Progress on human rights but concerns remain

On the eve of the universal day of human rights there are still major human rights violations in Afghanistan, but some improvements have been made in the post-conflict country. Abdul Sabour Babai was celebrating his freedom two weeks after he was released from a private jail in the northwestern Faryab province. The 35-year-old returnee was arrested and tortured by a local commander when he tried to get back his confiscated land in Pashtun Kut district on the outskirts of Maimana, the provincial capital of Faryab. Sabour returned from the western city of Herat where he spent three years as an IDP [internally displaced person]. The father of five left Pashtun Kut following the increasing number of violations by local commanders after the hardline Taleban was ousted late 2001. However, when he came back he found out that the rule of the gun was still in place in his isolated, mountainous home town. “We were told that all the commanders had been disarmed but that was not true,” Sabour told IRIN. “I had all the documents and when I insisted on getting my own land back, the commander put me in his private jail and after three weeks of detention the local elders helped me to run away,” he said. Sabour said local police could not do anything to stop the commanders from harassing and intimidating civilians. As Kabul marks the International Human Rights Day on Friday, rights activists at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) said the top human rights concerns in the country, still reeling from decades of conflict, were; land grabbing from farmers by local commanders; arbitrary killing and torture; and the general state of impunity. Moreover, violence against women continued unabated. But despite existing challenges, AIHRC believes there has been some improvement in the state of human rights in the country this year. “There have been some encouraging sings of improvement in the human rights situation in Afghanistan this year, however, the situation on a number of issues remains concerning,” Nader Nadery, a commissioner of AIHRC, told IRIN on Thursday in the capital, Kabul. According to Nadery, in the first six months of 2004 land grabbing accounted for 31 percent of all violations that AIHRC had investigated, while currently that figure has dropped to 18 percent. Some improvement has also been observed regarding the issues of torture, forced migration and forced marriages. “But at the same time there are some concerning points like arbitrary arrests,” he maintained, adding that they increased from 16 percent of all investigated violations in the first six months of the year to 44 percent in the second half. There was also a further breakdown in law and order and a rise in kidnappings, he noted. "The level of violence is still very high. Over the past six months we registered more than 2,000 violations of human rights, which is a big number," he said. The commission also said that there was yet to be any judicial follow-up of these incidents. “The judiciary either ignores them or is unable to bring perpetrators to justice,” Nadery claimed. Political analysts in Kabul believe that the greatest challenge for human rights protection in Afghanistan is the state of law-enforcement bodies. In most of the rural areas the law abusers were local police who remained loyal to armed militia and powerful warlords than to the central government. While there is an ongoing programme on police training, supported by Germany and the United States, much more work needs to be done before the provincial police departments become fully professional and centrally accountable institutions, Vikram Parekh, a Kabul-based analyst of the International Crisis Group (ICG), a multinational advocacy NGO, said. “In particular, disengaging the police from militia control should be prioritised by the new government - appointing militia leaders as police chiefs helps preserve their power and only delays the process of security sector reform,” Parekh told IRIN. Meanwhile, the AIHRC declared the three coming years as years for Human Rights Education at the primary and secondary education levels. “We are calling upon the authorities to end the state of impunity and bring those perpetrators of human rights violations to justice,” Nadery said.