Christian Message Boards: Mass Graves Reported in Afghanistan

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Posted by barrykind (Member # 35) on :

Three Mass Graves Reported Found in Afghanistan
Sunday, April 07, 2002

KABUL, Afghanistan — A U.N. team was traveling to the central Afghan city of Bamiyan on Sunday to investigate three mass graves that townspeople said contained the bodies of ethnic Hazaras killed by the Taliban last fall.

The number of people buried in the graves and the exact circumstances of their deaths were unclear, U.N. spokesman Manoel de Almeida e Silva said.

"Representatives of the Hazara community in Bamiyan believe that the graves contain bodies of members of their community killed ... approximately one month before the fall of the Taliban," he said.

The U.N. human rights adviser and a representative of the interim Afghan government's Interior Ministry were headed to Bamiyan to assess the discovery, he said.

There have long been reports of Taliban repression directed against the Hazara minority, which comprises about 10 percent of Afghanistan's population. The Hazara are followers of Islam's Shia branch, which is dominant in neighboring Iran and a few other places but is a rival of the Sunni branch to which most of the Taliban belonged.

Hazara leaders claim as many as 15,000 of their people were killed in a religiously motivated slaughter orchestrated by the Taliban in many parts of the country.

In the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif, workers have unearthed mass graves allegedly containing the bodies of Hazara killed when the town fell to the Taliban in 1998.

Hazara leaders in Bamiyan wanted to exhume the bodies from the newly discovered mass graves as soon as possible for proper burial, de Almeida e Silva said. He said the leaders had agreed to wait a short time to allow the United Nations to investigate.

Bamiyan, 50 miles northwest of Kabul, was the site of enormous 1,500-year-old carvings of the Buddha that were blown up by the Taliban last year.