|
Karzai powerless as warlords battle { May 18 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4484-2003May17.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A4484-2003May17.html
Karzai Powerless As Warlords Battle
Afghanistan's Leader Unable to Prevent Violence
By April Witt
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 18, 2003; Page A14
MEYMANEH, Afghanistan -- Assassins with their turbans wrapped to hide their faces ambushed a convoy on a main street in the middle of an April afternoon, executing Rasul Beg, a mid-level local militia commander, and igniting one of the fiercest battles between rival warlords ever waged in this northern town.
The gunfight lasted 20 hours, killed 13 people, including an 8-year-old boy, trapped international aid workers and left President Hamid Karzai's administration struggling to extend the rule of law to this provincial capital about 300 miles northwest of Kabul, the capital.
"I'm in a bad situation," said Enayatullah Enayat, a former Supreme Court justice whom Karzai recently sent here to serve as governor of surrounding Faryab province. "The warlords have men with guns and I don't. They might kill me."
The battle of Meymaneh and its aftermath, as recounted in interviews with witnesses and participants, is in many ways the woeful tale of all of Afghanistan 18 months after the fall of the Taliban and the installation of Karzai's interim administration. Despite military and financial support from the United States and its allies, the Afghan government has been unable to assert its authority over a country riven by ethnic, religious and cultural differences and shattered by decades of war.
The central government appears powerless in Meymaneh, beset by its own factional disputes and broke because warlords refuse to send it revenue from taxes they collect. Despite repeated disarmament talks, there are more gunmen today than there were a year ago in Faryab province, an agricultural and rug-weaving center on the border with Turkmenistan. None of them belongs to the country's newly founded national army.
Ordinary citizens are fed up, knowing that violence is likely to erupt again at any moment. And critics charge that, in Meymaneh and elsewhere, the Karzai government is failing to wield aggressively its most important weapon: legitimacy.
From Kabul, Karzai demanded that the two local commanders who had led the deadly battle of Meymaneh travel to the nation's capital to answer for their actions. They didn't go.
Enayat, the governor, signed a U.N.-brokered agreement promising that a commission would investigate Beg's slaying and report its findings within three weeks. The deadline passed without any arrests, while one of the alleged prime suspects crossed the border to Turkmenistan.
It might be that only the presence of U.N. monitors and about two dozen U.S. Special Forces soldiers camped out conspicuously at the Meymaneh Hotel has kept the militiamen from killing again.
Angry that the central government has not arrested anyone for Beg's murder, Attah Mohammed, the powerful regional leader of Beg's Islamic militia faction, said the Karzai administration must disarm warlords in the north and nationwide now, while the U.S.-led foreign coalition still rests its protective gaze on Afghanistan.
"I will insist and ask the government: Where are you?" Attah Mohammed said in an interview in his headquarters in Mazar-e Sharif, northern Afghanistan's major city. "Just do your job. Collect the weapons. Who will be the man to resist against you? Nobody.
Hardly a disinterested party, Attah Mohammed played a pivotal role in the violence that engulfed Meymaneh, effectively fighting a proxy war for control of the town. Yet he insisted that it was time for the authorities in Kabul to rise above the factional disputes and take charge. "The government's orders must be obeyed," he said. "It must not be dishonored. . . . This golden chance must be used."
Since the fall of the Taliban, Meymaneh, the capital of Faryab province, has been dominated by Gen. Hashim Habibi, 38, the powerful commander of Division 200, a militia ostensibly loyal to ethnic Uzbek leader Abdurrashid Dostum and his Jumbush-i-Milli party. Key jobs in the local government have gone to Jumbush, in a kind of machine politics conducted with bullets, not ballots.
Suddenly last year, Habibi got competition. A second force arrived in Meymaneh -- Division 24, tied to Attah Mohammed and the Jamiat-i-Islami party, whose military chief is Defense Minister Mohammed Fahim.
Dostum was livid. His forces had battled Attah Mohammed's around Mazar-e Sharif for more than a year. Now it looked as though Attah and Fahim wanted to challenge his control of the north by loosening his proxy's grip on Meymaneh.
"General Dostum's role in the north is the will of the people," said his second-in-command, Gen. Humayun Fawzi. "Nobody can change it."
Jumbush and Jamiat vied aggressively for control of Meymaneh. At least four police chiefs came and went rapidly as neither party would accept a chief who was a member of the rival faction.
As each militia recruited soldiers from throughout the region, the number of gunmen in Meymaneh increased dramatically. So did the crime rate. In three weeks this winter, there were 20 armed robberies, according to Sakhi Mohammad, a U.N. field assistant from Meymaneh.
"People were obligated to patrol their neighborhoods," he said. "They couldn't sleep. If they slept, people were robbed."
Over the past two months, the militias established dozens of new bases. Commanders for both groups turned their homes into encampments with soldiers and weapons. "The people hated their presence," Mohammad said. "But they couldn't do anything."
Tensions escalated on April 5, when Jumbush commandeered some Jamiat supply trucks and Jamiat arrested four Jumbush soldiers in retaliation.
Gen. Farouq Qati, 38, commander of Jamiat's Division 24, heard that a local Jumbush official had hired gunmen to assassinate him, he said. He stopped sleeping at his home because Jumbush's intelligence chief lives directly behind him. He switched cars frequently when moving about.
Just before 3 p.m. on April 8, a Division 24 convoy passed the Afghan Red Crescent Society office in Meymaneh. Farouq, in the lead, spied gunmen and ordered his driver to accelerate. Assassins opened fire on the third vehicle, in which the general had been riding a few hours earlier. They killed Beg, 47, a commander of no great power or fame, along with at least two bodyguards.
As military radios crackled with the news, the two militias clashed in strategic locations. Habibi and Farouq both later contended in interviews that their soldiers never attacked, only defended.
Workers at the World Food Program facility headed for their cement bunker, as neighboring aid workers scrambled to safe rooms stocked with food and water. A worker with Save the Children U.S.A. scaled a wall, hoping to dash to the food program's bunker, but spied tanks in the street and turned back.
In Torpakhtu, a village of dried-mud houses on the city outskirts, 8-year-old Zainullah was outside playing when a bullet struck him in the head. His father laid his dying child on the back of a donkey and walked an hour and a half to the nearest doctor.
When the evening call to prayer sounded from the mosque loudspeakers, soldiers stopped fighting just long enough for the caller to chant: "God is great. . . . Everybody is asked to come to prayer."
But in villages throughout the region, another call was sounding: Send the cavalry. Hundreds of soldiers loyal to Jumbush or Jamiat mounted horses and headed for Meymaneh.
In Mazar-e Sharif, U.N. monitors assembled high-ranking representatives of Dostum and Attah Mohammed to travel to Meymaneh and negotiate a cease-fire. In front of the monitors, Dostum and Attah Mohammed ordered their commanders by phone not to attack, but each apparently suspected the other of privately telling his troops to vanquish the opponent before the peace delegation arrived. Attah Mohammed conceded in an interview that he sent a helicopter to re-supply his Meymaneh militiamen.
"I told Dostum, 'I'm not a child. I won't allow any of my commanders to even start the engine of one tank without my order,' " Attah said. "Of course, Dostum first told his soldiers to shoot with tanks. Then he said, 'Oh, those impolite soldiers shot with tanks.' "
The U.N. convoy waited until after daylight April 9 to enter the city. Dostum's and Attah Mohammed's representatives, both generals, ordered their respective local commanders to hold their fire. A U.S. warplane circled overhead to underscore the message.
After the shooting stopped, a mob of irate townspeople marched in an unprecedented demonstration to demand that the dueling militias give up their guns and get out of town.
At the Meymaneh Hotel, the U.N. delegation had just sat down to work on a cease-fire agreement requiring both militias to move out of the town center when the protesters stormed their meeting, smashed furniture and beat peacemakers and combatants alike. Demonstrators pummeled at least one Jamiat representative, and the U.N. representatives who tried to shield them, while some Jumbush negotiators slipped away.
Enayat, the governor, who had started his new job just days before, addressed the crowd and promised to help free the town from the terror of gunmen. People lifted him on their shoulders. "I told them you have rights," he recalled. "The government of Karzai has to keep security."
In the following days, U.N. monitors prodded recalcitrant militiamen to put their weapons onto trucks and move to new bases on the outskirts of town. A convoy of U.S. Special Forces soldiers rode into the city as people cheered and threw flowers.
Yet another police chief arrived, one not aligned with Jumbush or Jamiat. The central government sent him, with 53 national policemen, to establish a neutral security force. But the 53 officers were in town only a few days before someone in Kabul ordered them home. Jamiat blamed Jumbush loyalists in the central government for the recall. Some Jumbush loyalists said the new officers weren't needed.
Too cautious to talk party politics, the new police chief offered an Afghan proverb: "For the water to be clean downstream, it has to be clean upstream."
The city administration, meanwhile, is broke. "The gunmen took all the money that was supposed to be for the city and put it in their pockets," said Abdul Aziz Ghafordshad, 67, whom Enayat recently appointed mayor. "The governor and I are prepared to cut into their profits. We're taking a huge risk. But nobody is backing us up."
Once international monitors leave, Enayat said, Meymaneh's dueling militias will be able to return to shoot up the town. "They could be back here in 10 minutes," he said.
The governor said he would like to keep his promises to banish the warlords and bring Beg's killers to justice, if only he knew how. "Right now," he said. "I can't do anything against these armed people."
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
|
|
