Two former Afghan generals who had apparently hoped to live quietly as political refugees in the Netherlands instead have found themselves in a Dutch court, accused of crimes committed during their homeland's Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
Former secret police
Heshamuddin Hesam, 57, and Habibulla Jalalzoy, 59, senior officials of the feared Khad secret police during that period, are accused of torture and war crimes at the first trial of its kind in the District Court of The Hague.
Witnesses have testified that they had been beaten, starved, deprived of sleep for days and given hours of electric shocks until they passed out from pain. During such brutal interrogations of opponents to the regime, Russians were often present, witnesses said.
In one other trial dealing with Afghanistan's decades of warfare, an English jury in July sentenced a former Afghan commander to 20 years in a British prison for torture and hostage-taking during the Taliban regime of the 1990s.
"These are the only trials to date dealing with Afghan human-rights crimes," said Patricia Gossman of the Afghanistan Justice Project, a Kabul-based human rights group, in a telephone interview. "But they are critical because this is the first sign people see here that there is no complete immunity for the past. The Afghan judiciary is not capable of handling any such sensitive cases."
`Universal jurisdiction'
The current trial, held under a combination of Dutch and international law, is also another step in the widening application of so-called "universal jurisdiction" that allows courts in one country to judge human rights crimes committed in another, regardless of the person's nationality. While international tribunals are dealing with large-scale atrocities like those from the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, national courts in Europe are gradually taking on more cases involving asylum seekers living on their soil.
The two Afghans now on trial here have been charged under Dutch laws that flow from the Geneva Conventions and from the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture. Although these treaties were ratified here long ago, the Dutch government set up its own war crimes investigation unit in the late 1990s, a result of more and more asylum seekers coming to the Netherlands, and an effort to support its reputation as a law center and the host of several international courts.
Investigations of the two Afghan generals began when they sought political asylum in the 1990s, requiring them to describe their past professions. This landed them on a list of persons who claim persecution but who may have been involved in human rights abuses themselves.
Witnesses fearful
The two men were refused asylum, but stayed on in the Netherlands, where their presence caused much unrest among many of the country's 30,000 Afghan refugees who feared them, Fred Teeven, the chief prosecutor, said.
During the investigations and even during the trial, he said, witnesses and court translators contended that they had been threatened by associates and relatives of the accused. Some witnesses had withdrawn their names from the record or changed their testimony, the prosecutor said.
Hesam was the chief of the Afghan military intelligence from 1983 to 1991 and later was a military attache to Moscow. His subordinate, Jalalzoy, was chief of interrogations. Both men have agreed they held the jobs, but deny giving any orders to mistreat prisoners. Hesam said he followed the instructions of Russian military advisers.
The verdict, expected in three weeks, will be by a panel of three judges. There is no jury in the case.
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