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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (11963)	11/29/2001 2:37:44 PM
From: arun gera	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

US 'hero' may have triggered Mazar revolt RASHMEE Z AHMED TIMES NEWS NETWORK ONDON: The United Nations has joined human rights groups in demanding an urgent inquiry into the carnage at the Qala-i-Jhangi fort near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif, even as new information is emerging about how it started and the two Pakistani Taliban reported to be the last men alive in the fort, until the violence finally subsided on Wednesday. Even as the CIA saluted its slain colleague, the first American fatality in Afghanistan, "American hero" Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann, who died in the prison revolt, British journalists in Mazar-i-Sharif have begun reporting that Spann was less an innocent victim than the one who allegedly provoked the riot. With allegations of "war crimes" against the US and UK coming in thick and fast for ignoring the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Commisioner, Mary Robinson, has echoed Kate Allen, director of the London-based Amnesty International in calling for an urgent inquiry. Amnesty has said it is willing to send an observer to Afghanistan to monitor an inquiry. On Wednesday night, the BBC’s authoritative domestic television programme Newsnight interviewed Oliver August, correspondent for The Times, London, in Mazar-i-Sharif, who said that Spann and his CIA colleague, Dave, were thought to have set off the violence by aggressively interrogating foreign Taliban prisoners and asking, "Why did you come to Afghanistan?". August said their questions were answered by one prisoner jumping forward and announcing, "We’re here to kill you". The Guardian’s Mazar-i-Sharif correspondent said the CIA "operatives had apparently failed on entering the fort to observe the first rule of espionage: keep a low profile". The Times’s August said Spann subsequently pulled his gun and his CIA colleague shot three prisoners dead in cold blood before losing control over the situation. Spann was then "kicked, beaten and bitten to death," the journalists said, in an account of the ferocity of the violence that lasted four days, leaving more than 500 people dead and the fort littered with "bodies, shrapnel and shell casings". Meanwhile, graphic reports are appearing of two Pakistani Taliban fighters’ final stand in the fort, alongside comments from the Northern Alliance that the dead prisoners were the most hardline of Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda recruits. The revelations, which may be a public relations disaster in the making for the Pakistani establishment, say that the two men, who survived 72 hours of targeted American bombing and missile strikes, were heard speaking Urdu. Long after hundreds of their comrades were dead, according to one newspaper, the pair, dressed in flimsy salwar-kameezes, remained hidden in a deep basement in the fort and it took several rockets to restore the fort to a "tomb-like silence". In the aftermath of the bloodbath at Qala-I-Jhangi, the British press has focussed on graphic images, including what they are calling the blatant defiance of the rules of war. One photograph, plastered across several papers, allegedly shows a Northern Alliance fighter using a long metal spike to prise out a dead Taliban soldier’s gold tooth. The Independent newspaper sardonically headlined its report, "How our Afghan Allies applied the Geneva Convention" in an indication that the US-led, UK-backed coalition may now be doomed to launch urgent rearguard action to quell public distaste about the conduct of Tony Blair’s "just war for a just cause". Amnesty International has highlighted public concern by demanding an investigation "into the proportionality of the response by the Northern Alliance, US and UK forces". In a statement released here, it said the enquiry "should make urgent recommendations to ensure that other instances of surrender and holding of prisoners do not lead to similar disorders and loss of life".