Communist-era mass grave discovered hightlights need for post-war justice

Some 2,000 bodies are believed to have been dumped in a recently unearthed communist-era mass grave in Afghanistan’s capital Kabul, officials said on Thursday.

The mass grave was unearthed one day earlier close to the communist era’s most notorious prison Poli Charkhi on the eastern outskirts of the capital by the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), said Dr Mohammad Halim Tanwir, director of the international press centre at the Afghan Ministry of Information and Culture (MIC).

MIC officials believe that the massacre took place between 1978 and 1986 when the Moscow-backed communist presidents, Noor Mohammad Tarakai, Hafizullah Amin and Babrak Karmal were in power.

Human skulls with bullet wounds, broken bones, pieces of clothing and shoes were seen in the several metre-long grave.

“More than 50,000 of our innocent people - who were mainly jailed in Poli Charkhi prison, were executed at that time,” Tanwir asserted. “The recovered bodies show that many of them had been shot in the head and then buried.”

Tens of thousands of Afghans and their family members were imprisoned and killed by the security services of the communist regimes during 1978-1992 for their alleged links with the Mujahideen groups who were waging stiff resistance against the Russian invasion and its communist regime in Afghanistan, officials say.

“The soldiers surrounded our house at night and then handcuffed my father and took him in a Russian jeep during the regime of Noor Mohammad Tarakai [the Afghan president from 1978 to 1979],” 38-year old Ehsanullah of Alingar district of Laghman province told IRIN. “He was in Poli Charkhi prison for some time and then disappeared. I am sure he might have been killed by communists,” Ehsanullah claimed.

In January this year, a former Afghan intelligence chief, Assadullah Sarwary was sentenced to death for his alleged involvement in mass killings during the rule of Noor Mohammad Tarakai.

A brutal reminder of years of factional fighting in the Afghan capital

To date several mass graves belonging to the communist era [1978-1992], the period of factional fighting between Mujahideen [1992-1996] and the Taliban [1996-2001] have been discovered in Afghanistan.

In September 2005, local officials found a mass grave in southeastern Paktika province containing some 500 bodies of the communist government’s soldiers, which were allegedly killed by the Mujahideen.

In 2002, months after US forces and several Afghan militia groups toppled the Taliban, the bodies of thousands of Taliban fighters were found in a grave in northern Afghanistan.

Human rights groups blamed the killings on Abdul Rashid Dostum, one of Afghanistan's most feared regional commanders, who is now an advisor to Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

But despite repeated calls from rights groups for the prosecution of those accused of mass killings and severe human rights violations during the nearly three decades of civil war, there is still no accountability, critics say.

Commenting on the recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released on 12 December, calling on Karzai to address war crimes justice, Malalai Joya, a parliamentarian, criticised the president’s current policy saying he was being too soft on the country’s powerful warlords.

“The president needs to be more firm and crucial against the warlords and druglords and should not make compromises with them, because they are still being implicated in various human rights violations in our country,” Joya told IRIN.

“Our people demand justice to all the atrocities whether it is committed by the communists, warlords or the Taliban,” he maintained.

The HRW report said that several high ranking officials of the current Afghan government had been implicated in war crimes during the factional war that killed or displaced hundreds of thousands of Afghans in the early 1990s.

The rights group accused the parliamentarians Abdul Rabb Rasul Sayyaf, Mohammed Qasim Fahim and Burhanuddin Rabbani, Minister of Energy Ismail Khan, Army Chief of Staff Abdul Rashid Dostum, and current Vice President Karim Khalili as major human rights violators.

The report also accused former prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and current Taliban leaders such as Mullah Omar, Mullah Daudullah and Jalaluddin Haqqani for human rights abuses during the late 1990s.

“Karzai and the international community have tried and failed, to establish peace without justice,” said Sam Zarifi, Asia research director at HRW. “Now it’s time to hold the killers accountable.”

Meanwhile, considering the HRW report incorrect, Afghan President Karzai maintains that a number of Jihadi leaders have played a positive role in ensuring peace and stability in the country over the past five years.

SM/DS