BY NORM DIXON
Up to six Kabul University students were killed when police opened fire on demonstrators on November 11 and 12. Human Rights Watch reported on November 14 that police fired directly into the crowd on November 12, without warning. Hundreds of students were protesting the lack of heating and electricity in their dormitories and food shortages.
On November 11, students marched to the palace of Hamid Karzai, the US-installed president of Afghanistan. According to the students, four marchers were killed in an unprovoked salvo of bullets. The Karzai government claimed the students had thrown rocks. The next day, as the protests continued, two more students were shot dead.
The massacre has shed some light on the reality of post-Taliban Afghanistan. Washington has attempted to portray warlord-dominated Afghanistan as a "democracy" and even suggested that Afghanistan's "liberation" is a model for post-invasion Iraq.
However, the killings have revealed the truth: the regime in Kabul is little different to the authoritarian pro-US regimes that dot the Middle East and Central Asia. Dictators and autocrats have been transformed into allies of "freedom" in the US "war on terror".
The only "terror" in Afghanistan these days is coming from the Kabul government, its warlord allies and US troops. Associated Press on November 4 reported that the village of Naray was subjected to a terrifying raid by US Blackhawk helicopters, which disgorged troops from the 82nd Airborne Division.
The soldiers rounded up the villagers, separating the women from the men, and confined them to the village mosque. When a wedding party arrived, they were ordered to sit down or the helicopter gunships would kill them. Artillery rounds lit night sky and explosive shells were fired into the mountainside.
US troops trashed the villagers' homes. According to the AP report, "Cash, passports and pictures of anyone with a gun were collected in a trash bag". Five people, including the village elder, were interrogated throughout the night. Colonel David Gerard boasted to AP: "They talk a lot better after some sleep deprivation; makes them feel sorry for themselves." The five were then loaded into the helicopters with bags over their heads and taken away.
"They came rushing into our homes, they kept us prisoner all night, and we were cold and hungry", Noorbad Shah told AP. "We had no bad will against the Americans, but now how are we supposed to feel?"
Meanwhile, CNN reported on November 14 that the United Nations was investigating reports that witnesses with possible information about alleged mass killings by a US-aligned warlord in northern Afghanistan last year have recently been harassed, detained, tortured and executed.
A team of representatives of the Afghan Human Rights Commission and the UN was dispatched to the north on November 11 to look into the reports.
Hundreds of Taliban fighters, captured by the forces of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, suffocated to death late last year after they were crammed into unventilated metal shipping containers. The fighters were meant to be transferred to a prison in Shibergan, but investigators for the US-based Physicians for Human Rights said hundreds died en route and ended up at a mass grave site nearby at Dash- e-Leili. Dostum has blamed the deaths on combat injuries and disease.
Paris-based Reporters Without Borders revealed on November 13 that an Afghan camera operator was "kidnapped, beaten and left for dead" in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif in October after helping a British reporter make a documentary about the mass grave sites.
The UN has said a full investigation into the mass killings would be difficult because the Afghan government is "too weak" to ensure the protection of those who might testify.
From Green Left Weekly, November 20, 2002.
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