Human Rights Watch has a new report about how many top officials in Afghanistan are, well, murders--or as HRW puts it "are implicated in major war crimes and human rights abuses that took place in the early 1990s":
Human Rights Watch's report implicates numerous factional leaders and commanders for their role in the abuses, including:
- Abdul Rabb al-Rasul Sayyaf, a radical Islamist commander and leader of the Ittihad-e Islami faction, who now advises President Karzai and exercises major political power over the Afghan judiciary and has numerous proxies within the Afghan government;
- Abdul Rashid Dostum, the leader of the Junbish-e Milli faction who now holds a senior post in the ministry of defense and exercises political control of several provinces in the north of Afghanistan;
- Mohammad Qasim Fahim, Afghanistan's defense minister from 2001 to 2004 and a commander in the Jamiat-e Islami/Shura-e Nazar faction of Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmed Shah Massoud (who was killed in 2001); and
- Karim Khalili, a commander in the Hezb-e Wahdat faction and now one of President Karzai's two vice-presidents.
HRW doesn't make a nod to toward the obvious tension between justice and reconciliation or peace. South Africa, among others, essentially choice the later. The difference is that in Afghanistan neither is happening at the moment. Maybe Afghanistan isn't stable enough to even launch a Truth and Reconciliation-type commission right now. And I drawing these guys into the government is a type of reconciliation. But there's not much truth going on at the moment.
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