Pashtun persecution leads to calls for better security

A minister in the Afghan interim government has backed a Human Rights Watch (HRW) recommendation to send peacekeepers to northern Afghanistan to ensure the safety of ethnic Pashtuns. "Only this will ensure security and stop violence from spreading," Amanullah Zadran, the interim minister for border affairs, told IRIN on Monday from the capital, Kabul. Zadran, whose ministry is responsible for maintaining harmony among Afghanistan's multiple ethnic groups and tribes, added that the government had swiftly reacted to such incidents by consulting General Rashid Dostum, the deputy defence minister, and other political and military leaders in the north. In a press statement on Sunday, HRW said armed political factions of Hazara, Uzbek and Tajik ethnicities in northern Afghanistan were subjecting ethnic Pashtuns to murder, beatings, sexual violence and intimidation, forcing them to abandon villages to seek asylum and refuge elsewhere. The statement added that the Uzbek Junbish Milli Islami (Renaissance of the Islamic Nation), the Tajik Jamiat-e Islami (Islamic Association) and the Hazara Hizbi Wahdat (Unity Party) military factions controlling northern Afghanistan, had targeted the Pashtun community in areas under their control. This was "partly in reprisal for these communities' real or perceived association with the predominantly Pashtun Taliban movement", the statement said. Commenting on the issue, an aid worker, who asked not to be named, told IRIN that there were layers of problems resulting in human rights violations, and the determinant factor was not ethnicity alone. "Settling of old scores, land disputes and getting property back also incites violence," she maintained. Earlier, aid workers had reported the arrival of about 20,000 mainly ethnic Pashtun Afghan refugees at the Chaman border crossing in south-central Pakistan last month, fleeing harassment in the north. Pashtuns are the overall-majority ethnic group in Afghanistan, but they are a minority in the north. However, Zadran added that they had not received any fresh reports of violence over the past two weeks. "Now we are moving towards democracy, this is a golden chance for Afghans to rebuild their country," he said. He admitted that the central government in Kabul was too frail to stop such incidents. "We can only request people and hold negotiations with them, but we cannot enforce our will in the far-flung areas," Zadran said. "I am sure the international community is sincere in their effort to rebuild our country. They should extend peacekeepers to other troubled areas besides the capital." Meanwhile, Muhammad Zahir Sarmalim, a former Afghan diplomat who had just returned from Kabul, told IRIN in Islamabad that he had met a delegation of Ahmadzai Pashtun tribal elders from the northern provinces of Baghlan and Samangan in Kabul. These elders were seeking the interim administration's help to stop reprisal acts of violence. "It's wrong to assume that all Pashtuns are Taliban - the atrocities in the north are committed against ordinary people," he said. Sarmalim added that the violence was not limited to the north. "In a recent incident in the Qarabagh district of the central Ghazni Province, ethnic Hazara fighters killed one person, injured three and abducted another one - all Pashtuns."