Rights made several requests to top U.S. officials to secure the mass graves, including an August 2002 letter to then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld asking that he "reconsider the position of the Defense Department and assure security at the grave site." Four months later, the organization sent a letter to then-Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz saying that it was crucial to provide a small security detachment.
"From the time we discovered the site in January 2002, we had been advocating privately and publicly to the United Nations, the U.S. and the Afghan government to ensure consistent site protection and protection of forensic evidence," Frank Donaghue, the chief executive officer of Physicians for Human Rights, said in a statement to McClatchy. "And clearly that did not happen."
Dostum has long experience with mass graves being used in the Afghan political arena. In 1997, he revealed the discovery of mass graves of Taliban members killed by a former ally turned rival, Gen. Abdul Malik Pahlawan, in the Dasht-e Leili desert. The grave sites, which Dostum's men brought in international journalists to document, helped cement Pahlawan's exile from the area at the time.
Afghanistan's attorney general, its top law enforcement official, said that given the bad security conditions in the country it was hard to think about investigating possible war crimes.
"So for the time being, we have put these issues off for the future," Mohammed Ishaq Aloko said in an interview at his Kabul office.
Aloko, who's seen as being very close to President Karzai, didn't respond directly to repeated questions about Dostum.
"I believe that those who committed crimes against humanity will be prosecuted one day," Aloko said. Just not anytime soon, he said.
30 Comments so far
Show AllThe dead silence of the US and the UN are a sure sign of GUILT.
Having been in INTEL I can guarantee that if an investigative team were to really dig deep into CIA and DoD databases, they'd find buku evidence including photos snapped by the Green Beanies and Spooks assigned in that sector back then. Sin Loi
Maybe Gen. Dostum is just having the bodies shipped to the new George W Bush Presidential Library as trophies?
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
"The U.S. Defense Department has said that it found no evidence of American involvement"
Also, OJ Simpson has said he has found no evidence of his involvment in his wife's murder,
"The only means of strengthening one's intellect is to make up one's mind about nothing, to let the mind be a thoroughfare for all thoughts." - John Keats
I believe the map of Afghanistan has the miles & kilometers reversed (in length)
Yup
http://www.metric-conversions.org/length/kilometers-to-miles.htm
Late for replying to DCBeltway1, now, likely anyway, but I'll post anyway.
I agree with you DCBeltway1, now that you've clarified your position or view, but while I do agree, women continue to be oppressed, subjugated also in North America, the U.S. and Canada, possibly, if not probably, also Mexico. It happens worldwide. And all of these instances are of injustice, male hegemony, etcetera; all must, certainly should anyway, cease. Yes, the Taliban are more severe, but it's rooted in their religious beliefs, and the Christian churches, certainly the RCC anyway, has a very long history of oppressing and subjugating female members of the church(es), while also continuing today in the RCC. It's better than it formerly was, but was still bad through to the middle of the 20th century, if not more recently than that. Not as bad as the Taliban, but both are cases of improper religious doctrine, male-ness, ....
Because of that, my approach with the Taliban would be to simply try to get them to carefully consider the likelihood (certainty imo, but would say likelihood to them) that the religious order or law they apply to women was written by a man who was experiencing cowardice, fear of women being equal, if not superior, in leadership, religiously and/or politically, or socially. After all, the law couldn't be from God, for He (or She, if you prefer) is of real justice, peace, love, and so on; therefore, He couldn't be for the treatment of women as if lesser than men.
YOU ARE WRITING in a U.S. website and whether you realize it or not, you can be contributing to motivating people to support the [totally] criminal war on the Taliban [and] Afghanistan, really all Afghanis, certainly all innocent ones anyway.
As for the Taliban you claim to have been from Pakistan being killed, the 100, and more, what kind of damn excuse is that? Borders are strictly political, and what do you do to ensure that the Chicanos of Mexico have their natural, native rights returned such that they are not considered and treated as if foreigners in the southwest U.S. and all the way up to around Utah, which was all their natural or native territory before Euros invaded, launched wars of totally criminal aggression and murderous genocide, etcetera?!
Borders are only political; they do NOT exist naturally. And to murder is to murder and is to always be condemned. Also, as a Christian, we can't support revenge, so could not support your group of Afghans murdering taliban who are from Pakistan out of revenge or for any other reason. To fight to [defend] is one thing, but to kill for any other reasons, as well as when not really necessary for defence, this is not killing; it is murder.
Your feuding with the Taliban, of whom I've read some or many are originally from politically referred to Pakistani territory, while others, perhaps also many, were originally from Afghanistan, it should not be promoted discussion topic today when the U.S. and whatever it truly has for coalition allies in this war, well, when they are committing totally criminal and condemnable war there. Another way of saying this is, work first to stop this criminal war, and all criminal U.S. wars of empire on many countries and peoples, and once you've succeeded in achieving this, then work on getting the Taliban to cease oppressing women; after which you might work on getting Christian churches, the RCC anyway, to also cease treating women as less than men.
You defend the Uzbeks in Afghanistan, but condemn the Taliban because you infer that they're all from Pakistan; yet the Uzebek afghans are from not Afghanistan, but Uzbekistan. Odd.
Anyway, our borders are political matters, and a lot of people like to come to the most rogue govt country in the world, the greatest war criminal govt, predator, and so on, and try to use your complaints to pump up our govt's war machine all over again. Weak!
Where do they people have any place in their minds and hearts for the extreme, perhaps most extreme in human history, genocide against the indigenous populations of North America, the U.S. and Canada, but the same having happened throughout all of the Americas. From what experts say was an original 100 million or so indigenous, only around 250,000 remained, and those living today continue to have [genocide] committed against them.
Interesting how people can be [subjective].
MikeCorbeil: "Yet the Uzebek afghans are from not Afghanistan, but Uzbekistan."
Like many developing nations, Afghanistan's borders were drawn encompassing multiple minority ethnic groups. Borders were not drawn by the colonial powers such as Britian in a fair and even way to give one uniethnic group a state. The divide and conquer rule was why many ethnic groups got pushed into one state with very odd borders--easier to rule for the colonialists if the natives are all fighting each other and not the colonial powers. The Uzbek Afghans and Tajik Afghans identify themselves as 100% Afghan and they've been that way for generations.
"DCBeltway1 December 12th, 2008 11:24 pm
Dostum is a scumbag amongst many war lords. He is a survivor though and he is not one to mess with. The one thing I do agree with you on if the Taliban takeover of the country again would be horrible on a human rights level and this needs to be prevented.
Why the heck there isn't an article on the Taliban genocide of the Hazara Afghan minority on here I don't know. Where is thier justice???"
NO, the question instead is where is your justice? The Hazara evidently are not who you think they are.
"No surprise at rumours of new atrocities by our 'foot-soldiers'
by Robert Fisk
The Independent (London) 13 November , 2001 "
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/FIS111A.html
QUOTE:
The Northern Alliance's sudden victories in Afghan-istan may be good news for the West but the bad news is not far behind. The Uzbek, Tadjik and Hazara gunmen who make up this rag-tag army have a bloody reputation for torturing and executing prisoners which - if resumed in the coming days - will plunge America and Britain into a moral abyss.
Chilling stories of more than 100 pro-Taliban Pakistani fighters shot dead after their surrender in Mazar-i-Sharif - and of Alliance gunmen "roaming the streets" of the abandoned city - will not come as a surprise to those who are aware of the atrocities committed by America's new allies during the 1992-96 fighting in Kabul. For the Americans - and for the minuscule British component of the West's military forces inside Afghanistan - the behaviour of the Northern Alliance presents a grave problem. As our "foot-soldiers" are in Afghanistan, we cannot disclaim responsibility for human rights abuses by the Alliance's gunmen; yet neither the Americans nor the British appear to have tried to control the army they are now helping. Indeed, it seems they may not even be able to prevent the Alliance from entering Kabul.
The massacres committed by malicious fighting in the name of outside powers have regularly brought shame upon their more powerful allies. The Contras in Nicaragua and the Phalangist militiamen in Lebanon contaminated their respective American and Israeli masters - the latter in the notorious Palestinian camp massacres of Sabra and Chatila in 1982. A glance at the Alliance's track record of rape, pillage and street executions in Kabul between 1992 and 1996 suggests that the so-called Allies - America, Britain and just about anyone else who wants to join in - have good reason to exert their influence over the newly victorious militiamen from the north of Afghanistan.
In Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat there are comparatively few Pashtun communities, which traditionally favour the Taliban.
A bit further south the Alliance will find itself among its ethnic enemies. In 1997, Mazar's Hazara defenders killed more than 600 Taliban militiamen who had taken over the city and then massacred dozens of Pakistani students who had accompanied the Taliban into the region. In later bloodbaths, thousands of Taliban prisoners were shot into mass graves, with dozens more Pakistanis. A Northern Alliance turncoat, General Pahlawan Malik, subsequently executed 2,000 Taliban prisoners of war who had been tortured and starved before being put to death.
Many were drowned in wells. Others met a more carefully planned death. One of General Malik's generals recalled: "At night when it was quiet and dark we took about 150 Taliban prisoners, blindfolded them, tied their hands behind their backs and drove them in truck containers out to the desert. We lined them up 10 at a time, in front of holes in the ground, and opened fire. It took about six nights."
On other occasions Taliban prisoners were locked inside containers in mid -summer; 1,250 were deliberately asphyxiated in this way, their corpses dragged from the containers, blackened by the heat.
Could it happen again? There is no reason to believe the Alliance has been taking lessons in human rights. It has been receiving ammunition from Russia and logistics from the United States. Photographs in yesterday's Pakistani papers showed Alliance gunmen leading a small party of Western troops through the terrain of northern Afghan-istan. But our soldiers are highly unlikely to have been distributing copies of the Geneva Convention to their new friends.
Copyright The Independent, 2001. For fair use only.
END QUOTE
Another good article is the next one.
"The 'good war' is a bad war", by John Pilger, Jan 9 2008
http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=470
He interviews an Afghan woman who describes oppression by Taliban, but also describes the No. Alliance drug and war lords are far worse in terms of public safety for Afghan women.
I agree the druglords/war lords are equally bad. My husband, an Afghan minority survived the Afghan civil war when the war lords destroyed most of Kabul. They are horrible people. The majority of the Hazara, Tajiks, and Uzbeks do not support these people...they suffered under them. The minorities also suffered horribly under the Pakistani backed Taliban. Afghans should not suffer under either the Taliban or War Lords. They are equally problematic.
According to your article: "Chilling stories of more than 100 pro-Taliban Pakistani fighters shot dead after their surrender in Mazar-i-Sharif"
These are Pakistani invaders to Afghanistan. Afghans are hardley going to shower them with flower when their goal is the takeover of Afghanistan and suprression of minorities. These groups suffered horribly under the Taliban. The Taliban showed them no compassion. They are simply returning the favor.
Hazara Perspective:
http://www.hazara.net/taliban/taliban.html
Afghan women airline stewardess before the Taliban. Let's not forget the Taliban banned women from working, going outside the home without a male escort, banned them from being educated, and forced them to wear burqas.
http://www.afghan-web.com/gallery/
Click on Ariana Airlines (photo)
Unless Obama announces the end of the occupation in Iraq, withdrawal of US forces in the middle east and closing of Guantanamo on his Inaugural Day, he will be guilty on January 21 of the same war crimes that Bush is guilty of.
General Dostum is not, by any means, the worst leader in Afghanistan. He is basically just a political survivor. He managed to survive Washington's onslaught in the 1980s when he organized and led resistance against the CIA funded/organized mujaheddin. We should never forget that Ronald Reagan's mujaheddin included Osama bin Laden and other notorious scumbags. In 1992, Dostum began to make a number of temporary alliances to stay alive in the 1990s. He then became involved in the Northern Alliance, resisting the Taliban regime, which is how he ultimately became part of the current Kabul government.
Anyway, while I believe that NATO needs to get out of Afghanistan, it would not be good if the Taliban take over the entire country either. Afghanistan needs someone who can develop the country and not let it rot in medieval backwardness. Karzai is clearly incapable of doing that.
Dostum is a scumbag amongst many war lords. He is a survivor though and he is not one to mess with. The one thing I do agree with you on if the Taliban takeover of the country again would be horrible on a human rights level and this needs to be prevented.
Why the heck there isn't an article on the Taliban genocide of the Hazara Afghan minority on here I don't know. Where is thier justice??? Where is the world's sympathy for their plight 7 years on ??? The people of Bamiyan who were masacred by the Taliban have my sympathy. The Afghan people and the world miss the Bamiyan Buddhas. Where's the continued outcry over the girls who has acid thrown in their faces by the Taliban in Kandahar because they wanted to attend school? Where's the outcry over the bus the Taliban recently blew up on the Afghan border? This bus was full of Afghan civilians they all died. Where's the outcry over ISI Pakistan's continued support of the Taliban???
While I agree these Taliban needed to be brought to justice, rule of law hardley exists in Afghanistan these days and the old mantra an eye for an eye still seems to dominate there. Its easy to sit in the "West" in my archair and preach lofty ideals. But if I was an Afghan minority and I had to live under these Taliban freaks I'd probably react the same way.
Why the heck there isn't an article on the Taliban genocide of the Hazara Afghan minority on here I don't know. Where is thier justice???
Simple, because it doesn't fit ideology.
I think you've hit the nail on the head here Thomas More. Why people are calling for human rights for a group of thugs who were the worst human rights violators on the planet really boggles my mind.
Human rights are not something one removes based upon how "bad" one group judges the other to be.
Even The Nazis had rights. Would people have preferred Germans just be rounded up en-masse and shot then buried in mass graves?
In defense of the mass murder of Germans would the same arguments be used? "Look what they did to the Jews, the Poles...The Gypsies..what about THEIR rights" ?
When one group of people use this type of argument to support or exonerate mass murder, then there no difference between you and them.
There are a good many Taliban who believe Americans are thugs I am sure...and murderers...using this rather inane logic "Americans" should have no rights and none should be concerned about them.
This is why it important the concept of Human rights remains inviolate and inseperable from the person.
Even "bad people".
PK
GWNorth I agree with you but again this is our western concept of human rights. That worked in post WWII because these systems and ideals were agreed upon in the European context. Afghanistan has no rule of law let alone human rights let alone democracy let alone freedom. People with no concept of the above are not going to react with these ideals in mind. This is my entire point. There is no judicial system in place in Afghanistan to send the Taliban to court let along to bring the corrupt war lords in Afghanistans government to justice. Corruption in Afghanistan is at its highest level in 7 years. Unfortunatly Afghans will react with their own concepts of justice when faced with the unslaught of the Taliban and its not going to be our western human rights ideals, they'll react with their own self-preservation and survivial in mind. It doesn't make their reactions right or just especially in light of our human rights but its how they are going to react given their own circumstances. The Taliban sought to destroy the Afghans as a people not only slaughtering minorities especially the shia but marginalizing their women, outlawing traditional Afghan music, dance and thier culture, destroying their history such as the Bamiyan Buddhas etc. Afghans are going to fight back for their survival. The Jews in the Nazi Ghettos had their uprising and they had every right to shoot back at those Nazi bastards. I applaud their bravery. Afghans will do the same against their oppressors and its thier right to preserve themselves. Its called self-defense.
>>Afghans will do the same against their oppressors and its thier right to preserve themselves. Its called self-defense.
No it is not.
Fighting back as the Taliban try and kill you is self defense.
Putting the taliban into cattle cars and executing them over a ditch is NOT self defense.
The Jews fighting the Germans were defending themselves. Had they captured hundreds of Germans who had surrendered to them then executed them it is no longer self defense.
This is not a matter of LIKING the Taliban or what they stood for. It recognizing that to be MORE then the Taliban and to show we can grow beyond that mindset, we must not act like them.
Now you point out that the Afghani's look at things very differently. So be it...I suggest this part of the reason those countries have not progressed in the past 400 years.
Women will never have rights there as long as that primitive, tribal, eye for an eye mindset prevails. In order for a people to see women as their full equals in every way, we have to accept that "Pushtuns, Kazars, Germans, Jews, Palestinians " are all equals as well .
Your last sentence makes no sense whatsoever. The Taliban are against women's rights plenty of Afghan men support the rights of thier women despite the media's stereotype. Secondly you sound like an anti-semite when you use the word kazar.
Kazars are not semites. They are a people that live in Asia of Turkish descent.
The Hazara are considered an offshoot of the Khazars.
Your attempt to link my mentioning Khazars to anti-semitism is rather lame and means I simply can not take any of your commentary seriously anymore.
You DID read what I wrote are were you just waiting to find any excuse to toss that old canard around?
PK
They are neither atrocities or mass graves when committed by the United States or her allies.
Its only an atrocity when Commies or "Muslim Militants" do it.
Too true . . . sadly.
Geneva Convention human rights atrocities have been committed with the cooperation of America in Guatemala since the Reagan years. The killers are typically trained at Fort Benning in Georgia, at the "School of the Americas". Of course the El Salvador death squad killings fall into the same category.
W. Bush and staff have spoken openly of applying the "Salvador Option", which apparently means hiring half a country to murder the other half. In Iraq, over three million civilians have fled the country because American money, guns and training has been poured into violating the Geneva Convention.
Bush's name, the names of most of his staffers, and the names of many of his supporters, are spoken of in bitterness.
Harvey,
Any human being has to have lots of money & no a need of a career to bring attention to this or any of the other atrocities ---
Americans are accustomed to a complete non interest in the deaths of NON AMERICANS especially where a "war" is involved !!!!
There is a documentary called "Afghan Massacre; Convoy of Death" which I saw a few years ago. They had footage of the trucks being loaded, the shot up trucks and the mass graves. I believe it was a British reporter, and I was wondering when this story would reappear, because the film presents a pretty complete picture, including Dostum, and the US soldiers watching the trucks get loaded.
Here is a link to it USA and England supervised authorised gave oversight
Afghan Massacre - The Convoy of Death http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article20740.htm
Sophie Scholl-The Final Days
This is a powerful documentary, yet only viewed by a relative handful of people in the U. S. It's posted on U-Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vbmCRImZR4
In the above article, U. S. special forces and the CIA are portrayed as playing only a minor role in the atrocities; the documentary offers evidence to suggest they played an instrumental role, likely directing the massacre.
I've only read about half of the article, so far, but not seeing reference to what's stated in my post on this topic in a page for an article of Dec. 11th, I'll post the link to it here.
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2008/12/11-7#comment-1091153
What's stated in that post may be the reason why the U.S., the Bush administration, NATO and the UN, or whichever of the latter two is also silent anyway, are being silent on the subject of the above article. I suspect it's minimally part of the reason, even if not the whole. And, in my above post, the McClatchy article referred to is the one Humbaba had provided a link for in the same page, and based on the excerpt he provided from it the piece seems very much like the above article by McClatchy, today. Otoh, that article, of today at CD, isn't of today at McClatchy, but of Dec. 11th; just having checked the original copy (of the above article).
Anyway, I'll repeat one thing from that above post of mine and it's that what's said in it was reported by a number of news media, internationally anyway; having been reported several years ago and perhaps starting in 2002. It was close to that early on in the war on Afghanistan, if not quite 2002. Pretty sure it was that though.
If the hunch is right, then the Bush administration may very much be trying to keep attention to the criminal role played by the U.S. forces in the killing of thousands of Taliban in the truck trailer boxes or containers away, silenced, ignored, ...; and Bush was and still is C-in-C of the military, U.S. But maybe they also don't want to lose their ally, Gen. Dostum. Could be for both reasons, or for either one, both seeming probably of certain interest to the Bush administration or more.
"I believe that those who committed crimes against humanity will be prosecuted one day," Aloko said. Just not anytime soon, he said.
Like after Bush is gone and then well see.