Dostum Accused of Prison Abuses

21/05/2004| IslamWeb

Inmates at the imposing Pul-i-Charki jail east of Kabul may well wonder at the international outcry over US military abuses at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, having been badly mistreated themselves. Most of the 1,244 men at the fortress-like prison have just been moved from Shiberghan jail in the north belonging to General Abdul Rashid Dostum, a presidential adviser and key ally of US forces during the war against the Taliban in 2001. There they were beaten and underfed, slept 26 to a cell and cooped up for months, and contracted tuberculosis due to the overcrowding, prisoners at Pul-i-Charki told Reuters yesterday. "For the first four months at Shiberghan we were not allowed outside," said Shah Akbar, a Pakistani who was fighting with the Taliban when they surrendered to Dostum's US-backed forces near Kunduz, in the north, late in 2001. "There were 26 of us in a small cell, sleeping on our sides on the bare floor. I was beaten several times with a chain," said the skull-capped, bearded 25-year-old from Pakistan's southern port city of Karachi. He suffers from tuberculosis. Prisoners moved from Shiberghan said no one had been formally charged, and none is considered to be a major security threat by the US military, which questioned them there. Some 849 of them were shifted to Pul-i-Charki, once a torture and execution centre where Communist regimes in the 1980s killed thousands of Islamists, after going on hunger strike this month. Many wonder why their basic rights were neglected for so long by the international community, including the United States. "We had no rights at that jail (Shiberghan) and the United States should have done more to take care of us," Akbar said. Conditions at Shiberghan improved after visits by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in 2002, but beatings continued and disease remained rife. **PHOTO CAPTION*** Abdul Rashid Dostum.