Take me to your leader

The US is hoping that Taliban and Al-Qa'eda prisoners will provide a "treasure trove" of intelligence. But at what expense? Nyier Abdou tracks the fate of thousands of war prisoners netted in Afghanistan
Less than a month ago, human rights activists, political analysts and aghast war correspondents were zeroing in on the seemingly forgotten Geneva Conventions -- most importantly, the Third Geneva Convention, which governs the treatment of prisoners of war (PoWs) under the so-called laws of war. Today the bloody quelling of a prisoner revolt at the Qala-i Jhangi fort near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i Sharif in late November, in which hundreds of prisoners died in three days of battle with Northern Alliance troops while US military "smart bombs" rained from the sky, is old news.
Calls for an inquiry into what started the uprising and whether the use of force against the prisoners was disproportionate were brushed aside by the US and Britain. London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International (AI), which has led the call for an urgent inquiry, claims that this kind of insouciance on the part of the military powers acting in Afghanistan sets a poor precedent for the treatment of PoWs in Afghanistan. On Friday, US-led coalition spokesman Kenton Keith offered the first estimate of prisoners detained in the course of the three-month-long war in Afghanistan. Speaking in Islamabad, Keith said that some 7,000 prisoners were in the hands of anti-Taliban forces or the US military. Another 200 are being held in Pakistan.
A tally of all these prisoners is difficult, but can be pulled together from various reports. Michael Kleiner, spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in Kabul, told Al-Ahram Weekly that to date, over 1,700 detainees have been recorded by the ICRC in over 30 places of detention throughout Afghanistan. The ICRC has also begun registration of prisoners at Shiberghan Central Prison, 75 miles outside the northern city of Mazar-i Sharif, where more than 3,000 detainees are being kept in a facility meant to accommodate 200.
The US military has eight detainees sequestered on the USS Peleliu, a warship in the Indian Ocean. Among these eight are the American John Walker Lindh and an Australian, David Hicks, both converts to Islam who were fighting for the Taliban. At the airport in Kandahar, US Marines have constructed a rough-and-ready detention centre, capable of holding up to 120 prisoners, but reports this week placed only 16 prisoners at the airport. A team of eight FBI agents arrived at the airport facility last week to begin interrogations of the detainees. These suspects are the pawns the US is hoping to move deftly enough to capture the king: Osama Bin Laden. Given this aim, the more prisoners, the merrier -- the more morsels of information and independent leads regarding the whereabouts of Bin Laden, the more likely it is the US will get its man. At Bagram air base, outside Kabul, US forces are apparently converting an abandoned hangar to accommodate more prisoners.
By this count, the US has 24 prisoners in its direct custody. Some 2,000 are still unaccounted for, leaving open the question of who is responsible should reports of inhumane conditions and human rights abuses prove true. Shiberghan falls under the authority of Uzbek warlord Abdurrashid Dostum. Rewarded this week for his service in the US-led war with an appointment as deputy defence minister in the new interim administration, Dostum has been repeatedly singled out by human rights organisations like AI and the New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) as a war criminal.
In cases of human rights infractions against prisoners of war, the 1949 Geneva Conventions obviously apply. But who is seeing to it that they are being observed? Human rights law expert David Weissbrodt told the Weekly that every state party to the Geneva Conventions (to which both the US and Afghanistan are signatories) has the responsibility "not only to respect, but to ensure respect for its obligations." Weissbrodt, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and co-author of International Human Rights: Law, Policy and Process, explained that the US is "to some extent responsible for the conduct of its allies in Afghanistan." He added: "It may be that the US is also responsible as the leader of the military coalition in Afghanistan."
An HRW backgrounder released this month notes that under international law, "government officials responsible for sending persons to a place where they are tortured could eventually be prosecuted for complicity in the tortuous acts." One US official quoted in a Los Angeles Times article on 20 December offered the threat of turning prisoners over to Afghan opposition fighters as one way to exert pressure on prisoners during interrogation.
The ICRC, in many ways the silent arbiter of armed conflict, has been given the most extensive access to prisoners, but the agency is, as a rule, tight-lipped about its investigations. The ICRC's Kleiner noted that international humanitarian law ensures that detainees are held in "acceptable" conditions and are not submitted to moral or physical torture, but he emphasised that the organisation "intervenes [with] the authorities confidentially and does not discuss publicly the content of its interventions."
The savage Qala-i Jhangi uprising confirmed in many people's minds that pro-Taliban and foreign Al- Qa'eda forces are not only capable of brutal surprise attacks, even in detention, but are also dogged in their determination to achieve martyrdom. This belief was only reinforced by last week's daring mutiny by Al- Qa'eda captives being transferred to a prison in Pakistan's Northwest Frontier Province, which left some 17 dead. Because of the Taliban's pitiless regime, and because the Al- Qa'eda terrorist network is believed to be behind the 11 September attacks in the US, it is difficult to muster up general interest in these prisoners' welfare outside of a hard-core group of dedicated human rights activists. A public hardened by the terrifying September attacks and, in many cases, only now learning the details of the Taliban's oppressive rule, is unwilling to spare a few heartstrings for prisoners they see as isolated agents of an insidious enemy.
This tough stance can only be maintained so long as the prisoners remain nameless, faceless masses -- the thousands upon thousands of hostile forces now safely tucked away. In many cases, however, there is little to distinguish these fighters from those fighting under the banner of the Northern Alliance or the anti-Taliban militias in the south, save an arbitrary affiliation. In a country devastated by decades of war, fighting has become a way of life; ideology and loyalties come after.
The case of John Walker Lindh is a prime example of how putting a face and a story to a fighter can change public sentiment. In the US, the debate is raging whether Lindh should be tried for treason. But if Lindh's fate is worthy of debate, so is that of his hypothetical cellmate, say, an Arab or Pakistani enlisted in the amorphous cause of jihad. A recent report issued by the New York-based Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR) notes that assuming Lindh and other foreign fighters are not suspected of war crimes -- provable acts such as killing unarmed prisoners of war, targeting civilians or rape -- there is no basis on which to try them. Naturally, a non-citizen cannot be tried for treason, so it seems that the average prisoner of war -- the bulk of the anonymous 7,000 -- should be released following the end of hostilities in Afghanistan.
The US is in uncharted waters, and legal experts are following how it will define these prisoners closely. Presumably, the US is seeking to separate the low-level Taliban and Al- Qa'eda fighters -- ordinary folk who simply joined up -- and the terrorist masterminds. Even assuming that low-level fighters are released, and even making the leap of faith that Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar are caught (alive), the question now becomes: where will senior Al-Qa'eda members be tried? The US administration is still thrashing out the details of the military commissions ordered by President Bush, but human rights expert Weissbrodt is quick to outline numerous concerns raised by the closed trials: the lack of confrontations and cross-examination, the secret evidence, the crucial lack of the burden of proof "beyond a reasonable doubt." He noted that it is unlikely a military tribunal for a non-US citizen comprised of US officers "could ever be perceived as impartial."
The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights strongly advocates the use of US criminal courts, ruling out military commissions as unable to maintain the "core values of due process." Noting that trial by military commission "lacks international legitimacy," the LCHR contends that this "undermines the ability of the US to protest when other countries create military or secret courts that violate basic human rights." A precedent has already been set with the trial of those accused of planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which was prosecuted in a criminal court.
The obvious route is an ad hoc tribunal set up by the United Nations Security Council along the lines of those dealing with the conflicts in Rwanda and the Former Yugoslavia. While this choice would lend international credibility to the trials, it is unlikely that the US would promote a UN tribunal for reasons similar to those that fuelled its initially vehement stance against the creation of the International Criminal Court. An autonomous international tribunal would presumably leave room to try war crimes in which US forces are connected, for example, the Qala-i Jhangi revolt, or the cover-up of crimes by proxy forces. Ad hoc tribunals are also extremely costly, cumbersome to set up and set perimeters for and, as a rule, do not seek the death penalty. The US, having grown accustomed to total control since 11 September, is unlikely to cede so much authority in claiming the trophies of its success.
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