Human rights situation needs to be monitored

The new interim Afghan administration has to extend its authority to ensure that fundamental human rights are not infringed by warlords, human right activists said on Wednesday.

"A government has been installed in Kabul. This government has to extend its writ to the provinces where people are living under the warlords," Afrasiab Khattak, chairman of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) told IRIN from Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, on the border with Afghanistan.

The interim government led by Hamed Karzai took control of Kabul on 22 December for six months as a first step towards a broad-based multi-ethnic government in an effort to restore peace in the country.

But Khattak maintained that as long as the warlords were ruling parts of the country, people could not feel safe. "They (interim government) have no mechanism to safeguard rights of the citizens," he added.

Karzai faces the daunting task of starting to rebuild destroyed institutions, a ruined economy and a devastated infrastructure in the country, where up to seven million people depend on international aid in some form.

Khattak said human rights were directly linked to the overall security situation in the country and also on the aid agencies ability to deliver help in remote regions. Millions of poor Afghans depend on food hand-outs to survive and armed groups roam towns and major roads with impunity.

"The coalition against terror had started on a three-pronged strategy. They were military, political and humanitarian," Khattak said explaining that whereas significant progress was made on the first two strategies, the coalition had not done much on the third.

"The humanitarian cause has lagged far behind...we do not see much focus on it," Khattak added.

He said one area of concern for human rights activists was the plight of the families that foreign Taliban fighters had left behind. "We have scattered information, those women who were Afghans but married to foreigners have some protection in the form of their Afghan relatives," he said.

"But those women who were foreigners are in miserable condition, the government, the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) and the UN must help them return to their countries," he added. There was no exact estimate of the number of foreign families left inside Afghanistan but aid workers and human right groups say they were in hundreds.

"Human Rights Watch is concerned that foreign fighters, as well as their families in Afghanistan, not to be deported to states where they will be subject to torture or other severe mistreatment," said a statement by US-based NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) on 14 December.

The statement said foreign fighters captured in Afghanistan and their families were believed to have originated from some two dozen countries, including China, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Pakistan.

Meanwhile the human rights situation in Afghanistan prompted the UN's special rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, Kamal Hossain, to urge the coalition forces and the Afghan authorities on 21 December to investigate incidents of summary execution of prisoners.

"Reports of the death and summary executions of prisoners after capture are a source of serious concern, since such acts amount to breaches of international humanitarian law," Hossain said in a statement.