06/06/07 – Elsie DeLaere – The Scott Horton Show

All right, my friends, welcome back to Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton, and my guest today is Elise Dilawe from Amnesty International.
They've just put out their world report, and my interest today is finding out all about the human rights situation in Afghanistan over the last year.
Welcome to the show, Elise.
Pardon me.
Elise?
Elsie.
Is it?
Elsie.
Yeah.
Pardon me.
That's okay.
Welcome to the show.
How are you?
I'm doing just great.
Thank you.
Okay, good.
It's a very interesting, very sad report on Afghanistan in Amnesty International's new country report.
You can find the link, by the way, from thestressblog.com.
Ken blogged it just two or three days ago, and you can find the link to the country reports there.
And I guess, can you just sort of give us an overall of what is the situation like for the average guy living, say, I don't know, on the outskirts of Kabul?
Well, it's not very hopeful at this point, from all that I can tell.
By the way, I have been in Afghanistan five times since the summer of 2004.
I do not represent Amnesty International when I go there.
I am a teacher trainer in the province of Ghazni, which is southeast of Kabul.
One quote that really worried me on my latest trip this April came from some of the female teachers that attended my training, and they were saying that they don't feel hopeful, they feel like poverty is continuous, they don't get paid often for the work they do.
And they've become more sympathetic of the Taliban again, when I asked them, why would they feel that?
I mean, as women, they are now able to teach, they said they prefer to stay home, feel safe, and rather than teach under the circumstances as they are right now.
So female teachers who, from my understanding, would be some of the primary targets of the Taliban if they were in power, they prefer the Taliban now.
I can't say this is a general statement, but that was a quote, which alarmed me greatly, because I've been working with these teachers over the last three years.
Female teachers are definitely a target for the Taliban, and I think it is important for me to state here that, aside from the human rights report that was released some weeks ago, that there was also a report released which concerned the Taliban by Amnesty International.
This was a very important report which balances the criticism, so to speak, of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.
The Taliban is definitely targeting women who are officials from the government, and that includes teachers.
Some teachers have been beheaded, 230 schools have been burned.
Human rights activists, especially the female ones, have been receiving death threats.
There was a famous woman, the regional director for the Ministry of Women's Affairs in Kandahar, was killed last year.
So it's very tenuous.
It sounds like, when the Americans came, they said, okay, anybody with the slightest bit of liberalism, come out and take part in the new government, we'll help you, we'll protect you.
They did that, but we failed to protect them, so now we've just put all these people in danger for being collaborators with us and for acting Western and acting like the foreigners, right?
Well, I'm not sure if I agree with that.
I think that the U.S. indeed has very close ties and a lot of power over the government there.
President Karzai is unable to exercise his power outside Kabul.
He's often called the mayor of Kabul, as opposed to the president of the country, because he's not been able to consolidate his power beyond the capital.
I think that in terms of the U.S. assistance there, that a lot of things have happened for the good, and there's been a definite increase in participation in more democratic ways, and that includes women are able to participate in jobs and also in the government.
But I think that outside the big cities like Kabul, there are two main kinds of things going on.
In the Northeast, we see a rise of warlordism.
These are people who the CIA backed in the 1980s against the Russians and were trained by the Russians.
They're generally called the people of the Northern Alliance, and they have established major powers in the North and the East of the country.
And then in the South and – Northwest, I should say – and in the South and East, we see a resurgent Taliban, which has been helped in some detrimental way by the conduct of the U.S. and its allied forces there, and that conduct includes the human rights abuses within their secret detention centers, like the Salt Pit, which is in Kandahar, and also its forwarding bases, where members of human rights organizations like ourselves are not allowed to go and check what really is going on.
Now, can I stop you there and ask you to tell me about the Salt Pit?
The Salt Pit is known as a secret prison that was operated.
I don't know if it's still being used right now, but that is where detainees have been rumored to have been severely abused and tortured by the security forces of Afghanistan, the secret police.
And you say that these prisons and their notoriety, and also things like airstrikes that kill civilians – that this is helping the Taliban's resurgence.
Unfortunately, it is very hard to understand the conflict.
Here we have the resurgent Taliban and the Afghan army, together with the U.S. and native forces, or ISAF, they're trying to get rid of the Taliban, basically, but the Taliban often hides out in civilian homes, especially in Kandahar and Helmand, and when they get bombed, a lot of civilians get killed in those incidences, but those are innocent civilians, and that has really raised anger towards the U.S. and international forces there, even to the extent that President Karzai has demanded that the U.S. and international forces take much greater care in how they suspected the Taliban.
This may be outside your area of expertise or opinion-stating, but from my Texas point of view, it seems to me like we supposedly won that war back in December of 2001, and all airstrikes should have ended then.
What does this have to do with an air war?
There's parts of Afghanistan that our soldiers can't go without having planes clear the path for them?
Yeah, unfortunately, that seems to be the situation.
I think that when the Taliban moves within the civilian population and hides out, that it's very difficult for the U.S. and allied forces to attack them, basically.
I'm not sure if I can say more to that question.
I do want to correct something I said about the salt pit that's actually in Kabul.
The other site that's been renowned for abuse is called the Discotheque.
It's connected to the Bagram Detention Facility, and that's north of Kabul.
And this Bagram facility, in the report it says, the Amnesty International Country Report, it says that there are 500 people still being held there while they're waiting to be transferred to Guantanamo Bay sometime in 2007.
Has that already happened, or do you know?
No, I don't think that has happened.
I have first-hand reports from a couple of African-American people who worked at Bagram as translators for the U.S. Army, and they did not like what they saw there.
The report from Amnesty International, March 1, 2006, says that detainees have said they were stripped naked, hooded, humiliated, handcuffed and shackled for days, forced to maintain painful postures for hours at a time, and subjected to sleep deprivations.
Apparently conditions for many of the detainees involved have improved since the latter part of 2005.
It's also important to know that eight Afghans are known to have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan.
What happens all the time in there?
The hundreds of detainees that are now in U.S. controlled facilities have no recourse to human rights safeguards, so they cannot challenge their arrest or detention.
Some have been detained without charge or trial for more than a year, and have no access to lawyers or relatives.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has been able to visit the detainees in Bagram, but not in the forward operating bases or other places which have not been acknowledged of detention.
It is a very, very sore point for many people in Afghanistan, because every time one does get released back because they have not found that they were actually guilty, a whole community turns against the U.S.
It's one of those unfortunate side effects of detaining people that have not been found guilty.
Right, yes.
I remember a news story maybe a year and a half or two years ago now about an old man I believe in his 80s who was released from Guantanamo Bay and sent back to Afghanistan.
Turns out he was innocent after all.
Oh yeah, it's a very, very sad story.
Just imagine if that was for any of us, anybody in the audience, or for you or me or anybody, imagine they arrest your father, your grandfather.
They hold him for all intents and purposes, hold him in complete legal limbo under torture, and then they say, oh, sorry, this guy was innocent.
Here's your 80-year-old grandfather back.
These are places, I guess unlike suburbs in Austin, Texas, these are places where you're talking small villages where everybody knows everybody, very tight-knit communities, and this is the kind of thing that causes rage.
How would we feel if somebody kidnapped our grandfather for a few years and tortured him and then gave him back and said, oh, sorry?
Yeah, this is unfortunately what has happened.
The mood in the country towards the US is increasingly souring.
I think when I first went there, and that was in 2004, I felt that people were still very optimistic, very supportive of our presence there, but that has changed dramatically over the last few years, and that worries me.
Also, people in President Karzai's government are now more and more opposed to his policies, and they are establishing what's called the United National Front.
They would like to reduce the power of President Karzai and move to a parliamentary system.
Really?
And this is a guy who has basically no power anyway, but I guess over the rest of the government he does, and so these are people inside the Karzai government who are moving against him.
Yeah.
I think we're going to hear more about that because that's been kind of omitted in the media.
There's also a lot of talk within the opposition group in Karzai's government about dealing with the Taliban, which would effectively give the Taliban power in some of the southern provinces.
Not so good.
Right, yeah.
We've heard of that, some of the models for compromise.
In fact, let me ask you about that, because I've never been to Afghanistan, I don't know anything about it, but it seems to me that basically we have a British-drawn border here, and that really what we're talking about is Pashtunistan or something like that, and that basically there is no other power among the Pashtuns for them to have self-rule other than the Taliban.
It's either that or they're ruled by exiles who've just come back under American occupation or Tajiks or someone else.
The Taliban was primarily made out of people belonging to the Pashto tribe, which is a big powerful tribe.
The Taliban, however, has been operating from across the border in Pakistan, and by most people who know about politics there, it seems that the role of Pakistan in supporting the Taliban is one that needs to change.
The U.S. government, however, must find itself in a very precarious situation.
On the one hand, they are supporting the government of President Musharraf in Pakistan, because after all they have the nuclear weapons and they want to appease him, and at the same time they also want to pressure him on reining in the Taliban, especially as they are now operating pretty much in their own fiefdoms in the northwestern province frontiers and in Balochistan.
The people of Afghanistan always say that the Taliban is not representative of who they are.
It really is just a foreign thing to know about.
They are very much aware that the Taliban was made out of young men who lived in refugee camps in Pakistan during the Mujahideen Wars, and they were then swept up into what's called the madrassas, the religious schools, and they were trained by the Pakistani Muslim extremists and were sent to Afghanistan to become what's known as the Afghan Taliban.
In essence, the Taliban itself was a foreign-backed, exiled government, and you believe that if the Pakistani government wasn't propping them up, that the people of southern Afghanistan would be able to set up their own self-rule without the Taliban, is that basically it?
I believe that the meddling of Pakistan in these issues has definitely been detrimental to the ability of the Afghan government to establish itself.
You know, I talked with Ivan Eland from the Independent Institute last week, and he was analyzing Pakistan policy, and he was saying that because America has stayed so long, instead of going in and getting al-Qaeda, killing bin Laden and Zawahiri and getting out of the country as fast as possible, because we've stayed as this foreign-occupying force and because we've so closely tied Musharraf's identity with that of the United States, that we've really weakened his position and forced him into a spot where he's had to now make all kinds of expansive deals with the tribal warlords, with people in the government who favor the Taliban, for example, that he basically has to compromise with all of these forces because of America's presence.
What do you think about that?
This is getting into personal opinions, and I want to make sure that people understand that as a representative of Amnesty International, I cannot comment on political issues because we are not a political organization.
Let me ask you this, then.
When you say that the people are losing confidence in the occupation, that they used to have some and now more and more seem to be turning against it, would they prefer, you describe in the Amnesty Report, just a complete breakdown in security, in law and order?
When people are arrested, they're held without charges, but then the worst crimes go unpunished and the place seems to be in a downward spiral.
Do the people there want America to improve the security situation, or do they want America to just pack up and get out and let them handle it themselves?
We see in Iraq that basically it's gotten to that point, so I wonder what your perception of that is.
My sense is that in spite of being critical of progress made by the Afghan government, that a lot of people are still feeling that we need a presence there, including the NATO presence and the presence of the U.S. military forces.
They fear that without them there, that there will be a return to some pretty intense fighting between the warlords, which still reign, especially in the north and west of Afghanistan, but also that the Taliban would be able to establish itself quite quickly if we were to draw our forces back.
That patience is being adjusted a lot lately because of the increase in civilian deaths, and also because a lot of people really aren't seeing that the economy has improved much at all.
There is a growing small group of very rich people.
As I travel to Kabul, I see the extreme poverty, and within the extreme poverty are major sites of wealth, which is in huge buildings, very expensive to stay at hotels for Westerners.
People are clearly upset by that because within the majority of the population, the economic situation has not improved at all.
The economic outlook, coupled with the increasing civilian deaths and complaints by detainees of their handling at detention centers run by U.S. forces, is definitely undermining the support for the U.S. forces present there.
On the economic front there, I think it's mentioned in the Amnesty Report that there's also a drought going on, and I remember there was a major famine in Afghanistan in the 1990s.
Is this still that same drought going on, or has it started again?
How bad is it?
How many refugees are we talking about?
We are talking about people eating mud because they are so hungry in places like Kandahar.
This is very serious, the World Food Program last year had to plead with international aid organizations to deliver food supplies also to places up in the north of the country.
The drought seems to be back, it was better a few years ago, but the drought is definitely infecting people's lives again.
It's an extremely poverty-stricken country, probably one of the worst for people to live in at this point.
We are talking about still very high infancy deaths, death of women at childbirth.
The life expectancy is about 42 for people there, which is pretty amazing.
Most people my age would be dead.
One of the things I do want to mention, too, is the situation for Afghan women right now.
It is still estimated that 90% of Afghan women experience frequent violence at home, and 90%?
Yes, 95%.
95%?
There are women in parliament, but unfortunately there are no women among the president's advisors, and there's only really one in the cabinet.
So as Seema Samar of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission says, if women are not part of the decision-making, men who don't understand women's problems will continue to make decisions and not address their problems.
The continued problems for women there are forced marriages, child marriages, and restrictions of movement, job discrimination.
The situation of children there is also pretty bad.
There's child abduction and trafficking.
And even though Afghanistan has signed a UN Convention on Children's Rights, which bans child labor, vast numbers of those children still work to help their families survive.
All in all, there have been some improvements, but that have been kind of contained for major cities.
The women improvements have been contained to big cities.
Once you're outside the big cities, like when I travel to the provinces, I never see women outside of the burqa.
They are still in the burqa.
It also needs to be understood that restrictions of women's ability to move were not just a result of the Taliban.
They were already in place during the Mujahideen wars and before the Taliban instituted even more, you know, restrictive rules on women, but they were there during the time the Mujahideen was fighting each other.
That is often overlooked, I think.
Forgive me, but isn't this the kind of thing that goes all the way back?
It seems like the most liberal governments, quote unquote, that Afghanistan's ever had have been the ones propped up by America and by the Soviet Union.
They put girls in school too and that kind of thing.
But without a colonial occupier dictating liberalism to these people, can we expect the local cultures there to move toward women's liberation and so forth?
This seems like a pretty heavy task for the U.S. Army to have to carry out, the liberation of all these people, you know?
It is a pretty heavy task.
I think by all means, a lot of the people who do serve in the U.S. military are there because they do believe they are helping the Afghan parliament in establishing a more democratic government, which would include women as equal partners in the process.
I don't know if we have put enough money in it.
Unfortunately, when the U.S. government decided to go to Iraq, a lot of assistance stopped flowing to the Afghan government and I think that has been very detrimental to the chances of the democratic, the elected government there to be able to accomplish what they would like to accomplish and the Afghan average person now clearly understands what really happened when the U.S. decided to invade Iraq and they feel very, very badly about the fact that so much of the resources have not gone to help out the Afghan government at this point.
We all know that the consequences of that are now being felt.
Well you sound pessimistic and yet hopeful.
Can you tell me the areas in which you think that there is hope for improvement?
I still feel, this is on a personal basis, that there is some hope left, but a lot of the times I am pessimistic.
I just don't see that without continuous and increased international support we are looking at a dire situation for Afghanistan.
I think that we need to keep an eye on what happens with the formation of the United National Front right now who wants to open talks with the Taliban.
They also would like the U.S. forces to leave, which is of course not advertised greatly in America and there are people who feel like they want the U.S. forces to leave.
The United National Front is not something that is the answer from what I understand to the problems there.
They are comprised of a lot of divergent groups including some major Northern Alliance forces who have been accused of major human rights abuses during the Mujahideen wars.
So this is something that I personally would like to find out more about.
The government of President Karzai is very weak, there is a whole lot of corruption within the government which reflects on the way the police ask for bribes from people.
Also the situation of the way Afghan police run the jails in Afghanistan is very questionable.
There's a lot of complaints about Afghan people being abused by the Afghan police in their jails.
I've also had personal reports from people on the ground in provinces like Ghazni where detainees or suspected Taliban forces have been executed without being sent to court where they could question the reasons for their detention, so those are extrajudicial killings.
Nobody has commented on that, however I have had people telling me that this is happening.
So there's a lot of worrisome things happening there.
All right, well thank you very much for all the bad news.
I'm sorry about that.
Well no, I'm sorry it came out sounding sarcastic, I actually really appreciate it, it's definitely hard work that you do and very necessary for the rest of us to understand what's going on in the world and our government's role in it, so I really do appreciate it very much.
I want to also praise the incredible efforts which are being made by the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.
They don't have a lot of money to work with, but they're working day and night on making the both the U.S. government and the Afghan government responsible for what they're doing with the suspected detainees and also their incredible work they do on behalf of women there.
And you say that's the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission?
Independent Human Rights Commission.
Okay, great, well thank you for that too.
Well thank you.
All right everybody, that's Elsie Davade from Amnesty International.
Thanks a lot for your time.