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December 2 to 8, 2001

The UN refugee agency asked Pakistan to allow newly arrived refugees to move out of their current makeshift camp to a better equipped site.

Freeze on Refugees
Aid workers are urging Pakistan to lift restrictions that left refugees stranded without food or shelter and in makeshift camps in the no-man's land between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The United Nations refugee agency, the UNHCR, says the Pakistani authorities allow too few registrations at the secure camps. The agency has set up services in Pakistan, providing tented accommodation, sanitation facilities and food supplies. Conditions outside the camp are much worse. The temperature plummets to below zero!

New Government

Pashtun tribal leader Hamid Karzai, chosen to lead Afghanistan's post-Taliban government, said the hardline militia's reclusive chief Mullah Mohammad Omar had shown no remorse and must face trial. "He has not made even a statement regretting what he's done. He must face trial," Karzai told reporters.

Military action in the US-led war on terrorism is spurring new anti-Taliban and bin-Laden bounty hunters to attack Tora Bora.

Anti-Taliban forces are taking the Tora Bora base of Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora area of eastern Afghanistan during intensive fighting overnight. A spokesman for the Northern Alliance, Mohammed Habeel, said that troops led by commander Hazrat Ali were now in control of most of the main caves in the complex. Arabs, including women, had been captured, along with weapons and vehicles, but that they had not found Bin Laden himself.

The oil and gas were warned that Osama bin Laden ordered strikes in the event of his death or capture.

Certainly, there are crimes against the Afghan people, especially the women of Afghanistan since the Taliban came into power. Now that the Taliban is agreeing to surrender, what is to be done with Taliban leaders?

Taliban Atrocities - The Record Dates Back to 1996

Mullah Fazil had overall operational command during a Taliban offensive that led to the recapture of Khwagaghar town in Takhar province and surrounding areas in January 2001. Over thirty civilians were detained and summarily executed during this operation, while at least forty-five others were detained and transferred to a jail in Kunduz. Numerous witnesses have also testified that Fazil was commander-in-chief during a January 2001 massacre of over 170 civilians. The victims had been detained by Taliban forces and then executed by firing squad in public view.

Mullah Dadaullah commanded Taliban forces carried out a scorched earth policy in Yakaolang district in June 2001. After briefly recapturing Yakaolang, Dadaullah's forces burned down over 4,000 homes, shops, and public buildings in the district. His forces continued their scorched earth policy as they retreated east, destroying entire towns and villages in the western part of Bamiyan province. Most of the civilian population in western Bamiyan fled the Taliban advance, but those who remained behind, as well as some who had encamped in the hills, were summarily executed. The Taliban's official Bakhtar Information Agency confirmed Dadaullah's responsibility for the military operations in the area. Dadaullah is also reportedly responsible for the massacre of Shi'a Muslims in Syedabad, in Mazar-I Sharif, in 1998.

Mawlawi Nurullah Nuri, the former governor of Balkh province - in which the city of Mazar-i Sharif is located - was military commander of the northern zone under the Taliban. He could be implicated in the reported summary executions of ethnic Uzbek civilians in Balkh in May 2001, and in a massacre of civilian prisoners that took place at Robatak Pass, on the border of Samangan and Baghlan provinces, in May 2000.

Mullah Fazil and Mawlawi Nurullah Nuri are known to have been in Mazar-I Sharif in the custody of Northern Alliance commander Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum. Mullah Dadaullah was also known to be in Northern Alliance custody, but his precise whereabouts were not known.

A report, released in Washington, London and Islamabad, listed additional media accounts from the past several weeks of activity and dating back to 1996. Reports like these prompted action by the administration to address growing concern for Taliban and al Qaida atrocities.

During a recent visit to US troops at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, Bush said Afghanistan is "just the beginning" of the war on terrorism. The US is currently collecting evidence of atrocities and crimes against the Afghan population by the Taliban and Mullah Mohammad Omar (left, in a rare photo from CNN).

Afghanistan's Taliban supreme leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, who had urged his men to die rather than surrender, agreed to give up his stronghold at Kandahar. The former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, Abdul Salam Zaeef, said Omar will begin the surrender on Friday by turning over the city to one of his commanders, who will then direct the handing over of weapons and ammunition to tribal elders. Zaeef said Omar will not surrender directly to Karzai.

Karzai and his father, former senator Abdul Ahad Karzai, began campaigning against the Taliban in 1997 from their exile base in Quetta, the closest Pakistani city to Kandahar. In July 1999, his father was assassinated while walking home from evening prayers. The murder was attributed to the Taliban.

Tribunals
U.S.: Military Commissions Can't Compare to International Courts
Due Process Standards Much Lower for Proposed U.S. Trials

(New York, December 4, 2001) Judicial standards permitted by a new presidential order on military commissions would be significantly lower than those at war-crimes courts established by the United Nations, although the U.S. administration has claimed they are similar

The Bush administration has said that guidelines to be issued by the Secretary of Defense may address due process concerns that were ignored by the presidential order. But U.S. officials have refused to speculate on what the Secretary of Defense's guidelines may contain.

Many President Bush's decision to employ military tribunals, some saying it is similar to those used against Nazi spies during WWII. Bush and Ashcroft say that terrorists who are tried before a military tribunal won't have the same rights as American citizens, can be tried in secret and can be executed without the right of appeal. Assistant Attorney General Mike Chertoff testified about an al Qaida manual found in the rubble of the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa had lesson plans on the ins and outs of the American legal system, and taught the art of hiding messages during detention visits and taking advantage of public sentiment during an indictment and trial period.

Authorities in Spain last week expressed reluctance to hand over eight alleged terrorists they have arrested if it meant the men would be put before a U.S. tribunal. 

Relief... effort, No Relief

The French humanitarian group, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), said more than 80 Afghan civilians had been killed and 50 others wounded by US bombs around Tora Bora in recent days. MSF workers have recovered the bodies, the group said.

The UN World Food Program (WFP) said it is meeting its target for delivering aid to Afghanistan . Spokeswoman Christiane Berthiaume said WFP said 53,000 ton of food went into the country in November - enough to feed six million people for a month. However, getting that food to needy Afghanis is another matter.

Fighting and bandits in the region continues to be a major block to giving relief to the needy population that remain in Afghanistan. There are perhaps 3 to 4 million needy Afghanis in the country. Banditry along supply routes was also hampering operations. UN aid convoys have been ambushed and robbed, agency offices have been looted, and several journalists have been killed in apparent robberies. The UNHCR's aid efforts also suffered a setback when two of the agency's vehicles were ambushed by three armed men.

The deputy UN coordinator for Afghanistan, Antonio Donini, said the humanitarian situation in northern Afghanistan is a crisis of stunning proportions, with some refugee camps yet to receive any humanitarian aid whatsoever. Babies and infants stranded in northern Afghanistan are dying and an estimated 150,000 people are living in flimsy tents in a refugee camp near Mazar-I Sharif, where snows have arrived and temperatures drop below freezing every night.

With winter, getting the food to the population will be an extraordinary feat. Some 500,000 people in the central highland areas of Bamiyan province stand to be cut off without supplies of any kind if aid does not reach them before the first snows of winter.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is also keeping a close eye on Ghor province, east of the western city of Herat, where 300,000 need assistance. ICRC had put 2,000 metric ton of food stocks on standby in Herat to be moved in when the situation allowed.

In the capital, Kabul, Afghan women are playing a key role in a one-off mission by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to distribute food to an estimated one million people too poor to feed their families. They will be distributing food coupons that will entitle a household to a 50-kilogram (110-pound) sack of wheat - enough, it is estimated, to last a month. The WFP is employing large numbers of women, who were forbidden from working during Taleban rule, to survey households in the capital's poorest areas, calculating how many people there are and how urgent their need is. It is both easier for them to gain access to households and a way of providing the women themselves with some income.

UN PEACE KEEPING

There has been speculation that the international force would be drawn largely from Muslim countries. Speed of deployment and the force's exact role would be decided by the countries contributing to it. A multinational force for East Timor would be a model for the Afghan operation. Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Indonesia and Bangladesh have been named as possible contributors to the force. None of Afghanistan's neighbors are likely to participate. Australia, Canada, France, Germany and Italy are also said to have offered to take part but none of these countries has yet volunteered to lead the force.

The deadline is tight if a planned multi-national peacekeeping force is to be up and running in Kabul when the new Afghan interim administration takes office there on 22 December. The United Nations wants at least part of the force to be in place from day one because, Secretary General Kofi Annan says, this is the "best guarantee" of a peaceful transition in the wake of the West's war against terror. The UN Security Council has already agreed the broad tasks the force will be asked to carry out. It will be asked first to secure the capital, then spread out from there to Afghanistan's other main cities. Troops are to assist aid organizations getting relief to the people and to start reconstructing the shattered country.

Kabul will be relatively easy to secure. There are doubts over the future stability of cities like Kandahar, where there has been much wider support for the Taliban, and over the vital and vulnerable highways which wind their way through more remote areas. The West's military campaign may have been carried through at a heady pace, but anyone that knows Afghanistan well would say the job will be complex and dangerous. What the Afghan people need is lasting stability. Good intentions and a few thousand peacekeepers may not be enough to ensure this. Too many weapons have been held for too long, in too many hands.

UN Call to Investigate War Crimes

UN Human Rights Commissioner Mary Robinson has said she would support an international inquiry into the killing of hundreds of pro-Taliban prisoners in a northern Afghanistan fort. The British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has ruled out an inquiry, as has the spokesman for the US-led "coalition against terrorism", but Robinson said the killings had to be investigated. Mrs Robinson said an investigation was needed to respond to what she described as the "very disturbing" reports from Mazar, reminding all parties that "Geneva conventions apply."

Afghanistan had long suffered from a "climate of no accountability", she said, stressing the need to set standards in the conflict.

In the takeover at Mazar several sources corroborated that over 100 Taliban troops  were killed by Northern Alliance forces on November 10 according to U.N. spokeswoman Stephanie Bunker, speaking at a news conference Tuesday in Islamabad, Pakistan. At that time, she said the situation in the city remains volatile. Reports since say that along with looting there is 'punitive action' that is being carried out. For example, family members of Chechen fighters that sided with Taliban forces have been targeted.

Suicide Bombers Strike Israel

People detained by the Palestinian Authority are frequently subjected to torture and denied access to fair trials, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released on 11/30. Because of more terrorist attacks, Israel is naming the Palestinians terrorist unless or until Arafat would arrest and prosecute terrorists. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, under strong international pressure to arrest those behind the suicide bombings, declared a state of emergency in the West Bank and Gaza.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld appeared to back Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian militants - previously condemned by Washington. "The only way to defend against terrorists is to go after the terrorists," he said.

Recently, the Bush administration added several Palestinian groups and factions to the State Department list of 'foreign terrorist organizations' facing heightened financial scrutiny after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the PFLP-General Command are all included.

Israel is closer to agreement with Washington on actions against Palestinian terrorists as suicide attacks continue there. The fact that Palestine and Israel are fighting this out in the open about the terrorist attacks from Palestine is somehow effecting Washington differently in December after in October that Israel somehow was out of line.

Sharing Power - Afghan Failures

Pakistan's military and intelligence have had close ties to the predominantly Pashtun Taliban in order to ensure a secure western frontier. The ethnic background of groups in Afghanistan tends to predict what politics that they will ally with.

Recent development in talk of power sharing are sorting out a solution for the problem of different factions and views on governing.

Pakistan is uneasy about its lack of involvement because of the dominance of the Northern Alliance. Hostility towards the Northern Alliance runs deep in Pakistan, especially among religious extremists and ethnic Pashtun who have close ties with the Taliban. There is also a deep-seated skepticism about the West and the United States in particular. Pakistanis say the international community was all too eager to ask for help when it needed it, but is now much less interested in Pakistan's needs.

Pakistan woos new Afghan administration
President Pervez Musharraf has congratulated the leader of the new interim administration in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai, in what's being seen as an effort to better relations.

... and there will be Rumors of War

The military piece of the 9/11 war on terrorism has been confined to Afghanistan so far. However, US officials raised the issue of Iraq where they suspect President Saddam Hussein of developing weapons of mass destruction. Other possible targets are in Somalia and Indochina. President Bush's administration is making statements that indicate the war will escalate to include more countries. Could Iraq be next? A letter to President Bush outlines recent DC sentiment.

Investigation and arrests continue throughout the NATO alliance in support for stopping terrorism.

!!! Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge !!!
Americans were given warnings of the possibility of more terrorist attacks. Ridge says the latest warning was precipitated by a "convergence of information" received over the past several days. He says Americans are asked to remain under alert during the holiday season.

The anthrax letter sent to Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy says: "You can not stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.'' The Leahy letter, like the one sent to Daschle, was postmarked from Trenton, New Jersey, on Oct. 9 and dated September 11, the same day 19 hijackers crashed commercial airplanes into the Pentagon, the World Trade Center and a Pennsylvania field, killing nearly 4,000 people. Eighteen people have been infected with anthrax and five have died from the inhalation form of the disease since early October.

12/3 IRAQ NEXT?

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