P.O.W.'s Were Shot; Question Is How Many? From NYT -- "Our press" at work
By JOHN F. BURNS with TERENCE NEILAN
(November 14, 2001)
nytimes.com
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 14 — Did Northern Alliance troops massacre 100, 200 or even 600 Taliban fighters after the alliance took control of the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif last week?
Or were such accounts — from United Nations officials, Western officials and alliance commanders — "unsubstantiated and sensational charges," as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asserted today.
The answer, most likely, is that it is impossible to know for certain in a country of rugged and remote battlefields and towns, where independent verification is rare and propaganda is as common as the machine gun.
In Geneva today the International Committee of the Red Cross said its workers were helping bury the dead in Mazar-i-Sharif.
"It is in the hundreds," a spokeswoman, Antonella Notari, said, adding that the committee's workers had agreed to bury the dead "for reasons of health and of dignity." They would be put in marked graves for possible later identification by families, she said.
It was unclear how many of the reported victims were civilians and how many were Taliban fighters.
A spokeswoman for the World Food Program, Christiane Berthiaume, said, "According to reports, in Mazar there is a lot of pillaging as well as civilian kidnappings, armed men out of control and fighting in the streets."
"We hope it stabilizes soon," she said, adding that the situation in the city was precarious and that the 89 tons of food in United Nations warehouses had been stolen over the weekend.
Since the American bombing of Afghanistan began, on Oct. 7, assertions of civilian casualties made by the Taliban — sometimes supported by United Nations relief officials and private aid agencies monitoring the war from outside Afghanistan — have been an almost daily feature of the conflict. Just as often, those reports have been questioned, or flatly rejected as propaganda, by the Pentagon.
Now the questions have spread to actions by the Northern Alliance, which went into action against the Taliban last week after waiting nearly five weeks for the bombing to weaken its enemy.
With the departure of foreign aid workers after the Sept. 11 attacks, almost the only Westerners inside Afghanistan have been reporters, and they have rarely been able to reach sites soon enough to check on reports of casualties.
Since the beginning of the week, differing accounts of events in Mazar-i-Sharif have focused on an incident, on Saturday, when alliance troops were reported to have opened fire on a school just outside of town where as many as 1,200 "jihadi, or holy warrior, volunteers from Pakistan, Kashmir and Chechnya were were to be hiding.
One account, in Tuesday's editions of the The Guardian in Britain, quoted an alliance commander as saying that "some 200" of the volunteers were killed after they had murdered alliance representatives sent in to demand their surrender.
At the daily United Nations news briefing in Islamabad on Tuesday, Stephanie Bunker, the American spokeswoman for United Nations operations in Afghanistan, said that "over 100 Taliban troops, young recruits hiding in a school" had been killed in the incident. She gave no sources for her account, and no corroborating details.
Later, a Cable News Network report from Termez, a border city in Uzbekistan about 50 miles from Mazar-i-Sharif, quoted "Western officials" as saying that "as many as 600 people" have been killed by alliance troops in the city since Friday.
It went on to say that "the majority of those killed" were Pakistani and Kashmiri fighters, as well as family members of Chechens fighting with the Taliban. The CNN report gave no corroborating details.
Asked about the reports at a Pentagon briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Rumsfeld sounded as though he had been waiting weeks to share his opinions.
"Well, the reports that we've heard out of the region have been absolutely lying through their teeth, week after week after week, throughout the whole thing," he said. "I don't know that it's really useful to repeat unsubstantiated and sensational charges that I can't validate, that you can't validate, and that have not been checked."
He added: "The implication — a thread I find from time to time — the implication is that America is what's wrong with the world, and in fact it's not. The Taliban have been vicious repressors in that country.
"They have done enormous humanitarian harm, and damage to men, women and children in that country."
"Now, I'm not there and you're not there," he said. "Therefore, I can't prove anything except to say this: That piece of real estate has changed hands dozens and dozens of times throughout history, and the carnage has been unbelievable. Century after century, people have, in some cases, eliminated entire cities. The last time these places changed hands, the Taliban came in and killed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people."
"When there's a war, and people are shooting, and things happen, and there's no question that there are people getting killed — I don't doubt that for a minute. Who knows when it's over, what the best assessment will be, and I'll certainly defer my judgment," Mr. Rumsfeld said.
"But I'll guess that when this is over, that this probably will prove to have been the change of hands with the least loss of life of any time in modern memory in that country. But there will be loss of life." |
