Published Tuesday, October 16, 2001, in the Herald-Leader
Northern Alliance has poor human rights record By William Douglas NEWSDAY WASHINGTON -- They have been called ethnic cleansers, rapists, thieves and thugs. But in the war against terrorism, the soldiers of the Northern Alliance are being described as something else by the Bush administration: potential friends.
Washington is working cautiously with the alliance to root out Osama bin Laden and dump Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, a group with an atrocious human rights history, in the U.S. view.
Several human rights advocates and political analysts, however, say that President Bush, in his zeal to capture the key suspect in the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, may be fighting evil with evil by depending on the Northern Alliance.
``Unfortunately, some of their top commanders were warlords who excelled in running rampant in Kabul and elsewhere, massacring and raping people,'' said Joost Hiltermann, executive director of the arms division of Human Rights Watch.
And many Afghans worry that the alliance will eventually reclaim a Kabul it lost to the Taliban and resume its old ways to settle old scores.
``That's what people are afraid of in Afghanistan, that these guys are coming back,'' said Patricia Gossman, an adjunct Georgetown University professor who has researched Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch. ``That's why people are fleeing Kabul. They know what these guys did. They were horrible.''
The Northern Alliance -- or the United Front, as it likes to be called -- is a confederation primarily of ethnic Tajik and Uzbek Afghans who have been locked in battle with the Taliban, who mainly hail from Pashtun tribes. Pashtuns make up 38 percent of Afghanistan's population.
When they weren't fighting the Taliban, alliance factions were fighting among themselves, racking up a record of human rights atrocities.
>From 1992 to 1995, factions that later formed the Northern Alliance
indiscriminately bombed Kabul neighborhoods, killing thousands of people,
according to Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. On Feb. 11, 1993,
Tajik and Pashtun factions joined forces and went on a murder and rape spree
in West Kabul, killing about 100 people and causing countless ethnic Hazara
civilians to ``disappear,'' a Human Rights Watch report said.
Two years later, Tajik alliance troops went on a raping and looting rampage after capturing a predominantly Hazara neighborhood in Kabul.
``Everybody likes to make them (alliance members) into Robin Hoods,'' said Milt Bearden, who was a CIA station chief in Pakistan, handling the agency's aid to anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan. ``When they ran Kabul from 1992 to 1994, they were as responsible as anyone else for bringing the Taliban to power.''
The alliance's infighting created the perfect vacuum for the Taliban, a fundamentalist Islamic group, to move on Kabul in 1996.
The alliance abuses continued under Taliban rule and were aimed directly at their foes.
In its 1999 report on human rights practices around the world, the State Department wrote that ``armed units of the Northern Alliance, local commanders, and rogue individuals were responsible for political killings, abductions, kidnappings for ransom, torture, rape, arbitrary detention and looting.''
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, however, many politicians and analysts are viewing the Northern Alliance with a fresh eye.
``We need to recognize the value they bring to this anti-Taliban effort,'' Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said recently, ``and, where appropriate, find ways to assist them.''
The alliance are an unsavory lot, said a former Clinton administration adviser, but the United States needs them.
``There's a direct threat to the United States. Six thousand Americans died, and (the Northern Alliance) is willing to help,'' said the adviser, who requested anonymity. ``Sometimes the only way to catch terrorists and murderers is to associate with terrorists and murderers.''