http://www.guardian.co.uk/afghanistan/story/0,1284,608690,00.html
There is no excuse for this savagery
We too are responsible for the massacre at Qala-i-Jhangi fort
Isabel Hilton Thursday November 29, 2001 The Guardian
We know how it ended, the prisoners' revolt in Abdul Rashid Dostam's
Qala-i-Jhangi fort. Yesterday journalists were allowed in close enough
to see the grotesque litter of dismembered bodies. But there were
other things Dostam did not want them to inspect: a field, for
instance, in which the bodies of some 50 Taliban fighters lay, their
hands tied behind their backs.
The smooth account of how this prisoners' revolt began has some murky
passages. The 15-day siege of Kunduz had ended with touching scenes.
The blood bath that had been flagged up had been avoided. The
prisoners - reports vary between 300 and 600 - were taken to Dostam's
fortress near Mazar-i-Sharif, trusting, apparently, to Dostam's
guarantees. So cordial were the arrangements that two truckloads of
men widely considered to be the world's most dangerous prisoners were
not even searched for weapons. On Saturday evening, after a Chechen
prisoner detonated a hand grenade, Dostam, apparently, did not react.
Even more bizarre, the following morning, a CIA agent known as Michael
entered a cell containing a large number of prisoners to interrogate
them in the company only of "David", a second CIA operative. According
to David, one of those prisoners replied, when asked why he was in
Afghanistan: "To kill people like you," and threw himself upon his
interrogator. Michael then shot four prisoners dead before being
overpowered and killed. David fled and called in the airforce as the
Taliban overpowered their guards and the revolt began.
No doubt the CIA is full of gallant figures, careless of their own
safety, but this story seems preposterous. If they wanted to
interrogate
prisoners why did they not remove them to a place of interrogation
singly or in twos?
We are invited to believe that in the final appalling hours of the
prisoners' revolt they were fighting to the death and by then, no
doubt they were. But if that had been their intent from the start, why
did they not fight to the death defending Kunduz? Were they led into a
trap in the fort, then provoked into rebellion once they realised that
the promises they had been given were hollow?
On Monday evening, Dostam's adviser Alim Razim boasted that anyone
left after the uprising would be killed. Repellent though this might
be, he is hardly out of line. All the Northern Alliance commanders at
Kunduz repeatedly stressed that the foreigners would not get out
alive. Perhaps they took their cue from the US secretary of defence,
Donald Rumsfeld, who has said he would prefer foreign fighters to be
killed rather than to escape from Afghanistan.
There has been a deafening official silence following the massacre, a
silence in which Amnesty International has called for an investigation
into how this "prisoners' revolt" began. The Taliban's foreign
fighters are not innocent civilians. But how you treat a captive enemy
divides the warrior from the war criminal.
As prisoners, they presented a problem of custody and security and
posed the question of what would eventually happen to them. If they
were guilty of terrorism, would they be tried? Were they to be
released when the war was over? But Donald Rumsfeld had vetoed that:
they were terrorists who would return to killing. It's so much neater
that they are dead - victims, the official story goes, of their own
desire for martyrdom.
It is time to remember what this war was supposed to be about: a
crusade against terror, a defence of the right to live in peace, a
defence of the
superior values of a civilised society against the immorality of the
terrorist. War, as we are often reminded, is a messy business and one
that democracies do not wage lightly. This war has the backing of a
people wounded and enraged by September 11, but that does not mean
that any savagery is justified. Surely the point about civilisation
is that it does not descend lightly into terror and barbarism? Already
a US congressman has dismissed the call for an investigation as
unnecessary. He could not be more wrong.
The Afghans, we hear, have a bent for savagery and it would be absurd
to expect a war in Afghanistan to be fought by Queensberry Rules. But
whose war is this and who must take responsibility for the war crimes
that have been committed? This was a massacre repeatedly foretold. In
two weeks of talking about the likely slaughter, there was no move to
prevent it. Had it been only Dostam's forces who were fighting in
Qala-i-Jhangi fort, there might have been a case for a regretful
shrug. But the battle was conducted by US and British special forces
side by side with Dostam's men and supported by US air power. Were
they fighting by Dostam's rules or by their own? Or do we no longer
bother with the distinction?
