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| Karimi faults HRW report as erroneous |
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| KABUL (PAN): Describing the recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report on Afghanistan as erroneous, presidential spokesman Karim Rahimi on Tuesday said it was an attack on the personalities of some leaders who had served the country in the past.
The New York-based rights group, in its report released on Tuesday last, accused some former mujahideen leaders of involvement in human rights violations and asked President Hamid Karzai to bring HR violators to book.
The leaders mentioned as war criminals in the HRW report included members of the Wolesi Jirga Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf, Mohammed Qasim Fahim and Burhanuddin Rabbani; Minister for Energy Ismail Khan, Army Chief of Staff Abdul Rashid Dostum and the current Vice President Karim Khalili.
The report also put former mujahideen prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and some Taliban leaders, including Mulla Omar, Mulla Dadullah and Jalaluddin Haqqani in the same category.
But Rahimi said (with the exception of Hekmatyar, Omar, Haqqani and Dadullah) the leaders had rendered great services for the country over the previous five years and their services could not be ignored.
Asking for spreading reports based on facts, the spokesman said there should not be image distortion of any personality.
He said the HRW officials had prepared the report on the basis of a single trip to Afghanistan while human rights were being trampled in the country since more than 20 years.
He said the government's recently-launched Action Plan on Peace, Justice and Reconciliation was working on the same lines to reach to the facts and unveil those who had violated human rights in those years.
Rahimi said the cabinet had also discussed the report a day earlier. "The meeting decided that the cabinet members will cooperate and provide facts to NGOs and other organisations preparing surveys or other reports on Afghanistan."
The spokesman disclosed that chief of Pakistan's Pukhtunkhwah Milli Awami Party (PkMAP) Mahmood Achakzai, in response to a letter from President Hamid Karzai, had assured his cooperation to the incumbent Afghan government.
He said Achakzai described the proposed Peace Jirga between Afghanistan and Pakistan as need of the hour. In recent months, Karzai had sent letters to some Pakistani political and religious leaders on achieving the goal of lasting peace in Afghanistan. |
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