UN says Taliban committed rights abuses despite blanket amnesty

Since the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan in 2021, hundreds of members of the US-backed former government have been detained, tortured or killed under the new government, despite Taliban leaders’ declaration of amnesty for actions during the long civil war, the United Nations reported Tuesday.

The UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in a new report that it had documented “at least 218 extrajudicial killings of former government officials,” primarily police officers and soldiers, committed by members of the new government, though the pace had slowed greatly since the first months after the takeover.

“In most instances, individuals were detained by de facto security forces, often briefly, before being killed,” it said. “Some were taken to detention facilities and killed while in custody, others were taken to unknown locations and killed, their bodies either dumped or handed over to family members.”

The killings were among some 800 documented human rights violations against members of the former government from the Taliban takeover Aug. 15, 2021, until June 30, 2023, the UN mission said. The majority took place before the end of 2021, the report said.

More than 400 people were arrested and detained without any clear reason given. Many were held without any contact with their families, often by the national intelligence service. Some were never seen again.

The UN report “presents a sobering picture of the treatment of individuals affiliated with the former government and security forces of Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover of the country,” said the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk. “Even more so, given they were assured that they would be not targeted, it is a betrayal of the people’s trust.”

In a statement appended to the UN report, the Taliban government denied any knowledge of such offenses.

“After the victory of the Islamic Emirate until today, cases of human rights violations (murder without trial, arbitrary arrest, detention, torture, and other acts against human rights) by the employees of the security institutions of the Islamic Emirate against the employees and security forces of the previous government have not been reported,” it said.

Officials also reiterated that the government’s supreme leader, Sheikh Haibatullah Akhundzada, had issued blanket amnesty to all former government members immediately after the group seized power.

Some of those reportedly detained without charge, tortured or threatened said they had been accused of supporting small-scale insurgencies still ongoing against the Taliban, according to the report. In its reply, the Taliban cited that threat, suggesting that only people acting against them since the takeover had anything to fear.

“Those employees of the previous administration who joined the opposition groups of the Islamic Emirate or had military activities to the detriment of the system have been arrested and introduced to judicial authorities,” it said.

The report points to the difficulty the Taliban leadership may have had, after taking power, in redirecting fighters steeped in violence, retaliation, accumulated grievances and a culture that often considers revenge an obligation. It also underscores the complications of Taliban leadership trying to enforce a nationwide policy of amnesty among fighters of an insurgency that was once highly decentralized

During the US-led war, targeted killings of civilians by both sides were far more common than they have been recently. And the UN mission and human rights groups reported far more commonplace torture by the security services of the US-backed government than by the new one.

That context is important to keep in mind, according to Graeme Smith, an Afghanistan expert with the International Crisis Group. At the same time, he said, the advent of relative peace “actually puts a heavier legal burden on the Taliban” to uphold human rights than they would bear in the chaos of war.

The UN mission said it had included only reported violations for which it was able to document both that the episode had taken place and who was responsible. Its reporting standards, more cautious and rigorous than those of some human rights groups, are “the gold standard,” Smith said.

“I think we can be very confident that those are minimum numbers, because they are very careful in their work,” he said.

Of the documented victims, 72 per cent had been in the military, the police or the National Directorate of Security under the old government, according to the UN report. Many of the killings appear to have been reprisals by individual Taliban fighters against their former enemies rather than a systematic revenge campaign.

Still, despite repeated Taliban assurances that such actions would be punished, the report said, “there is limited information regarding efforts by the de facto authorities to conduct investigations and hold perpetrators of these human rights violations to account.”

One witness report was from a person whose brother, a former police officer, was stopped on the road by the Taliban and taken away; three days later, his body was found with “the signs of many bullets.” In another instance, a former soldier was arrested last January, and more than two months later, “his dead body was returned to his family, bearing signs of torture.”

The Taliban government, badly in need of aid, wants to project a law-abiding image internationally even as it imposes increasingly repressive rule at home.

The UN report addresses only offenses against former government officers, not the Taliban administration’s restrictions on women and girls or other policies that have drawn widespread international condemnation.