ChicTrib

Northern Alliance not seen as a cure

By Uli Schmetzer Tribune foreign correspondent Published October 9, 2001

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- In the wake of air strikes by the U.S.-led coalition, the search has begun for a viable successor to Afghanistan's hard-line Taliban regime, whose ragtag army and outdated arsenal are not expected to survive a protracted offensive by modern weaponry.

The quest is not an easy one in the rugged Central Asian country, divided by the towering Hindu Kush mountain range and ancient squabbles among warlords who fight each other for the most banal of reasons.

Many of these fierce warriors have banded together under the euphemistic name of Northern Alliance, encouraged by the U.S. anti-terrorism coalition whose aim is to overthrow the Taliban and capture terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and members of his Al Qaeda organization.

The Alliance had barely clung to 10 percent of Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Washington's apparent choice for a partner to topple the Taliban regime and bring bin Laden to justice has breathed new life--and new allies--into the Northern Alliance's moribund and scattered members, many of whom had been allies of the Taliban.

With its installations under attack or destroyed, the Taliban's besieged forces are expected to retreat from Kabul and begin a campaign of guerrilla warfare. This would open the capital to the advancing Alliance.

Yet, Pakistani veterans of the Afghan war against the Soviet occupation of the 1980s describe the warlords as "bandits and opportunists." Others argue that the clerics of the Northern Alliance are equally radical in their Islamic values as are the Taliban.

"People in Afghanistan are not afraid of the American bombings but are afraid that the Northern Alliance, another brutal regime, is coming back into power," said Samhara Saba, who runs the foreign affairs committee of the women's organization called the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan.

Human-rights groups argue that allowing the Alliance to take power unchecked by a United Nations peace-keeping force is a dangerous move. In the first initiative of its kind, an umbrella organization of human-rights groups Monday announced the formation of a war-crimes committee. Its purpose is to gather evidence against Taliban commanders and the warlords who committed war crimes and human-rights abuses in Afghanistan over the past two decades. The evidence will then be submitted to the International War Crimes Tribunal at The Hague.

"For a lasting peace and reconciliation in Afghanistan war criminals must first be brought to justice," said Sarwar Bari, the committee's coordinator.

Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, warned Monday that if the Northern Alliance comes to power it would bring back to Afghanistan the rule of "warlords fighting each other and butchering one another. We will return to anarchy, atrocities and killing [in Afghanistan]. And I could tell you horror stories of those days."

Bringing back king

Like many other leaders familiar with Afghanistan, Musharraf called for a "broad-based coalition" representing all ethnic groups in a future government. He agreed that the former king of Afghanistan, Mohammed Zahir Shah, who was exiled in 1973, would be "an acceptable figure" to take over as an interim solution.

Now 86 years old and living in Rome, the monarch had brought modern ideas and the liberation of women to his almost medieval Afghan society, an initiative that outraged Muslim fundamentalists and eventually cost him his throne.

Pakistani sources said Musharraf had decided that the king was a lesser evil than the Alliance and that Zahir would step aside once the national assembly of tribal elders had chosen a leader.

Few Pakistanis have positive memories of the warlords who ransacked Afghanistan after the war against the Soviet Union. The U.S., anxious to stop the communist government from gaining a foothold in Central Asia, had armed and trained the mujahedeen, or holy warriors, among them Osama bin Laden.

In his best-selling book "Taliban," author Ahmed Rashid writes: "The warlords seized homes and farms, threw out their occupants and handed them over to their supporters. The commanders abused the population at will, kidnapping young girls and boys for their sexual pleasure, robbing merchants in the bazaar and fighting and brawling in the streets."

The rule of the warlords, who set up toll chains across roads, prompted the transporters of Pakistan's smuggling mafia, ferrying goods back and forth to Iran, to finance the Taliban's ragtag army of zealous Islamic students in the early 1990s. At that time both Pakistan and the West saw the student army as the solution to bring back law and order to a war-weary Afghanistan.

Treated like animals

No one was disturbed that the Taliban wanted to emulate the ideal society of the prophet Muhammad who lived 1,400 years ago. By 1996 the Taliban was in Kabul ruling the country.

"The Taliban banned women from working. Under the warlords women could work as long as they were veiled but no women dared go out into the streets. The Jihadeen [warlord fighters] treated women like animals," recalled Saba.

With 3 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Saba says the women who fled Afghanistan to escape the repressive rule of the Taliban would not return "if the Alliance takes over Kabul."

Memories burn

Their memories are too vivid.

One of the women who Saba cares for was 17 years old when warlord warriors came into her village, killed her father and kidnapped her and two other girls. Two days later, after being raped and abused by dozens of men, she was dumped on the outskirts of the village. She has not spoken since.

"There are lots of cases like that," said Saba.

Meena Bibi, 22, shrouded in a prayer shawl, said she was luckier. They "came to our town of Punjab and said: `Give us cows, eggs and corn. If you don't we'll take away your daughters.' We had nothing to give so they killed my father and slapped my mother. They took three girls from my neighborhood. The girls were never seen again.

"I escaped into the hills at night with my older sister Huma. We walked to Kabul," the young schoolteacher said.

In Kabul she lived with relatives. Then the Taliban decreed no woman could work or be educated. So she started a clandestine school for little girls. She gave three classes a day, always afraid of being caught and sent to jail or sentenced to lashes.

Her pupils paid for the secret lessons in eggs, flour, vegetables and sometimes a piece of meat.

Then on Sept. 11 the world changed.

"Our entire neighborhood ran away, not in the daytime because the Taliban police would stop you. Everyone escaped at night. Even the Taliban were running away. Sometimes, through the burqa [full veil] I could see the expression of fear on their faces," Bibi said.

One night she also escaped. Some miles from Kabul a pickup truck took her and others to the Pakistani border for 200 rupias, or $3, a person. She arrived last week.

"Now I am waiting at a relatives' home for peace so I can go back to Kabul. But not if the Northern Alliance returns to power," she said.

The threat of an ethnic war, as Pashtuns rally against Tajiks in the wake of the weakened Taliban, prompted Musharraf on Monday to issues a call for a broad-based future coalition in Kabul.

Copyright © 2001, Chicago Tribune

-- Anonymous, October 09, 2001