Transitional Justice Forum

Afghan President's TJ "Action Plan"

Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:12 | TrackBack

On December 12, the government in Afghanistan adopted a five-point Action Plan for Peace, Reconciliation and Justice. From my reading of this BBC report and this later Reuters report, these five points seem to comprise the following:

-- the eventual establishment of either a truth commission or a national-level war-crimes court;
-- vetting of government officials;
-- commitment to actions to mark remembrance of victims of past abuses;
-- collection of detailed information about past abuses; and
-- support for reconciliation between groups involved in past fighting.

(I would much appreciate it if any TJF reader could send me a copy-- preferably in English-- of the actual text of the Action Plan. Then I could correct any errors in my understanding of the nature of the five points. ~HC)

President Hamid Karzai's government adopted the Action Plan just one week before the opening of the country's recently elected new Loya Jirga (Parliament). An unknown number of the parliament's elected members are accused of having been involved in the prior commission of atrocities, and some rights activists in Afghanistan and elsewhere have expressed concern that the parliament might enact a blanket amnesty as one of its early acts.

Karzai's adoption of the Action Plan would seem to forestall that option.

The Action Plan was unveiled near the beginning of a big, two-day international conference in Kabul on transitional justice, that was co-hosted by the UN's Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). The conference was attended by Jean Arnault, the Secretary-General's Special Representative for Afghanistan, who gave this speech, and the UN's deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights Mehr Khan Williams, who gave this (much more substantive) speech.

Today's Reuters report from Kabul, by David Brunnstrom, notes the following about the Action Plan:

It commits the government and the international community to reforming the justice system and setting up a five-member task force by the end of the year to draw up a plan to deal with the abuses.

This task force, to comprise nominees from the rights commission [AIHRC] and the United Nations and three named by Karzai, will have until the end of 2007 to present its proposals.

Rights groups welcomed the fact that the action plan ruled out amnesties for serious abuses, a response to concerns that perpetrators in government and the new parliament, due to sit for the first time on Monday, might try to block prosecutions.

It also provides for the exclusion of those responsible for crimes from government and the administration.

"The adoption of the action plan is a significant step towards accountability, justice and peace building," Ahmad Nader Nadery, a commissioner of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), told Reuters.

Richard Bennett, head of the U.N. Human Rights office in Kabul, called it "an important step forward", but added:

"The important thing now that the plan has been adopted is to ensure it is implemented fully in accordance with the timelines." The government has committed itself to implementing the plan within three years, with rights groups hoping for a system that could include a South African-style truth and reconciliation commission and tribunals.

"We need to deal with those crimes to prevent a recurrence today and tomorrow. It is a major issue," Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah told the closing session.

However, Abdullah underlined government worries about the dangers of the process, saying its priority was peace. "We cannot sacrifice peace for justice," he said.

But Sima Samar, head of the AIHRC, questioned that caution.

"National reconciliation must not happen at the price of ignoring justice," she said.

"If we are to build a stable Afghanistan in which human dignity is respected, we must investigate the past of Afghanistan. It is not just for revenge, not just for trials, but for shaping the future."

The AIHRC had played a very constructive role in preparing the ground for the Action Plan. Toward the end of 2004 it conducted a nationwide investigation/consultation into both the scope of the atrocities that the country's people had suffered and the preferences and ideas that Afghans had regarding what should be done about those tragedies. The AIHRC published the report of that investigation in late January 2005.

The consultation considered the opinions that AIHRC's researchers had gathered from a total of 4,151 Afghan nationals-- residents of, I think, all the country's provinces and also individuals in the Afghan-refugee communities in Iran and Pakistan.

The report noted that, "nearly 70% of all the people we spoke to during our consultation have personally suffered loss or injury due to crimes inflicted on them in the course of the war." (That is, during the 20-plus years of war and civil strife that followed the Soviet Union's 1979 invasion of the country.) ... Also, that there was a wide feeling that the commission of atrocities had not yet definitively ended.

Obviously, facts such as these make the crafting of any policy extremely challenging.

Ch. 5 of the report summarizes the organization's analysis and recommendations on what Afghanistan should do in the TJ field. Many of these recommendations seem to have been incorporated into Karzai's latest Action Plan.

The report's detailed presentation of the findings of the consultation (Annex V, starting on p.70) is also very interesting. The methodology that AIHRC used in its consultation was a little more open-ended than that used by the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) in the broadly similar survey it conducted in 2002-2003 into TJ understandings and preferences in East Timor. (The ICTJ had consulted with AIHRC on the methodology of the Afghan survey.) But still, a very large proportion of the questions on the questionnaire used by the AIHRC-- Annex III of the report there-- were on the specific topic of war-crimes trials, with very few of them probing other possible TJ mechanisms.

The questionnaire did, very usefully, have a specific question, #3, asking" What does justice mean to you?" It allowed five possible responses to this: "a) Punishment of those responsible by a court; b) Compensation for victims of human rights violations; c) Reconciliation of divided communities; d) Publication of the truth about the past; e) All of the above." Personally, I'm glad they included option (c), but wish they could have included some other options geared specifically to socioeconomic understandings of "justice", and/or included an additional answer option "other; please specify."

Anyway, the results there were interesting... As shown in Annex V, Table 1, p.70, "Justice means punishment by a court" was the most popular of the five offered options-- but it was chosen only by just under half of the respondents. In other results, 76.4% of respondents expressed the expectation that "bringing war criminals to justice... would increase stability and bring security" (Table 5); and 79.5% said that trials should be held inside Afghanistan (Table 6). On timing, only 44.9% said that war criminals should be brought to justice "now" (Table 7).