FLASH: International Concern about Atrocities

FLASH: Growing International Concern about US-Backed Atrocities

According to an article of 11/28/01 in The Toronto Star, Canada's largest newspaper, "International concern is growing that the United States is turning a blind eye to atrocities being committed by its Northern Alliance allies on the ground in Afghanistan."

The article continues: "Not only has Washington ignored increasing evidence of Northern Alliance brutality, say critics, but the Bush administration has gone so far as to signal its approval for whatever Alliance commanders decide to do with captured Taliban troops....

"`Well, the president's policy is "dead or alive."' Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld joked last week with reporters. `I have my preference.'

"`The implication that a dead enemy is better than a live one will not have been lost on the murderous warlords of the Alliance,' wrote the Times of London. `If they think they can get away with killing their Taliban prisoners, they will do so.'

"That appears to be exactly what has been happening in recent days with increasing reports the Northern Alliance, which has essentially won the war because of the massive American bombing campaign, has been committing war crimes by massacring Taliban prisoners-of-war.

"Eyewitness media reports document, among other incidents, the killing of 100 surrendering Taliban soldiers in Mazar-e-Sharif and the execution of Taliban fighters as they lay wounded in the streets of Kunduz.

"`Surrender must be an option that does not end in certain death,' wrote the Times. `It is clear which side -- if something as diffuse as the Northern Alliance can be called a side -- is winning, but the key to whether this war comes to a swift end or spirals off in endless bloodshed, depends now on the treatment of prisoners.'

"At the Pentagon, Rumsfeld says the U.S. wants nothing to do with prisoners, and that their fate depends on the Northern Alliance. `The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders ... nor to accept prisoners ... If people are trying (to surrender), we are declining,' he told reporters. `That's for the Northern Alliance and that's for the tribes in the south to make their own judgments.'

"At several briefings, Rumsfeld joked about what happened to prisoners.

"`You're not suggesting they would be shot?' a reporter asked Rumsfeld about Washington's no-prisoner policy.

"`Oh my goodness, no. You sound like Charlie ... "summary?" ..."summary?" ... I remember that line,' said a laughing Rumsfeld, referring to another journalist's question about the summary executions of surrendering Pakistanis in the captured city of Mazar-e-Sharif.

"The apparent hands-off approach by the Pentagon goes beyond bin Laden to Taliban troops, who reportedly have been rebuffed in attempts to surrender, or who know that surrendering is not an option with the Northern Alliance.

"`It is shocking that the messages from the Pentagon have been unclear on the basic and simple point' that if fighters surrender, they will not be massacred, Britain's Guardian newspaper said....

"Despite reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross, the U.N., as well as increasing public criticism of the Alliance from the British and Pakistani governments, among others, Rumsfeld said there is no evidence of war crimes."

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On 11/29/01 an even stronger article appeared by Robert Fisk in the London Independent, under the headline, "We are the war criminals now: 'Everything we have believed in since the Second World War goes by the board as we pursue our own exclusive war'"

The same day the Independent published a graphic eyewitness of the massacre in Mazar-i-Sharif, after "a pitched battle with American and British special forces and Afghan soldiers under command of General Abdul Rashid Dostum."

(A San Francisco Chronicle published later the same day confirmed "intense U.S. air strikes," but said nothing about the participation of US and UK Special Forces in the battle.)

However still later on November 29 a BBC story added that "Fresh reports from Mazar-e-Sharif suggest that it was the presence of American agents in the fort that set in motion the bloody chain of events....About a dozen US and British forces are reported to have arrived on the scene to co-ordinate the Northern Alliance's assault as well as US air strikes."

Also on 11/29/01, Amnesty International reiterated its demand for an inquiry into the Mazar-i-Sharif massacre, adding that "the primary responsibility for such an inquiry ... lies with those who had custody of the prisoners and were directly involved in this incident -- the United Front, the United States and the United Kingdom."

On 11/30/01, UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson, speaking to the BBC, said that "an investigation was needed to respond to what she described as the "very disturbing" reports from Mazar," despite the declared opposition to such an inquiry from the Northern Alliance and British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, and the refusal of US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to be drawn into the issue.

In the most detailed account of the carnage to date, witnesses cited by Le Monde, on 12/1/01, have attributed most of the deaths to no less than thirty attacks by US aviation, guided on the ground by US Special Forces.

The issue of an inquiry is obviously complex, and involves other tensions with the Northern Alliance, such as over participation in a coalition government, as well as introducing international peace-keeping forces into the area (a proposal Rumsfeld deems to be currently unnecessary). In particular one must consider the argument of Eric Margolis in the Los Angeles Times that through their clients the Northern Alliance, "The Russians have regained influence over Afghanistan, avenged their defeat by the U.S. in the 1980s war and neatly checkmated the Bush administration, which, for all its high-tech military power, understands little about Afghanistan." See Section VII (oil).

Nevertheless I consider it appropriate for US and world public opinion to support the imposition of international law guidelines by backing an investigation, as well as considering other presures to help stop the massacres. One first step is to share all the information above, and especially to learn if the The Toronto Star is accurate in its reports about the laughing Rumsfeld and his no-prisoner policy.