Tag Archives: human rights

Mali’s Fog of War: Refugees Tell of Terror, Hunger and Rape

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

TIME.com

It took Ibrahim Touré three weeks to escape from Timbuktu after rebels seized the desert town, but, in his heart, he hasn’t really left. The 26-year-old shopkeeper studies the floor as he talks, cradling a welter of scabs and fresh scar tissue on his right elbow. Sometimes he stops to rub his head with an uncertain hand — the unforgiving sun, maybe, or a reaction to the horrors he has witnessed and suffered. If what he says is true, then the fog of war in northern Mali — where Tuareg separatists, Islamic militants, Arab militias and a hodgepodge of terrorist groups are vying for control following a spectacularly successful military campaign — is concealing a grisly spate of human-rights abuses, humanitarian suffering and war crimes.

The shadows were lengthening one Friday after mosque, he relates, when he saw three truckloads of gunmen from the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) pounce on two young women. One was an old school friend called Isata, Touré says — a girl who was “always laughing.” The rebels fired wildly in the air and stuck a gun in her face. Hidden in a nomad’s tent, Touré felt his guts contort as he watched them rape her. “I didn’t think these kinds of things could happen in reality,” he says. After the gunmen left the two violated women on the ground, other women went to comfort them. Isata “couldn’t even talk,” says Touré. “Her whole face was destroyed where they’d hit her. There was blood everywhere.”

(MORE: One Foreign Couple’s Escape from Timbuktu)

Touré’s own problems were just beginning. As he surveyed the ruins of his electronics shop days later — looted, he reckons, by MNLA fighters — Islamic militants from a faction called Ansar Eddine took issue with his livelihood. Spotting a computer, they asked him what he wanted with a white man’s things. They knocked him to his knees, gripped his hands and held a flaming torch to his arm. Someone struck him on the leg with a knife. “I was so scared,” he says. “I can’t remember what happened after that.” Hungry, wounded and destitute, Touré has wound up on a dusty sidewalk in Mali’s capital, Bamako, one of hundreds of people arriving each day on overcrowded buses from the country’s disintegrating north. His nephews Oussman and Hamar (ages 12 and 5) lie in the dirt nearby. Their mother died about a month ago from “sickness and starvation.” Continue reading →

Clinging to power

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Economist

EVERY morning a bus caked in dust pulls into Bamako bringing the latest rumours of war. Looking dazed and dehydrated after 24 hours on the road, Mohammad Maiga explains how Tuareg separatists and Islamist militants have turned his native Gao, northern Mali’s most populous town, into a ghost town. “Everyone is leaving,” says Mr Maiga. “There’s no food, no supplies.” Blackouts last all day. Banks and offices have been pillaged by rampant rebels.

Mr Maiga says he saw a truck of National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) rebels abduct three young women on the street in front of his house the day before he fled. “They had no choice,” he explains. “The rebels had weapons.” His claim is impossible to verify but it is one of many alleged instances of murder, robbery and rape laid at the rebels’ door. The UN has called for international action to halt the worsening crisis. Aid agencies reckon that over 200,000 people have been displaced though no one knows the exact numbers.

The clearest winners so far from Mali’s chaos are a trio of jihadist groups—Ansar Eddine, a Salafist outfit that emerged from the secular MNLA’s slipstream; al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb; and another terror group called the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa. The black flag of militant Islam has been spotted over all northern Mali’s big towns and residents say public awareness campaigns about the dictates of sharialaw are underway. Yet far from berating the Islamists for imposing a strict and alien form of Islam, some inhabitants actually offer guarded praise. Ansar Eddine, in particular, they say, is attempting to rein in the MNLA’s rapacious fighters. Continue reading →

Justice for Ivorians starts with Gbagbo’s extradition. Can it continue?

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

Gbagbo and his wife Simone in the custody of forces loyal to Alassane Ouattara at the Golf Hotel in Abidjan on 11 April 2011 (Aristide Bodegla/AP)

The Independent

Laurent Gbagbo, the former Ivorian president who led his country to the brink of civil war, shuffled off a chartered plane and into the custody of The International Criminal Court at The Hague yesterday in a groundbreaking extradition that could spell an end to a decade of bloodshed and rebellion in Ivory Coast.

Amid howls of protest by some Gbagbo supporters, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC’s chief prosecutor, promised that the strongman’s arrest was “just the beginning” and that more suspects would stand trial for crimes committed during inter-ethnic violence that flared up following Ivory Coast’s 2010 presidential election.

Diplomats, human rights groups and analysts say Ocampo’s ability to honor that commitment, and the willingness of the Ivorian authorities to try people on both sides of the political divide, are essential if the West Africa nation is to put its troubles behind it. Continue reading →

After the US pulls out, will CIA rely more on Afghan mercenaries?

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Christian Science Monitor

Thousands of Afghan mercenaries are believed to be helping America battle Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their allies. But they’re accused of flagrant human rights abuses.

With his broad cheekbones, hair swept back under a sequined cap, and the gentle manner of a well-to-do Pashtun, Atal Afghanzai might easily pass for a doctor or an engineer.

Instead, his career path led into a cloak-and-dagger world of covert armies and foreign agents, until a rare lethal run-in with an Afghan police chief landed him on death row in Kabul’s most notorious prison.

Young and motivated, Mr. Afghanzai is one of thousands of Afghan mercenaries believed to be working with the CIA to help America battle Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their allies. His story – confirmed by US diplomats, other Western officials, and Afghan authorities – illustrates the military advantages of this secret war. But, with the US poised to ramp up reliance on paramilitaries like Afghanzai as it pulls out frontline troops, the practice is raising the ire of Afghans who accuse the groups of human rights abuses. Continue reading →

Afghanistan’s Dirty War: Why the Most Feared Man in Bermal District Is a U.S. Ally

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

 

Commander Azizullah, Sept 23, 2010 | U.S. Army photo by Sgt Justin P Morelli

Time.com

So-called Afghan security guards have become essential to what NATO calls security in parts of the country. The local populace, however, is terrified

On Nov. 30, 2009, in the shadow of mountains that crumple up 9,000-ft. ridges, an Afghan mercenary bankrolled by the U.S. military and hell-bent on the destruction of Taliban rebels allegedly stopped three men heading home to celebrate ‘Id al-Adha with their families. According to an elder from Bermal, the Afghan district where the incident took place, Commander Azizullah and his men bound their hands. Then, the elder told TIME, Azizullah drew his pistol and shot them. There was no evidence that these men were insurgents, the elder says. “But he killed them anyway.”

The story, corroborated almost word for word by an internal U.N. report dated January 2010 and calling for Azizullah’s removal from the U.S. payroll, is one of numerous accounts of atrocity laid at his door. As part of a secretive U.S. Army program responsible for some of the most effective fighters in Afghanistan, Azizullah has risen from nothing to command a ferocious 400-man militia of Afghan security guards. Stocky, bearded and seemingly implacable, he’s credited with bringing some kind of security to a few square miles of southeastern Afghanistan. “[I've] conducted lots of operations, seen lots of stuff, been blown up by a suicide bomber,” he told TIME during a phone call earlier this year. But if testimony from four Afghan sources in Bermal, two businessmen with interests in Bermal, two Afghan officials and two Western diplomats is to be believed, the cost has been a spate of bloodletting that makes little distinction between enemy combatants and ordinary civilians — despite legislation forbidding U.S. taxpayer dollars from funding units where there is credible evidence of human-rights violations.

The U.N. report cites seven other instances in which Azizullah and his men appear to have overstepped the bounds of their authority. In late September or early October (the Afghan month of Mizan) 2009, they searched a house “belonging to Ahmad Gul” following a clash with insurgents. Gul “was killed in his home along with his brother Omer Khan” and a third person, who had been working the fields nearby. Azizullah strapped “their bodies to the hood of [his] vehicles” and paraded them through the Margha Mandi bazaar — in a country where burial rites hold deep cultural import. “The bodies were kept for eight days until they started to rot,” the U.N. report claims. A maulawi (a senior cleric) from Bermal gives a similar account, placing the event in early October 2009 and naming the third victim as Mir Nawab, although rather than tilling a field, he says, Nawab was helping Gul build a mud wall. “Witnesses say the Taliban were nowhere near there and the ambush was far away,” the maulawi told TIME. Continue reading →

Militias funded by US accused of rights abuses

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Independent

Militias in Afghanistan funded by the United States are terrorising the communities they were supposed to protect, murdering, raping and torturing civilians, including children, extorting illegal taxes and smuggling contraband, according to a damning new report from Human Rights Watch.

In a 102-page report entitled ‘Just Don’t Call It a Militia’ the group documents how the Afghan government and the U.S. military have provided guns and money to paramilitary groups without adequate oversight or accountability. Because of their links to senior Afghan officials, many of these groups operate with impunity.

Their behaviour fuels support for the Taliban, and creates insecurity rather than decreasing it. But, under U.S. General David Petraeus, who recently left Afghanistan to head up the Central Intelligence Agency, Nato aggressively pursued a strategy of raising militias as a security quick-fix ahead of its departure in 2014. Continue reading →

Nato urged to investigate Afghan ‘war criminal’ employed by US

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Independent

The head of Afghanistan’s Independent Human Rights Commission has urged Hamid Karzai’s government and Nato to investigate allegations, first reported in The Independent, that an Afghan strongman employed by United States Army Special Forces embarked on a spate of war crimes, including rape, the summary execution of children, and torture. “We call on Special Forces – indeed, any forces – and the Afghan government to conduct an investigation of these allegations and find out if [the allegations are] correct or not,” said Nader Nadery, who heads the Human Rights Commission.

He said the commission would make its own efforts to verify the claims against Commander Azizullah, the leader of a US-sponsored militia in the south-eastern Paktika province, but that “it is a core responsibility of the government of Afghanistan to launch an investigation… this is the only way to build confidence in [the country's security] forces”. Continue reading →

Afghanistan: ‘If he is aware of our complaints, he will find us and kill us’, say witnesses

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Independent

Proper procedure would have been to detain and question the family he suspected of hosting Taliban insurgents but Azizullah did things differently, opening fire on their house with his men. Then they locked the survivors inside. And then they set the place ablaze.

This story is one of many separate alleged instances reported by interviewees during an investigation by The Independent lasting several months. Three separate reports, including two by the UN from early 2010, confirmed many of The Independent’s findings, and documented their own, separate allegations of atrocities. Continue reading →

Revealed: Afghan chief accused of campaign of terror is on US payroll

Posted by Julius Cavendish on

The Independent

Witnesses back leaked UN reports detailing claims of rape and murder against feared Tajik warlord

An Afghan warlord backed by US special forces faces persistent allegations that he launched a two-year spate of violence involving burglary, rape and murder of civilians, desecration of mosques and mutilation of corpses. Yet, despite repeated warnings about the atrocities Commander Azizullah is alleged to have committed, he has remained on the payroll of the US military as an “Afghan security guard”, a select band of mercenaries described by some as “the most effective fighting formation in Afghanistan”.

Interviews with religious leaders, tribal elders, villagers, contractors and Western and Afghan officials all pointed to a reign of terror in which they believe 31-year-old Azizullah, a ethnic Tajik, targeted Pashtun civilians while fighting the Taliban. Although individual allegations, all from ethnic Pashtuns, might be inaccurate, malicious or motivated by envy of Azizullah’s close and lucrative links to US special forces, taken together they come from sources belonging to a range of tribes and from several areas. The testimony also tallied with several independent reports documenting the allegations against Azizullah and seen by The Independent, including two confidential reports compiled by UN officials and circulated to Nato personnel last year. Continue reading →