AFGHANISTAN: NATO force rejects rapporteur’s charge on civilian killings
Posted by warvictims on May 19, 2008
NATO force rejects rapporteur’s charge on civilian killings
Agence France Presse
The NATO force in Afghanistan rejected Sunday charges by a UN rapporteur of complacency in investigating civilian casualties in counterinsurgency operations and that it had killed 200 civilians this year.
The toll presented last week by the special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Philip Alston, was “far higher than can be supported by serious analysis,” NATO spokesman Mark Laity told reporters.
“We would say it is in the low double figures,” Laity said.
The spokesman also dismissed Alston’s statement that complacency about these killings was “staggeringly high.” Alston said police were also involved and the Taliban was estimated to have killed 300 civilians in the past four months.
In respect of NATO’s multinational International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), the charge of complacency was “absolutely wrong,” Laity said.
“When mistakes or accidents happen, the intensive investigations that follow indicate an attitude that is the reverse of complacent,” he said.
Laity acknowledged that accountability was complex in Afghanistan with many nations involved in the fight against insurgents in a difficult environment where “exact information is very hard to come by.”
On Alston’s suggestion that there should be more contact with the Taliban, Laity said insurgents would use this to present themselves as “as equal parties and morally equivalent in this conflict.”
And he said Alston’s “slipshod” language implied there were occasions when ISAF forces acted unlawfully and this was “irresponsible given the absence of evidence and the seriousness of the allegation.”
Alston, whose preliminary report followed a 12-day visit, said shadowy militias headed by foreign intelligence units were at work in Afghanistan outside of the authority of the government and international forces.
They also appeared to be responsible for killing civilians, he said.
Laity said there were no ISAF spies or intelligence agents in Afghanistan. “But there are other groups in this country — they have their own arrangements with the Afghan government,” he said.
There are about 70,000 international soldiers from around 40 nations in Afghanistan on a UN mandate to help the government fight a Taliban-led insurgency that was at its fiercest last year, with around 8,000 people killed — most of them rebel fighters.
