UN tally excluded Afghan civilian deaths
By Gareth Porter and Shah Noori
WASHINGTON, KABUL - A July United Nations report asserting that only 30
civilians died in targeted raids in Afghanistan during the first six months of
2011 reflected only a very small fraction of night raids in which civilians
were killed, according to officials of the independent Afghan commission which
had co-produced the 2010 report on civilian casualties with the UN Mission.
The report on civilian casualties by the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan (UNAMA) attributed 80% of the 1,462
civilian deaths it counted during the six-month period to the Taliban - mostly
from improvised explosive devices - and only 14% of them to "Pro-Government
Forces".
The report credited the US-North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military
command with reducing civilian casualties in night raids during the six-month
period by 15% compared with the same period last year.
But officials of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC),
which collaborated with UNAMA on its 2010 civilian casualties report, told
Inter Press Service (IPS) that the number of night raids that UNAMA
investigated could only have been a very small proportion of the total number
of targeted raids with civilian casualties.
A leading official of the independent commission has also objected publicly to
UNAMA's exclusion from the total in last year's report of most of the
allegations of civilian deaths in raids that had been brought to its attention.
The AIHRC officials, who have personal experience on the issue of civilian
casualties from night raids, told IPS that most night raids are carried out in
districts that are dominated by the Taliban. In those districts, people are not
able to file complaints and usually are not even aware of any opportunity to do
so, the sources said.
The AIHRC sources requested anonymity because they are not authorized to talk
to the news media about the matter.
In Helmand province, the raids are believed to be concentrated in the districts
where the Taliban are strongest, such as Baghran, Baghni, Sangin and
Nahr-e-Saraj, the sources explained. The same is true for Kandahar, Zabul,
Uruzgan and other southern and eastern provinces where the Taliban has a strong
presence, the AIHRC sources said.
The commission received only nine complaints directly from families of those
who had been killed or injured in a night raid during the first six months of
2011, according to the AIHRC sources.
In fact, the commission gets most of its information about civilian casualties
in night raids not from complaints from people in the area where the raids take
place but from talking with people in detention, the sources said.
But that information is fragmentary, according to the sources, because the
commission has access to only a fraction of the detainees in the Afghan prison
system, and because the detainees themselves are only aware of some of the
cases.
UNAMA has seven regional offices, but travel and contact between those offices
and the districts in which the Taliban are strongest are limited.
Daphne Eviatar, who has monitored human rights in Afghanistan for the US-based
group Human Rights First, agreed with the assessment that the families of
victims in many districts would be unlikely to file complaints about civilian
casualties from night raids.
"I'm not sure who they would complain to," said Eviatar.
UNAMA's six-month report conceded that, "Given both limitations associated with
the operating environment and limited access to information, UNAMA may be
under-reporting the night raids involving civilian casualties."
In a February 2011 interview with researchers on a study by the Open Society
Foundations and The Liaison Office, an unnamed "international human-rights
monitor" went even further. The unnamed individual admitted to "underreporting
of night raids because many of the areas in which they took place are
inaccessible and the civilians are difficult to verify".
UNAMA is the only international entity that has been reporting totals of
civilian casualties in night raids.
The UNAMA report for the first six months indicates that the NATO-led
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had refused repeatedly to
provide information on the number of night raids it had carried out.
Nevertheless, figures provided by ISAF to the Washington Post and to blogger
Bill Roggio show a total of 2,020 targeted raids in the six-month period from
early May through early November 2010, killing roughly 2,000 "insurgents".
United States military officers also told the researchers for the Open
Societies Foundation study that shots had been fired in only 20% of night
raids. That would mean that 2,000 people were killed in just over 400 raids in
which shots were fired during the six months - an average of five people per
shooting incident.
The vast majority of night raids target a single individual. So the available
statistics on night raids suggest that the vast majority of those killed in the
raids had not been targeted.
UNAMA acknowledged in the report that ISAF does not apply the same definition
of "civilian" based on international humanitarian law that UNAMA applies in
counting civilian casualties.
United States Special Forces officers belonging to a unit that had killed nine
election workers along with a former Taliban insurgent they had mistakenly
believed was the Taliban shadow governor of Takhar province in September 2010
told former BBC reporter Kate Clark last December that anyone found in the
company of a person who is targeted is regarded as an insurgent as well.
The very broad definition of "insurgent" used by ISAF in releasing figures on
the number killed in night raids, along with statistics on raids coming from
ISAF itself, suggests that most of those killed in night raids would be
considered civilians under international humanitarian law criteria.
UNAMA would not allow IPS to interview the head of its human-rights office,
Georgette Gagnon, about the 2011 report, even though she had told IPS she could
do an interview during the week of August 22.
In responses to questions e-mailed by IPS, however, Gagnon said that UNAMA had
investigated a total of 89 night raids in which casualties had been alleged,
and that it had rejected the allegations of civilian deaths in 58 of those
cases.
AIHRC and UNAMA, which co-produced the 2010 report, had clashed over UNAMA's
decision to put the number of civilian deaths in night raids at 82 in that
report.
Nader Nadery, a commissioner of the AIHRC, revealed in an interview with IPS
after the report was published that UNAMA had based the figure of 82 deaths on
only 13 night raids in which the civilian deaths had been verified to UNAMA's
satisfaction. Nadery said the total had excluded alleged civilian deaths in 60
other raids.
UNAMA did not partner with AIHRC in producing the 2011 six-month report.
In a recent interview with IPS, Nadery estimated that 462 civilian deaths had
occurred in all of the night raids in 2010 about which the commission had
obtained some information.
The latest report's methodological section confirms that alleged civilian
deaths are not included in UNAMA's total if the civilian status of any of the
victims in an incident is uncertain.
Gagnon told IPS that said the mission's decisions on such cases "are based on
firsthand accounts for the vast majority of the incidents investigated". She
would not say, however, how many of the decisions to reject allegations were
made on the basis of eyewitness accounts.
Gagnon also acknowledged that ISAF and Afghan officials had challenged some
allegations, but would not reveal how many of the allegations that had been
rejected fell into that category.
Shah Noori reported from Afghanistan. Gareth Porter is an
investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security
policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance:
Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006.
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