President Karzai visits Berlin before London Conference Karzai government infringes human rights

The Society for Threatened Peoples STP (Gesellschaft für bedrohte Völker GfbV) has accused the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai of committing massive infringements of human rights. "All further assistance for the Afghan government must be made dependent on an improvement of the human rights situation”, said the STP Afghanistan expert, Tillmann Schmalzried. Germany made an important contribution to the setting up of an Afghan constitutional state in organizing the Petersberg (near Bonn) conference in December 2001. It must be a matter of concern to the German government that the human rights situation in North Afghanistan, where the German army is stationed, presents considerable problems.

In the North Afghan province of Balkh there have been since July 2008 more than 25 politically motivated murders of prominent people of the Pashtun minority by security forces close to the government. In the neighboring province of Sar-e Pol about 170 Pashtuns have been arbitrarily killed since January 2009. Responsibility for these murders is considered to lie with three militia organizations, whose commanders are under the direct control of coalition partners of the new Karzai government.More than 130,000 Pashtuns, Kashgai (Afghan Arabs) and Kuchi nomads have fled from the attacks, some to the neighboring central Asian countries. People are still flying for their lives.

But it is not only the warlords allied with the Afghan president who are responsible for the violations of human rights, but also Karzai personally. Particularly shocking is the case of the Afghan writer and journalist Mahsa Taee, who fled with her two children to North Germany in July 2009. Together with her husband, the publisher Ahmad Hashemi, she published in Afghanistan a newspaper, the Payam Daily, with a national circulation of 70,000. After ten months of publication the paper was banned on 10th January 2009 by the Karzai government on the grounds of an alleged insult to Islam. Ms. Taee was arrested, but was released on the intervention of a minister. She fled the country following threats from the security service and following an attack on her life and that of her nine-year old son.

Her husband, who at the time of the ban was abroad, had to go into hiding to escape the deportation applied for by the Karzai government. In Afghanistan he is threatened with a long prison sentence or the death penalty. Although four leading politicians from North Afghanistan spoke out for the arrest warrants to be rescinded, Karzai insisted that they be carried out. Karzai personally gave orders that a critical book by Ms. Taee on corruption and the misuse of power be confiscated and destroyed. Another book by the publisher on the Afghan Parliament suffered the same fate.

Tillmann Schmalzried can be reached at t.schmalzried@gfbv.de