Nov 14 2001 – U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson said on Tuesday she was worried about Afghan civilians in cities falling to the Northern Alliance, some of whose leaders had a history of rights abuses.
Speaking as U.S.-backed anti-Taliban fighters from the Northern Alliance entered the Afghan capital Kabul, she urged the United States and Britain to make it very clear that civilian massacres and human rights violations would not be tolerated.
“When territory has changed hands in recent years in Afghanistan, there has been a terrible massacre of civilians, raping of woman, a retaliatory sort of destruction by whoever comes in to take a town or a city,” she told a news conference.
The United Nations had been gathering evidence of massacres committed by the ruling Taliban and the Northern Alliance, a coalition made up mostly of ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks.
“A number of those who are leading the Northern Alliance have very bad records of violations of human rights and I’m extremely concerned that they might be part of a future power structure,” she added.
“I look particularly to the United States, to the U.K. and other countries that are involved in the military strategy to make it very clear that there will be no toleration of massacres, or rapes, or abuse of civilians and if it happens there will be justice against those perpetrators,” she said.
Washington had appealed to the Northern Alliance not to enter Kabul, where it is deeply unpopular among the capital’s mainly Pashtun population and remembered for bloody power struggles in the 1990s that killed about 50,000 residents.
Its fighters moved into Kabul on Tuesday in defiance of U.S. pressure.
Robinson, who was in New Delhi for a conference on human rights, said Afghan civilians should not become the indirect victims of the September 11 attacks on the United States.
Its people, suffering from two decades of conflict and several years of drought and famine, must be allowed to decide for themselves who should run their country. Women, who make up more than half the population, must have a say, she said.
“We have to really, for once, care about the civilians in Afghanistan,” she said.