See No Evil?

Tim Holmes — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 10:52:12 +0000

This week Amnesty International released an extraordinary report, which says essentially this: Nato and the countries operating in its coalition in Afghanistan are complicit in the arresting and torturing of detainees. In a totally dismissive response, Nato denies everything: “Nato has no proof of ill treatment or of torture of [its] detainees.” Both cannot be correct, so who’s telling the truth?

Beginning in 2005, Nato recommended to the 37 countries fighting in its coalition in Afghanistan that they transfer any persons arrested to the Afghan authorities. Nato presented this as a simple bureaucratic adjustment: the coalition had been transferring detainees to the Americans, but could not do so after news of the CIA’s underground gulags broke. Nato argued that transferring the detainees to the fledgling Afghan government would help it build its capacity.

Under the Nato’s plan, coalition forces in Afghanistan arrest both combatants and non-belligerents. There is no list of approved offences, and soldiers can arrest any person for any reason they think necessary (ie the detainees are not all Taliban prisoners). Once in custody, detainees are fingerprinted and interrogated, but never provided a lawyer. Within 96 hours, the detainee and the interrogation files are transferred to the Afghan secret police.

Britain, Canada, Denmark, Holland and Norway, and possibly other countries in Nato’s coalition, have signed agreements with Afghanistan based on this model.

Trouble is, Nato’s plan overlooks mountains of evidence that Afghanistan tortures prisoners. The United Nations’ highest human rights official writes that complaints of torture in Afghan custody are “common”. The US state department writes that the Afghan authorities “routinely” torture detainees, using methods such as “pulling out fingernails and toenails, burning with hot oil, sexual humiliation and sodomy”.

Even the Afghan government’s own human rights watchdog writes that “torture [is] a routine part of police procedures”. Just last week, President Hamid Karzai said in a speech that “there are still cases where people are threatened, even tortured”.

These statements defeat Nato’s claim that it knows nothing about torture. Most likely, Nato’s denial is a silly see-no-evil pretense to duck controversy about the Afghan secret police’s well-documented criminality. But it could also be that Nato knows about the torture, and finds it convenient to accept the intelligence it yields – in which case the detainee transfers are actually renditions, and Afghanistan’s torturers are performing an outsourced service. (Evidence is lacking as yet to discern which explanation is the correct one.)

But motives aside, it is sure that if Nato investigated, it would find a disturbing reality.

Earlier this year, Graeme Smith, a Canadian investigative journalist, interviewed 30 men who the Canadian military transferred to the Afghan authorities in the course of Nato operations. Many gave accurate, detailed accounts of their handling in Canadian custody, thus proving they spoke with firsthand knowledge. The Canadians treated them well, but the Afghans tortured them. Some of the detainees were beaten or given electric shocks. Others were starved, choked or frozen. One man’s torturers hung him upside down and beat him for eight days.

Asked about their cases, the human rights ombudsman for the local Afghan police force answered “these people need some torture, because without torture they will never say anything”.

These revelations forced Canada to dispatch inspectors to Afghan jails. There the inspectors found more instances of torture, not to mention “the universal use of leg-irons”, and the fact that “some detainees were languishing in custody for up to a year without charges being laid”.

Canada’s government, once admired internationally for protecting human rights, denounced none of this; rather it denied and dissembled, just as Nato now seems to be doing. But the revelations hurt Canada’s Conservative government terribly: they aborted Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s run-up to an election in spring, and obliged Harper to sack his defence minister. Worse, legal scholars have advised the international criminal court that Canada’s top military officers, having authorised the transfers and so having aided and abetted the torturers, could now be prosecuted for war crimes. The Harper government is dolorously navigating a thicket of lawsuits and investigations (interestingly, with the help of Professor Christopher Greenwood, who is known to Britons as the very well-remunerated barrister who soothed the Blair government with a memo that going to war in Iraq was legal).

There are crucial lessons for Europe here. Whether to protect detainees from torture, or to keep their own soldiers becoming war criminals, or simply not to lose an election, European governments must look past Nato’s canard that torture doesn’t happen – or Europe will repeat Canada’s mistakes. Amnesty International reports that the Belgian, British, Dutch and Norwegian forces have transferred dozens of detainees who either cannot be located, or who are held in prisons never visited by these countries’ inspectors. Norwegian officials admit they “cannot rule out that torture is going on”. Surely it is only a matter of time before a similarly intrepid European journalist as Smith investigates these cases. Then what?

Nato’s administration has disgraced itself by these foolhardy adventures in torture. Not only is its see-no-evil complicity in torture illegal, but a detainee scandal involving any of the European Nato countries I name would probably tip that country to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan – something Nato cannot afford. To avoid that, Nato should do as Amnesty recommends, and establish constant, 24/7 coalition oversight in an Afghan prison where detainees are held. Such a prison would be run cooperatively with the Afghans, and could serve as a training college where safe detention and interrogation are taught. A solution like this would build Afghanistan’s justice capacity infinitely better than robotically handing bodies to torturers. If Nato has the imagination and courage, it will seize on Amnesty’s recommendation to turn its detainee liability into a desirable opportunity.

Amir Attaran | ukwatch.net

See No Evil?