ICC Gets Over 1 Million Testimonies From Afghans Suing US Government, CIA
Over War Crimes
By teleSUR
17 February 18
The International Criminal Court began collecting material three months ago
for a possible war crimes case involving armed actors Afghanistan.
More than one million statements from Afghan people and organizations have
been submitted to the International Criminal Court alleging war crimes were
committed by several actors in the country including the U.S. military, the
CIA, Afghan forces and the Taliban, local groups working with the
Hague-based tribunal said Friday.
Abdul Wadood Pedram, an official at the Kabul-based Human Rights and
Eradication of Violence Organization, told the Associated Press Friday that
his group has knowledge of the groups and individuals who submitted the 1.17
million statements to the court over the past three months.
"It is shocking there are so many," Pedram said, noting that in some
instances, whole villages were represented. "It shows how the justice system
in Afghanistan is not bringing justice for the victims and their families."
The ICC began accepting statements in November after the court's prosecutor
Fatou Bensouda, presented a request to open a formal investigation into
possible international crimes committed in Afghanistan since it became a
member of the court in May 2003, few years after the U.S.-led intervention.
The court accepted testimonies until Jan. 31 and will now evaluate the
statements to decide if the war crimes investigation requested Bensouda
should get the greenlight. Pedram told the AP that since in some cases one
statement represents multiple people or whole village, the number of people
seeking the war crimes probe could amount to several millions.
Individuals and organizations who have spoken to media over the past few
months documented many cases of extrajudicial killings, torture and
persecution by local and foreign actors including warlords connected to the
Afghan government as well as the CIA and the U.S. military.
Among those named in the statements, according to the BBC, is Afghan
Vice-President General Abdul Rashid Dostum, currently exiled in Turkey, who
has previously worked with U.S. Special Forces and the CIA and has been
linked to massacres.
Others said that Taliban commanders were in fact connected to the government
and thus have received total impunity for the crimes they committed against
locals, specially Shittes.
Bensouda said evidence existed of war crimes committed "by members of the
United States armed forces on the territory of Afghanistan, and by members
of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in secret detention facilities
in Afghanistan," according to the AP report. The secret detention facilities
were operated mostly between 2003 and 2004, she said.
The ICC can only prosecute countries that are party to the Rome Statute, the
treaty that established the court in 2002. While the U.S. is not a signatory
to the statue, its citizens can be tried for crimes they committed in
countries that are party to the Rome treaty.
In an article for the British newspaper The Guardian Friday, Katherine
Gallagher, a senior staff attorney with the New York-based Center for
Constitutional Rights, argued that the Afghanistan case could be a test for
proving the effectiveness of the young court and hoped the ICC judges would
decide to approve the probe.
"To date, no high-level U.S. official from the civilian leadership,
military, CIA, or private contractor has been prosecuted for war crimes and
crimes against humanity. An ICC investigation could finally change that -
bringing an end to the impunity US officials have enjoyed and, critically,
some measure of redress to victims of the U.S. torture program," Gallagher
stressed.
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