More than 100 awaiting execution in Afghanistan

November 11, 2008

KABUL (Reuters) – More than 100 convicted murderers, rapists and kidnappers are on death row in Afghanistan awaiting President Hamid Karzai to sign the orders for their execution, a senior judge said on Tuesday.

Crimes such as kidnapping, rape and killing have sharply increased in recent years in Afghanistan where the Taliban , ousted in a U.S.-led invasion in 2001, carried out public executions for similar acts.

Five people have been executed since Saturday after Karzai approved the sentences following repeated appeals from many ordinary Afghans to mete out the punishment as enshrined in the country’s constitution and ordered by Islam.

“We have 125 people who have been sentenced by various courts to the death penalty and are to be executed after Karzai’s approval,” said a senior Supreme Court judge who declined to be named.

An official at the presidential palace confirmed that lists of those sentenced to death by the courts have been sent to the president for him to approve their execution.

(Reporting by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing by Jeremy Laurence)

Afghanistan: Human trafficking survey documents abuse, recommends action

Source: International Organization for Migration (IOM)

September 12, 2008

IOM today launched a field survey report on trafficking in persons in
Afghanistan. The findings will be shared with relevant Afghan government
ministries and other partners to develop effective future counter trafficking
strategies.

The research provides an in-depth analysis of the trafficking phenomenon in,
from and to Afghanistan, based on first-hand data collected mainly from expert
interviews and a field survey conducted in Kabul and nine border provinces.

It represents the first attempt to interview a wide range of victims and
actors and is an important addition to an initial report on human trafficking in
Afghanistan published by IOM in 2004.

“We know that trafficking gravely affects Afghanistan from anecdotal evidence
and from cases which we have assisted, but actual data and analysis has been
very scarce until now,” says Nigina Mamadjonova, IOM Afghanistan’s Counter
Trafficking Programme Manager.

Among the factors making Afghan people extremely vulnerable to human
trafficking are more than two decades of conflict, the subsequent loss of lives
and livelihoods, prolonged economic instability and deteriorating security.

The report discusses these push factors and the demographics of trafficked
victims, including age, gender, place of origin and educational background, in
comparison with smuggled migrants and victims of kidnapping.

It also analyzes trafficking methods and destinations. Recognizing that some
elements of control and exploitation were experienced by all victims of
trafficking, regardless of their nationality or gender, the patterns and extent
of violence are also closely examined.

The report also looks at the roles of key counter trafficking partners,
particularly the Government of Afghanistan, in order to recognize achievements
and identify gaps in the areas of prevention, law enforcement and protection of
victims. It also recommends short- to medium-term action to combat the problem.

The report is currently available in English and will soon be made available
in Dari and Pashto. Copies can be obtained from the office of IOM Afghanistan or
downloaded from:

http://www.iom.int/jahia/webdav/shared/shared/mainsite/activities/countries/
docs/afghanistan/iom report trafficking_afghanistan.pdf

For further information, please contact Nigina Mamadjonova at IOM Kabul, Tel
+ 93 (0) 700 066041, Email: nmamadjonova@iom.int or Katsui Kaya, Tel +93 (0) 700 18596, Email: kkaya@iom.int

In Afghanistan, Rape Victims Begin To Break The Silence

September 01, 2008

By Farangis Najibullah
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty

Sobbing and barely able to speak, a teenage girl from Afghanistan’s northern Takhar province describes the horror of being gang-raped at gunpoint.

“They raped me for three days and nights. I felt like I was going crazy,” she said. “They forced me to drink alcohol. I couldn’t get up. They had guns, knives. They were so cruel and brutal. I screamed and cried, but they didn’t care.”

Many others in Afghanistan have undergone similar ordeals. But the true numbers are not known, because victims and their families usually prefer to remain silent, fearing a lifetime of disgrace in their conservative society.

In recent months, however, some victims’ families have begun to break the silence, and their calls for justice have prompted President Hamid Karzai to acknowledge the problem.

Sheila Samimi, a member of the Afghan Women’s Network (ANW) — a group that brings together dozens of women’s organizations — tells RFE/RL that in just the first three months of this year, there were 112 reported rape cases involving girls under the age of 17. Most of the reported cases have taken place in Afghanistan’s northern provinces, including Sari Pol, Jowzjan, and Takhar. According to Samimi, there are thousands more such cases across Afghanistan, where “raped women, girls, and even boys have chosen to keep it secret.”

The victims’ silence is driven not only by fear of disgrace, but also because in many cases, the assailants are powerful and well-connected people with ties to armed groups or government officials, according to Afghan rights activists.

But as victims begin to come forward, private television channels have publicized their stories through programs about adolescent girls and their families suffering the after-effects of rape.

In one testimony, the parents of one 11-year-old girl who was raped by five armed men in Sari Pol Province said the entire family wanted to commit suicide because they “were not able to protect their child.”

After this interview and others were broadcast on television and posted on feminist websites, Karzai met with two rape victims and their relatives. Karzai promised to crack down on rape and bring assailants to justice — “to face the country’s most severe punishment,” meaning the death penalty.

High-Level Attention

In Sari Pol, five officials, including the chief of security and high-ranking police officers, were sacked shortly after Karzai’s statement in early August.

In Takhar Province, police arrested six men, including border guard officers, in connection with the rape of the teenage girl.

ANW representatives recently met with Afghan Vice President Ahmad Zia Masood to ask the government to punish offenders and find ways to prevent the crime.

Following the ANW initiative, Afghan state television has started to air weekly programs about rape and other crimes against women. Program producers usually invite police officers, high-ranking authorities, and community leaders to take part in the discussion.

Samimi said the ANW has started a nationwide campaign to put pressure on the authorities not to allow offenders to go free.

Many religious leaders and imams have also agreed to participate in the campaign and address the issue in their sermons. At the same time, the ANW is seeking to raise women’s awareness about their rights. “We tell them to go to the police instead of suffering in silence,” Samimi said.

But the campaign has yet to make an impact on some institutions. “In Sari Pol Province, a family member of a local parliamentarian raped a 12-year-old girl,” Samimi said. “But he walks free because the police wouldn’t dare to arrest him.”

“Afghanistan doesn’t yet have a proper police system. It’s a country coming out of war and there are many problems in such countries,” Samimi said. “We don’t have the rule of law and therefore the [lawmaker] doesn’t allow the court to try his son. He has power and influence, and he threatened the victim’s family that if they complained, there would be consequences.”

In some other cases, jailed rapists simply bribe their way out of prison. And victims’ families worry that assailants could take retribution against the victim for her testimony.

Samimi says such incidents are threatening the rights that Afghan women have won after the fall of the hard-line Taliban. “Some people say the Taliban wouldn’t allow girls to go to school or work, but at least under the Taliban, girls wouldn’t be raped with impunity,” she said.

A very young girl from Jowzjan Province recently came to the local police station along with her mother. She accused a neighbor of raping her and pleaded with the police to punish him.

“What he did to me was wicked,” she told Radio Free Afghanistan from the police station. “I want the government to kill this man. But the government doesn’t listen to me.”

Women’s’ rights activists hope that this young girl and others like her can eventually find justice and feel secure that the government will protect them.

RFE/RL’s Radio Free Afghanistan contributed to this report

Aussies dismiss Afghan abuse charges

Press TV (Iran)
Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:38:42 GMT

The Australian military investigators have cleared its combat troops of beating or humiliating prisoners detained in war-torn Afghanistan.

The inquiry by Colonel David Connery, in a report released Friday, found that medical evidence and witness statements did not support the allegations.” Based on the evidence available to me I do not believe any of the detainees were beaten up, stripped naked or mistreated by the Australian FE (force element) on April 29-30, 2008.”

He added while the men may have been “manhandled” during detention and tactical questioning, the lack of significant physical injuries led him to conclude that the force used against each detainee was “reasonable and humane.”

The accusations related to the treatment of four suspected insurgents, including a 70-year-old man and a 25-year-old with only one leg, who were held in the southern province of Uruzgan following a battle with Taliban fighters.

Among the complaints leveled against the Australian troops were that the detainees were “stripped naked, beaten and mistreated” and that they had been subjected to “too rough” handling.

The Australian Defense Force was forced to investigate the claims after an Afghan army officer objected to the treatment of the prisoners and complained to a senior Afghan national army commander. The young officer had seen a an old man, who was not wearing trousers when captured, and a disabled man being detained and secured overnight in walled pens.

Australia has about 1,000 troops in Afghanistan as part of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Earlier, the Australian military had cleared its troops of any wrongdoing in a battle in Afghanistan last November during which two women and a baby were killed.

The report is bound to worsen relations between the Afghan government and the US alliance forces stationed in the country, analysts say.

The report also came after the Afghan government said on Monday it would renegotiate the terms of US-led troops in the country following hundreds of reports of civilian deaths by torture.The cabinet is also demanding US-led troops halt air strikes on civilians, illegal detentions and unilateral house searches.

According to an official count some 3,200 people have been killed in the violence-wracked country so far this year, most of them civilians.

Australian troops held Taliban suspects in dog pen

By KRISTEN GELINEAU
Associated Press / September 2, 2008

SYDNEY, Australia – Australian special forces in Afghanistan detained four suspected Taliban militants captured in April in pens sometimes used to hold dogs, the defense minister said Tuesday.

Many Muslims consider dogs impure and the head of Australia’s main Islamic group strongly criticized the actions of the special forces. Afghanistan’s ambassador to Australia Amanullah Jayhoon said the reports were troubling but stopped short of criticizing the soldiers.

Australian Defense Minister Joel Fitzgibbon defended the special forces, saying the detainees arrested on April 29 were held in the most secure place available before they were transported to a detention center in the town of Tarin Kowt in southern Uruzgan province. He confirmed the four suspected insurgents were held for 24 hours in a compound occasionally used to house dogs.

“Our people were patrolling far away from our main base in Tarin Kowt near one of our forward operating bases. They did detain people suspected of the worst and most atrocious acts. And they detained them in the most practical way available to them at the time,” he told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

Fitzgibbon said it was misleading to characterize the holding facility as a dog pen.

“They were in a compound I’ve had described to me as a walled compound which I’m sure is used for a variety of purposes,” he told ABC. “I’m advised that the compound is from time to time used to hold dogs, yes. Dogs are a very important part of our operations there.”

The revelation follows complaints by an Afghan soldier about mistreatment of the detainees, who were held following a battle with Taliban fighters. An Australian defense inquiry last week found that medical evidence and witness statements did not support allegations of abuse.

“It is quite appalling that the Australian soldiers are in any way caught up in the inhumane treatment of human beings — irrespective of who they are,” said Ikebal Patel, head of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils. “I think it’s quite despicable that something like that could happen and that the Australians are party to it.”

But the Australian admission may not stir such a negative reaction in Afghanistan, where people are less averse to dogs than in many other Muslim countries. Afghans are accustomed to seeing dogs on the street and dog fighting is a popular pastime in the country.

“It is a matter of concern because … it provides propaganda for the Taliban, and at the same time it is not good to treat a human being inhumanely,” said the Afghan ambassador Jayhoon. “(But) we have not launched any formal protest.”

The Afghan Defense Ministry spokesman and the provincial police chief in Uruzgan, where Australian troops operate, said they had not heard of the allegations. There are 1,000 Australian troops in Afghanistan.

Brig. Brian Dawson, a defense department spokesman, said one of the four detainees was released the following day after it was decided he was not a threat. The three others were handed over to Dutch authorities who manage the Tarin Kowt facility. Dawson said he did not know the detainees’ current whereabouts or status.

Bob Brown, leader of Australia’s opposition Greens party, criticized the Australian troops.

“For Australia to find itself keeping prisoners in dog kennels, dog pens — even overnight — is a big mistake,” he told reporters in Canberra.

__

Associated Press reporter Amir Shah in Kabul contributed to this report.

UN criticizes Afghan decision to free rapists

By AMIR SHAH
Associated Press
August 28, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan – The United Nations has criticized Afghanistan’s government for freeing two men convicted of raping a woman in northern Afghanistan after they served only a portion of their 11-year sentences.

The release of the men will send the wrong message to other perpetrators of violent crimes against women, Norah Niland, the U.N.’s chief human rights officer in Afghanistan, said in a statement this week.

Three brothers who were fighters for a regional militia commander were convicted of raping a woman in the village of Ruyi Du Ab in the northern province of Samangan in 2005, Afghan officials said.

The militia commander, named Karim, was a stepbrother of the woman’s husband, said Habib Rahman, the head of criminal investigations in Samangan. Rahman said the rape was carried out because of tribal disputes.

After raping the woman and cutting her with a knife, the brothers took her pants and hoisted them on top of a mosque, Rahman said. They forced her to walk home partly naked, he said.

Shortly afterward, Karim went into hiding. The three were convicted and sentenced in 2006 to 11 years in prison, according to the provincial governor, Enayatullah Enayat.

Their sentence was upheld by Afghanistan’s Supreme Court, the U.N. said. One of the brothers died in custody, Rahman said.

Afghan officials said the mother of the rapists wrote to President Hamid Karzai after the death of one of her sons, asking him to pardon the other two. They were freed in March, Enayat said.

They are now “back in the neighborhood where the crime was perpetrated and where the victim and her family continue to live,” Niland said in a statement this week.

Although the circumstances of the release are not clear, “this is clearly an injustice against the victim, the victim’s family and all Afghan women,” Niland said in a statement.

But the U.N.’s Niland said freeing the convicts sends the wrong message to other crime victims. “Such injustice can only promote a culture of impunity for violence perpetrated against women,” Niland said.

Karzai was traveling abroad with his chief spokesman, and his office was not available to comment Thursday, but the U.N. said the Afghan government was investigating the circumstances of the release.

___

Associated Press writer Fisnik Abrashi in Kabul contributed to this report.

Afghan inquiry into freed rapists

Wednesday, 27 August 2008 06:44 UK

By Kate Clark
BBC News

An Afghan woman in Kabul on August 25, 2008
Human rights groups say women in Afghanistan suffer abuse with impunity

The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, has announced a full investigation into the case of two rapists who have been freed on a presidential pardon.

The case was raised by the BBC after it discovered that the victim, Sara, had been forced into hiding by the release of the men.

Sara and husband Dilawar only found out the rapists had been freed when they saw them walking around their village.

The case highlights the endemic corruption in the Afghan legal system.

‘Questionable justice’

Dilawar said they were stunned, particularly when they found out President Karzai had apparently pardoned the rapists.

“Our appeal to the president is how on earth a rapist who was involved in disappearance of my son was released. What a decision is this? What a justice system is this?” he said.

The president’s office has refused to speculate on how the pardon could have been signed.

But the suspicion must be that corruption – which is widespread across the Afghan justice system – has managed to penetrate the president’s office.

A spokesman for Mr Karzai told the BBC that the acting attorney general would lead a commission of investigation.

“We are taking this with extreme seriousness,” he said.

It had been a horrifying case which started with the, as yet, unsolved disappearance of the couple’s son.

Dilawar said after his wife publicly accused a local commander of the disappearance, she was gang-raped, knifed with a bayonet and left half naked to find her way home.

Sara alleges the commander used connections to escape justice and he was released by a local court.

But three other men were eventually put on trial, found guilty of rape and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

One of them died and the other two were given a presidential pardon in May.

AFGHANISTAN: Food prices fuelling sex work in north?

Sex work is on the rise due to high food prices, unemployment and lack of economic opportunities for vulnerable women, women’s rights activists say
MAZAR-I-SHARRIF, 16 July 2008 (IRIN) – High food prices, drought, unemployment and lack of socio-economic opportunities are pushing some women and young girls in northern Afghanistan into commercial sex work, women’s rights activists and several affected women told IRIN.

“I have no way of feeding my children other than by doing this disgusting job,” said 27-year-old Nasima (not her real name), a commercial sex worker in Balkh Province.

Clad in a blue `burqa’, Najiba, a sex worker in Mazar-i-Sharrif, the provincial capital of Balkh Province, said she had been pushed into sex work after food prices started rising dramatically in November 2007.

“I am a widow and I have to feed my five children. I am illiterate and no one will give me a job. I hate to be a prostitute but if I stop doing this job my children will starve to death,” Najiba told IRIN.

Most women who turn to sex work are illiterate widows who lack professional skills to find alternative employment, according to Malalai Usmani, head of a local women’s rights non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Balkh.

“Extreme poverty and the obligation to feed their dependents have increased prostitution among women,” Usmani said.

Severe penalties

In Afghanistan sexual relations between a man and a woman outside marriage are considered a serious crime and offenders can face death penalty and/or a lengthy prison sentence, depending on their marital status and other circumstances.

Every year hundreds of female sex workers are sent to prison for allegedly having “unlawful sexual relationships”, according to women’s rights activists such as Usmani.

“This [sex work] is an abhorrent deed and an appalling crime. We encourage and help security forces to arrest and punish women involved in prostitution,” said Fariba Majid, director of the Women’s Affairs Department in Balkh Province.

Majid acknowledged that many female sex workers have no other option, but warned that the country’s Islamic laws and conservative culture meant prostitution was “unacceptable”.

Sex workers are also exposed to stigma and discrimination. “We cannot live in one place for long,” said a middle-aged sex worker who refused to be identified. “We move as soon as local people become suspicious of us.”

“People will spit on us and no one will interact with us if they know about our work,” she added.

Photo: Parwin Arizo/IRIN
Most sex workers are unaware of the risk of sexually transmittable diseases and HIV, health workers say
Poor HIV/AIDS awareness

Afghanistan launched its first ever national HIV/AIDS control programme in 2003. At least 436 HIV/AIDS cases have been confirmed over the past five years, according to the Ministry of Public Health.

Health specialists warn that sex workers, intravenous drug users, truck drivers and other vulnerable groups have very little knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases and preventive measures.

At least three female sex workers interviewed by IRIN said they paid no attention to HIV, and had not used condoms to avoid infection and/or the spread of the virus.

“I don’t know about HIV/AIDS,” said a female sex worker who preferred anonymity. “I have not seen any of my clients using a condom.”

Saif-ur-Rehman, director of the National HIV/AIDS Control Programme in Kabul, said there was a widespread lack of awareness about sexually transmitted diseases and HIV among commercial sex workers.

“We will launch a project to boost awareness and introduce preventive measures among sex workers hopefully in September [2008],” Rehman told IRIN, adding that the distribution of free condoms would be part of the project. “It’s a very sensitive project and we will try to avoid misconceptions that it supports or encourages prostitution in Afghanistan.”

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Sex trade thrives in Afghanistan

By ALISA TANG
Associated Press
June 14, 2008

KABUL, Afghanistan – The girl was 11 when she was molested by a man with no legs.

The man paid her $5. And that was how she started selling sex.

Afghanistan is one of the world’s most conservative countries, yet its sex trade appears to be thriving. Sex is sold most obviously at brothels full of women from China who serve both Afghans and foreigners. Far more controversial are Afghan prostitutes, who stay underground in a society that pretends they don’t exist.

Customs meant to keep women “pure” have not stopped prostitution. Girls are expected to remain virgins until their wedding nights, so some prostitutes have only anal sex.

Police make two to three prostitution arrests each week, according to Zia ul-Haq, the chief investigator in the Interior Ministry’s department of sexual crimes. They are often the casualties of nearly three decades of brutal war and a grinding poverty that forces most Afghans to live on less than $1 a day.

“Prostitution is in every country that has poverty, and it exists in Afghanistan,” says women’s rights activist Orzala Ashraf. “But society has black glasses and ignores these problems. Tradition is honor, and if we talk about these taboos, then we break tradition.”

The girl is now 13, and her features have just sharpened into striking beauty. She speaks four languages — the local languages of Pashtu and Dari, the Urdu she picked up as a refugee in Pakistan and the English she learned in a $2.40-a-month course she pays for herself in Kabul. She is the breadwinner in her family of 10.

She does not know what a condom is. She has not heard of AIDS.

The Associated Press learned her story in a dozen meetings over four months, as well as interviews with police and aid workers. For months she insisted she was a “good girl” — a virgin. But in March, she confessed to having anal sex with men for years, starting with the legless beggar.

She looked down as she spoke, her face and hands sooty from car exhaust. She tucked her hair repeatedly under her head scarf.

The girl grew up in Pakistan, where her family fled during a bloody civil war in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. She cleaned cars for money.

Five years ago, her family and a flood of other refugees returned to Afghanistan after the U.S.-led invasion toppled the Taliban regime. But her father could earn only $40 a month doing various odd jobs.

So she sold chewing gum and newspapers and cleaned car windows in the muddy, potholed streets of Kabul. She made about $3 a day.

That was where she met Uncle Lang, a nickname that literally means Uncle Legless.

Uncle Lang was a land mine victim. When the girl and a friend brought him tea and food, he forced himself upon them, police say.

“I didn’t know anything about sex,” she says. “But it happened.”

It’s hard to know how many other women in Afghanistan are prostitutes because of the extreme secrecy around the issue. A University of Manitoba report last September estimated about 900 female sex workers in Kabul.

A 2005 report by the German aid group Ora International drew data from 122 female sex workers, of whom less than 1 percent knew about AIDS. The youngest was 14.

Prostitutes in Afghanistan include scores of Chinese women serving Western customers who work for security firms, companies and aid groups in Afghanistan. Many of the women say they were tricked into the trade by middlemen who promised them respectable jobs, but Gen. Ali Shah Paktiawal, head of Kabul’s criminal investigations, denies this, saying: “They come here of their own will.”

The shame of prostitution in Afghanistan is intense.

“In our culture, it is very, very bad,” said Soraya Sobhrang, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commissioner for women’s affairs.

Under the Afghan penal code, prostitution is often considered adultery, which is punishable by five to 15 years in prison. Under Islamic law, married prostitutes can be stoned to death.

Some prostitutes are forced into the sex trade by their families. The Ora report said 39 percent of the sex workers interviewed found clients through their relatives — including 17 percent through their mothers and 15 percent through their husbands.

For many girls, there is little recourse.

“They think that if they tell us the truth, we will return them to their families, and their families will kill them, or that we will send them to an institution and they will be put in prison,” says Jamila Ghairat of the aid organization Women for Afghan Women. “The girls are afraid of their families, the government and everyone.”

In some cases, it is families that pimp out the girls. At one family-run brothel, the oldest girl was a 15-year-old, orphaned when her parents died in rocket attacks in Kabul. A relative had married her off to a 9-year-old boy whose father was a pimp. She ran away three times, but each time her father-in-law bribed police to bring her back. She finally escaped to the human rights commission.

Makeshift brothels exist all over Kabul, but they are always moving, says Esmatullah Nekzad, a policeman formerly with the force’s Department of Moral Crimes. The clients are mostly Afghan men.

“Most Afghan men have this hobby — young men from about 16 to 30 years of age,” says Nekzad. “You go, you take their phone number, then you tell your friends. It’s all by telephone.”

The girls stay in one place for anything from five days to three months, until neighbors learn of their business.

That’s what happened with the girl Uncle Lang raped. In November, he trafficked her and several others to the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif to beg and sell sex. Within days the neighbors became suspicious and tipped off police.

Police raided the place and arrested the prostitutes. Uncle Lang fled.

For a few weeks, the girl went daily to a women’s aid organization. She arrived in the morning, worked in the kitchen and had an hour of counseling every day. She left at 4 p.m.

Her hands became clean and soft. She was happier. She started praying to ask Allah forgiveness for her sins.

At first she said her family did not know she was selling sex, and her mother would kill her. But during the counseling sessions, she let it slip that her parents encouraged her to work with Uncle Lang. When she stopped seeing him, they sent her 10-year-old brother instead.

One day, an aid worker spotted her with Uncle Lang on a popular street lined with kebab and ice cream shops.

The aid worker confronted her. A day later, the girl stopped going to the organization.

She has not been seen or heard from since.

Afghanistan’s Epidemic of Child Rape

Sunday, Aug. 17, 2008

By Aryn Baker / Sheberghan

Sweeta tucked her hands between her thighs and began to rock as she told her story. The details emerged in a monotone, her face expressionless. Last winter she had just stepped out of her house in Afghanistan’s northern province of Jowzjan to fetch water from the well when a neighbor approached her. He told her that her father was ill and had been taken to the hospital. He offered her a ride. When she refused, he threw her into his car, his hand over her mouth so no one would hear her scream. He took her to a room in the nearby army garrison. “And then he took off his pants,” she says. “He raped me.” Sweeta is only 11 years old.

Child rape is on the rise in Afghanistan’s northern provinces, part of a general increase in crime that is largely overshadowed by an equally disturbing spread of insurgency. Government officials say only a handful of child rapes have been reported across Afghanistan in the past few months, but human rights organizations say the toll is much higher. Maghferat Samimi, head of the Afghan Human Rights Organization in Jowzjan, says that over the past two months she has interviewed 19 victims from the three northern provinces she serves. The youngest victim was 2 1/2 years old. Samimi carries the little girl’s picture in her mobile phone, ready to show to anyone who might be able to stop what she calls a new plague on her country.

She is not the only one bringing the crimes to light. In this conservative Islamic country where a girl’s virginity is valued above all else, rape has long been considered something shameful, something to be hidden at all costs. But as the incidents increase, families are starting to speak up, risking dishonor in order to bring justice. Families of teenage victims are airing their tales on national TV, hoping, like Samimi, that somebody will be able to do something. So far, little has been done.

The Interior Ministry has announced that it will crack down on sexual assault. During a recent press conference, President Hamid Karzai said that rapists should face “the country’s most severe punishment.” Yet on the same day, a man charged with the rape of a 7-year-old boy in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif escaped from prison. Three policemen, thought to have assisted his escape in exchange for a payoff, have been detained; the man has not been recaptured.

It is not uncommon for criminals to bribe their way out of prison in Afghanistan. But in the north, where warlords still command private militias and enrich their armies by running lucrative smuggling routes, impunity is rife. Police often refuse to register cases against well-known criminals, for fear of retaliation and more often because they are on the take. When Amruddin’s 13-year-old daughter was kidnapped in Sar-i-pul province last year, he had to pay for the local police officer’s fuel in order to get the officer to visit the café where she had last been seen. The officer was no help. When Amruddin — who, like most poor farmers in Afghanistan, only has one name — finally found his daughter a week later, she identified the police officer as one of her eight rapists. Three other suspects worked for the village strongman. When their case came to the local prosecutor, he dismissed it, saying there wasn’t enough evidence. More likely, says Amruddin, there wasn’t enough of
a bribe. Amruddin says that in order to raise enough money for all the necessary bribes, he sold his two other daughters, ages 9 and 11, for $5,000. “I had to sell them in order to pursue this case,” he says. “What else can I do? I am not a pimp, a coward, to let these men get away with what they did. I will sell all of my children if that is what it takes to get justice.”

Corruption in Afghanistan’s justice sector is often shrugged off by international donors who argue that security and development must take a higher priority. Some take it as the price of doing business, saying that rich countries can’t expect Afghanistan to meet Western standards of transparency. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has just endorsed a plan that would give $20 billion to build up Afghanistan’s military and police forces. But what is the use of improving the police sector when the judicial system is unable to successfully prosecute criminals? A few countries are beginning to address this problem. Norway has just announced a $6 million contribution to Afghanistan’s justice-sector reform program, in addition to the $21 million already donated by other countries. The fund will cover legal reform, training, court and office rehabilitation, computers and legal assistance.

What Afghanistan needs, says Major General Robert Cone, who oversees the U.S. effort to train Afghanistan’s security forces, is a surge of lawyers to take on the country’s justice system, just as the international community has sent soldiers to mentor the police and army. “Good policing needs a good judicial system,” says Cone. “I think that a similar effort to the police effort needs to be launched on a similar scope and scale to address the justice issues. We have some real problems with corruption in the prisons here. There are 10 links between arrest and putting someone in jail. The police own the first four links in the process, but if you fix the first four links without addressing the next six, it won’t work.”

Sweeta’s family knows that revealing the details of her ordeal may condemn her to an unmarried life marked by shame and poverty. But they are not seeking money, only justice. After six months of waiting for resolution, Sweeta’s sister Saleha has given up on the government and is starting to wonder if the past seven years of foreign intervention have brought any progress at all to Afghanistan. “If the Taliban were still here, that rapist would have already been executed by now. It would have been a lesson for all,” she says. “If there is no law, and the government does not listen to people’s complaints, then it is better to go back to the Taliban era. At least then we had justice.” — With reporting by Ali Safi / Sheberghan

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^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ KABUL, Aug 10 (Reuters) – Afghan authorities were checking on Sunday reports more than a dozen civilians were killed by a foreign forces air strike in an area to the northeast of the capital, an official said.

Civilian deaths caused by foreign troops while hunting Taliban insurgents are highly sensitive for the Western-backed Afghan government and its allies as the incidents feed popular resentment.

The latest reported incident occurred on Saturday after a group of foreign soldiers came under attack by suspected Taliban insurgents in Tagab district of Kapisa province, an official in Kabul said, quoting provincial authorities.

‘We do not have a lot of details now and are checking the reports saying more than 12 civilians were killed and 18 more wounded,’ the official said on condition of anonymity.

Other officials could not be reached immediately for comment about the reports of deaths.

Some 400 non-combatants have been killed so far this year during operations of NATO and U.S.-led forces as well as Afghan troops, according to Afghan officials and aid agencies.

Tagab lies some 90 kms to the northeast of Kabul and is located to the east of Bagram air base, the hub of operation of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan.

Troops from NATO and the U.S.-led military have clashed with suspected militants on several occasions in Kapisa in recent months and provincial officials in the past have complained of some civilian deaths.

(Reporting by Sayed Salahuddin; Editing Jerry Norton)