UN human rights team in Mazar-e Sharif to discuss mass graves

A UN team comprising human rights advisers to the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan left for the northern Afghan city of Mazar-e Sharif on Tuesday to discuss the issue of mass graves with the local Afghan authorities. "Basically it's not an investigation," a spokesman for the UN, David Singh, told IRIN in the capital, Kabul, on Tuesday. "It's a follow-up to the to the Dostum and Atta statement." Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum and Gen Atta, powerful factional leaders controlling northern Afghanistan, issued a statement last week denying deliberately killing Taliban prisoners, but admitting that some 200 Taliban prisoners might have died of wounds received during fighting. Hundreds of Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners reportedly suffocated in shipping containers while being transported to the Sheberghan prison close to Mazar-e Sharif after the fall of Taliban late last year. While the UN would not launch forensic investigations immediately, Singh said it would try to ensure that the grave sites were not tampered with. The UN was also concerned about the protection of the witnesses to the events. Last week, UN Special Representative for Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi told reporters that the fledlging Afghan government was insufficiently equipped to conduct an investigation, noting also that it lacked the capability to protect witnesses. In early May, the UN conducted forensic investigations of three alleged mass-grave sites in Mazar-e Sharif, Sheberghan and the central province of Bamian. Reacting to the discovery of grave sites, the head of the newly established Afghanistan Human Rights Commission, Sima Samar, told IRIN that hundreds of such human rights abuses over the past 23 years would also have to be investigated if a probe was launched into the Sheberghan incident. "We are in a situation where [when] something like this happens, [it] is politicised and used against other people," she said, adding that the actual reasons behind the continuing cycle of violence were needed to be determined.