By Sayed Salahuddin Mon
Dec 26, 6:30 AM ET
KABUL (Reuters) - An Afghan former intelligence chief
went on trial on Monday accused of war crimes and torture during communist rule in the 1980s, the first such trial to be held
in Afghanistan after decades of warfare.
Assadullah Sarwari has been detained since 1992, when Mujahideen (holy warrior)
factions overthrew a Soviet-backed communist regime.
Prosecutors said Sarwari was arrested for conspiring against Afghanistan's
Islamic government and was guilty of illegal mass arrests and executions.
Now 64 and sporting a short grey and black beard, he served as head of intelligence
when thousands of people were killed for opposing the government.
Appearing before the national security court, Sarwari said his detention
was illegal and he had no connection with war crimes.
"I ... strongly reject the charges ... (and) consider them a political conspiracy,"
he told the court.
Sarwari was given 20 days to prepare an affidavit.
Officials said he would be sentenced to death if found guilty.
After heading the intelligence network, he served as deputy prime minister
and Afghanistan's ambassador to Yemen.
His trial was the first for alleged war crimes in Afghanistan where successive
regimes have been accused of abuses in 25 years of war that began with a Soviet invasion in 1979.
WAR CRIMES
The trial is taking place a week after President Hamid Karzai's government
adopted a plan to address war crimes and other human rights abuses committed during the conflict.
It commits the government and the international community to the setting
up a five-member task force by the end of the year to draw up a plan to deal with the abuses.
The task force, to comprise nominees from Afghanistan's Independent Human
Rights Commission and the United Nations and three from Karzai, will have until the end of the 2007 to present its proposal.
Rights groups have welcomed the fact that the action plan ruled out amnesties
for serious abuses -- a response to concerns that perpetrators in Karzai's government and a new parliament inaugurated this
month might try to block prosecutions.
In October, a Dutch court jailed two former police officers of Afghanistan's
former communist regime for 12 and nine years after convicting them of war crimes and torture while serving with intelligence
services.
The two were Hesamuddin Hesam, the former head of the Khad secret police
between 1983 and 1991, and its head of interrogation, Habibullah Jalalzoy.
Dutch prosecutors estimated 200,000 political opponents were tortured by
various branches of the Afghan security apparatus under communist rule and about 50,000 died.
http://www.americans-working-together.com/id107.html
.
.
