GUEST BLOG: At the Dublin Diplomatic Conference on Cluster Munitions
Posted By: Marc Garlasco, Senior Military Analyst, HRW and CIVIC Board Member Here I am in Dublin at the massive…
Indiscriminate use of force
Posted By: Erica
On March 4, 2007, a US Marine convoy killed 19 Afghan civilians and wounded 50 others in one of the worst incidents of indiscriminate fire on Afghan civilians. Fleeing the scene of a suicide bomb attack in Jalalabad city, the Marines fired arbitrarily at passing civilians on the crowded highway, including those civilians who had pulled over to the side of the road to let the convoy pass.
UN Special Rapporteur speaks out
Posted By: Erica
For the past two weeks the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, or Arbitrary executions has been in Afghanistan on a fact-finding mission (See here for a Special Rapporteur definition). His mandate is to look into all violations of the “right to life” in Afghanistan, and provide recommendations for improving respect for this international obligation.
A sad story…
Posted By: Erica Today [May 18, 2008] I received the following, very sad story in an email from one of…
Aiding Garmsir’s refugees
Posted By: Erica
Since the end of April, hundreds of Afghan families have fled the Garmsir region of Helmand province due to fighting between insurgents and US-led forces. High estimates by the Afghan Red Crescent Society and by the UN agency for refugees in Afghanistan have suggested that as many as 1000 families have fled. Other media and NGO sources I spoke to reported displacement of a few hundred families. The US military spokeswoman I spoke to, Kelly Frushour, suggested the military only saw a few hundred people displaced.
Tora Bora, Part 2
Posted By: Erica
When I met Nazir and Amin they were doing much better – they had received assistance from ACAP (the US funded program that supports war victims) that allowed them to run their own family grocery businesses. Although they were satisfied with the assistance and their current situation, I could not help worrying about the effectiveness of such aid so many years after the initial incident. Nazir and Amin did not receive assistance until seven years after their family members died at Tora Bora. That’s because the program didn’t exist when they were first harmed. Now aid gets to families quickly, but back then, they were left with nothing for too long. So, even if it was the right thing to do, I wondered if all these years later the assistance was too little, too late?
GUEST BLOG: Waking up in Afghanistan
Posted By: Ana, working on human rights issues in Afghanistan Just as any other morning my driver was waiting for…
Tora Bora, Part 1
Posted By: Erica
In December 2001, the Tora Bora mountains in eastern Afghanistan were believed to be the last refuge of Osama bin Laden. US air strikes barraged the Tora Bora area, dropping hundreds of bombs and artillery shells. Unfortunately, Bin Laden and associates were not the only ones hiding in the caves. Though sparsely populated, the Tora Bora area had been home to Afghan families for generations. When the bombing began, many of the families fled to refugee camps in Pakistan but not everyone made it out.
A few weeks ago I talked to Nazir, who lost family members in the Tora Bora bombings. He said half of his family had fled to Pakistan but that his brother stayed behind with his family in Tora Bora. Every night, he and his family would listen to the BBC and Voice of America on the radio for news of what was happening just across the border. One night he heard the news about Tora Bora and immediately headed back into the conflict zone to find out what had happened to his family. “I went from vehicle at first, then by foot. It took me two days,” he said. It is normally a 5 hour journey or less.
GUEST BLOG: Sudan’s other war victims…
Posted By: Michael, an aid and peace-building expert working in Darfur.
I recently spent a few days in Darfur, on a short-term assignment for an NGO working in the region. I was there to support the organization’s peace-building work, which seeks to create grassroots dialogue between and among tribes which live in the same area. Most of the world’s attention has focused on the 2.4 million people forced to flee their homes, many of whom now live in IDP camps scattered throughout the region. Millions more people, though, continue to live in villages and settlements across Darfur. They, too, are victims of the conflict — often living in fear, and brutal poverty. The peace-building project tries to foster stability in these difficult-to-reach rural areas, trying to restore some of the inter-tribal relationships and understanding that existed before the war.