Taleban concern at prisoner mistreatment

Thursday, January 8, 1998 Published at 12:25 GMT BBC News

Alan Johnston Kabul

The Taleban authorities in Afghanistan have expressed concern about the way their enemies are treating Taleban prisoners-of-war. According to the Taleban, prisoners have been tortured, forced to work and denied proper food rations. The Taleban have called on the international community to step in and prevent more such abuses. But as our Kabul correspondent Alan Johnston reports, there are often accounts of the Taleban themselves beating people in custody or detaining them in unsatisfactory conditions:

The Taleban have focused their concern on conditions in jails in the Panjshir Valley, the stronghold of one of the main anti-Taleban commanders, Ahmed Shah Massoud. A former prisoner who says that he'd escaped recently claimed that soon after being captured he'd been beaten and subjected to torture by electric shock.

He said there was forced labour and that prisoners were given insufficient food. He claimed that at least 30 captives had died of illnesses.

A Taleban spokesman called on the United Nations and international aid agencies to intervene and ensure that conditions improved. Anti-Taleban-alliance sources in the Panjshir Valley could not be reached for comment.

However, they have been allowing journalists and aid workers to make visits to jails in their area and as yet there have been no independent reports of major mistreatment of captives. But issues relating to conditions for prisoners-of-war in Afghanistan are highly sensitive at the moment.

The Taleban believe that many hundreds of their fighters taken captive in the northern cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Shebarghan were close to death during the summer, and there's no doubt that conditions in prisons on both sides of Afghanistan's front lines are always bad by international standards.

There are often reports of the Taleban beating people who are rounded up in mass arrests of suspected political opponents -- and the Taleban are also guilty of using completely unsuitable metal shipping containers as makeshift prisons.