Afghanistan Peace CampaignAfghanistan Analysts Network
You can preview and download the UN Mapping Report here.
The UN Mapping Report brought together all the published sources on the war crimes of the first two decades of the Afghan war. It is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Afghanistan. Together with the Afghanistan Justice Project’s ‘Casting Shadows: War Crimes and Crimes against Humanity, 1978-2001’, published in 2005, which incorporated fresh eye-witness and survivor testimony into its account, these two reports meticulously documented patterns of war crimes up to the formation of the interim government in December 2001.[1] Crucially, they also provide the political context for the crimes, giving indispensable background to the emergence of the various political and military forces which continue to dominate Afghan life.
That some form of accountability was yearned for and expected in the first years of the Islamic Republic was made clear in a nationwide consultation by the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), the results of which were published in a 2005 report, ‘A Call for Justice – A National Consultation on Past Human Rights Violations in Afghanistan’. 70 per cent of those interviewed said they or members of their family had suffered war crimes or human rights violations. Patricia Gossman and Sari Kouvo summed up the findings in their 2013 special report for AAN, ‘Tell Us How This Ends: Transitional Justice and Prospects for Peace in Afghanistan’:
There was considerable support for either criminal accountability or for removing suspected perpetrators from power. How this was to be achieved was not included in the survey. There was also a wide recognition that sustainable peace required national reconciliation. Although the term was not fully defined, participants described it as including overcoming conflict at the local level. Reconciliation was not equated with forgiveness.
How the UN Mapping Report came about
The genesis for the mapping report had come during the final year of the first Islamic Emirate as a response to human rights groups’ dismay at the United Nations’ failure to investigate two massacres that followed successive captures of Mazar-e Sharif in the late 1990s, of Taleban prisoners of war by General Malek in 1997, and of largely Hazara civilians by the Taleban in 1998.[2] In mid-2001, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) launched an attempt to ‘map’ human rights violations in Afghanistan over the course of the war. Later that year – after the 9/11 attacks and the United States’ toppling of the first Islamic Emirate – two researchers travelled to the region to assess what was required for the mapping exercise. At the time, news of a third mass killing was emerging, again of Taleban prisoners of war and again after Mazar-e Sharif had changed hands; the men who asphyxiated in shipping containers had this time been under the control of General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s forces.
The Secretary General’s new Special Representative in Kabul, Lakhdar Brahimi, opposed taking action over that third massacre, reported Gossman and Kouvo, and also opposed a callmade in October 2002 by Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary or Arbitrary Executions Asma Jahangir for a commission of inquiry “to undertake an initial mapping-out and stocktaking of grave human rights violations of the past, which could well constitute a catalogue of crimes against humanity.” [3] In the end, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) commissioned only a limited mapping exercise that drew on already published material. Gossman and Rubin’s cataloguing of the major patterns of violations over the course of the war, from the 1978 coup d’état to the formation of the interim government in December 2001, became known as the UN Mapping Report.
How the UN Mapping Report was received
The mapping report was due to be published alongside the AIHRC’s ‘A Call for Justice’ in 2005. However, reported Gossman and Kouvo:
In the weeks before the scheduled release of the two reports, UN officials pressed the High Commissioner [for Human Rights], Louise Arbour, not to make the … report public. UNAMA officials argued that a public release would endanger UN staff, and complicate negotiations surrounding the planned demobilization of several powerful militias. They also argued that as a ‘shaming exercise’, the report raised expectations that neither the UN nor the Afghan government could meet: namely, that something would be done about the individuals named in the report.
Journalist and author Ahmad Rashid, who was in Kabul for the launch, described in an AAN report how deep and broad the pressure on OHCHR not to publish had been:
The Mapping Report … clearly implicated Afghan communists, present day warlords still holding power in Afghanistan, Taleban and a host of others as being responsible for war crimes. But when the report was about to be published – [UN High Commissioner for Human Rights] Louise Arbour already had arrived in Kabul -, almost all major players – the Americans, the Afghan government, many Europeans, the UN mission for Afghanistan – insisted that the Mapping Report be suppressed and not be made public.
They did not want to rock the boat of the fragile Karzai government that had been cobbled together of unlikely partners – Karzai and his circle of Afghan returnees from exile who had started as reformers and most mujahedin leaders (except Hekmatyar, Khales and Nabi Muhammadi) who were dead against all reforms that would threaten their key positions in the institutions, the security forces and the (licit and illicit) economy. These ‘Jihadi leaders’ were about to see their names printed in the report and threatened all kind of action to avoid this happening.
However, the UN Mapping Report slipped through the net. It was published briefly on the OHCHR website, “most likely,” reported Gossman and Kouvo, “by accident.” Despite being swiftly taken down, it had already been picked up by Human Rights Watch and other human rights organisations and as it had officially been published could legitimately be disseminated by others.[4] Moreover, as Rubin said, it was based on already public material so it could hardly be ‘suppressed’.
The pressure not to discuss or take action on war crimes never went away. Indeed, a worse fate was to befall the far more comprehensive mapping report compiled subsequently by the AIHRC.
The AIHRC mapping report
Following AIHRC’s publication of ‘A Call for Justice’, together with the United Nations and Afghan government, it drafted an action plan focussing on transitional justice. The plan was formally adopted and publicly launched by Karzai in December 2006.[5] However, said Gossman and Kouvo, the government “implemented little and finally shelved it for all intents and purposes.” The major action that did come out of the plan was the AIHRC’s own mapping report. This was an ambitious, multi-year-long project which gathered fresh material about the war crimes of 1978-2001 from witnesses and survivors from all of Afghanistan’s provinces. That report was never published. AIHRC chairwoman Sima Samar said she could not publish without Karzai’s support. He never gave it. Ahead of the 2014 election, when AAN asked the two frontrunners if they would publish the AIHRC mapping report should they become president, Ashraf Ghani said he would, Dr Abdullah appeared not specifically to have heard of it.
The consequences of ignoring the past
The inability of the post-2001 Afghan state to accept any form of truth-telling and the fearfulness of most of its international backers of any move to face up to the crimes and hurts of the past ultimately weakened the Republic. The argument in those early years was that stability was more important than justice, and peace had to come before accountability. That meant the foundations of the Republic were built on shaky ground that would eventually prove unstable.
Transitional justice, what to do about the perpetrators of war crimes, as Barnett Rubin has put it, “some reckoning with the past,” did come up at the December 2001 Bonn conference at which Rubin participated as an advisor to Brahimi.[6] It was discussed, Rubin said, but rejected from inclusion in the Bonn agreement, which set out a road map for what would become the Islamic Republic. As Rubin has stressed, the Bonn agreement was not a peace settlement. The parties did not “painstakingly negotiate over a period of years how to structure a government that would resolve the conflicts that had torn the society apart, create new armed forces and a new police service, and confront the painful legacy of the past to lay the groundwork for national reconciliation.” Rather, one side was still being “pulverised by US bombs” while representatives of four anti-Taleban groups thrashed out the Bonn agreement, along with UN, US and other interested parties.
In retrospect, the moment of de facto regime change had already taken place: when the US decided to arm the Northern Alliance and other anti-Taleban commanders to fight the Islamic Emirate while it bombed Taleban frontlines, it had established who gain the victory and who would capture the Afghan state. Once in power, some of those featuring in the AJP report, the UN and (presumably) the AIHRC mapping reports were able to stop any attempt at national reconciliation or a facing up to the past. Their efforts included, in 2008, MPs voting for a blanket amnesty for “[a]ll political factions and hostile parties who were involved in one way or another in hostilities before the establishing of the Interim Administration.”[7]
The silencing of the discussion of war crimes, at least those committed by the groups and individuals who ended up with power in 2001, has had repercussions. This author has argued that – as it was framed – favouring peace over justice and stability over accountability led to a lack of peace, justice, stability and accountability. Ignoring the past fostered impunity, encouraging continuing and future abuses by the state and pro-government individuals and groups, which meant there were never nationally representative, accountable security forces or government. Ultimately, as well, it helped spark the insurgency.[8]
Despite everything that has happened since 2001, the mapping of the war crimes of those first two decades remains important, given how the crimes of those years have still not been dealt with and how the patterns of violation in Afghanistan seem to keep repeating themselves.
Edited by Roxanna Shapour
References
| ↑1 | Both reports include material from late 2001 on US bombing and its treatment of detainees, including forced disappearances and its use of secret detention facilities in Afghanistan and elsewhere. |
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| ↑2 | These massacres are documented in both the AJP and UN mapping reports. |
| ↑3 | Brahimi argued that the time was not yet right for an investigation. As reported by the BBC, he said an enquiry should happen eventually, but the fledgling Afghan government did not have the capacity to deal with one at that time. “There is no judicial system,” he said, “that we can really expect to face up to a situation like this” and the priority had to be with the living not the dead, given the Afghan authorities were unable to protect potential witnesses. |
| ↑4 | For many years, it was hosted on a website called flagrancy net, but that link is now broken. |
| ↑5 | The Action Plan, wrote Gossman and Kouvo includes:
five measures in graduated sequence to be completed over three years: (1) according dignity to victims, including through commemoration and building memorials; (2) vetting human rights abusers from positions of power and encouraging institutional reform; (3) truth seeking through documentation and other mechanisms; (4) reconciliation; and (5) establishing a task force to make recommendations for an accountability mechanism. |
| ↑6 | See Rubin’s ‘Transitional Justice and Human Rights in Afghanistan’ published in ‘International Affairs’, vol 79, no 3, May, 2003, pp 567-581. His text is based on a lecture he gave in memory of Anthony Hyman at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London on 3 February 2003. |
| ↑7 | For the text of the law, see Kouvo’s ‘After two years in legal limbo: A first glance at the approved ‘Amnesty law’ and for a discussion, Gossman and Kouvo’s report, pp28-31. |
| ↑8 | See Stephen Carter and Kate Clark, ‘No Shortcut to Stability: Justice, Politics and Insurgency in Afghanistan’, December 2010, Chatham House, and ‘Talking to the Taliban: A British perspective’, 3 July 2013, AAN. |