Actually they were called either "relocation camps" or "internment camps". They were never referred to as "concentration camps".
Paft, so you know, the Afghans have been butchering members of each side for years now. One of the preferred methods of mass execution is to simply pack prisoners into a steel cargo container for a few days, then dump the bodies into a mass grave or bury the cargo container. Cheap and effective, they suffocate in a 160 degree oven within a few hours.
The WSWS is taking the possibility (likelyhood) that Northern alliance commanders sometimes did this to Taliban prisoners when the US wasn't around (remember, both sides have been doing this, and worse things to each other for years) and expanding it out to include the presence of US troops before or during the events. (unlikely at best). If nothing else we would've heard from the soldiers themselves if they had seen this happen.
From CNN, Newsweek, Physicians for Human rights and the United Nations...
http://www.cnn.com/2002/WORLD/asiapcf/c ... s/?related
Now, before you cry too much for the Taliban, I want you to understand some of what they have done:
In 1998, "On August 8 and the days that followed, Taliban militiamen and their allies methodically executed between 2000 and 5000 civilians in one of the deadliest mass killings of civilians in two decades of warfare in Afghanistan, according to interviews with witnesses who later fled to Pakistan and reports by international human rights investigators. Taliban militiamen searched house to house for males of fighting age who belonged to the Hazara ethnic minority, says a report in Washington.
Hazaras were gunned down in front of their families or had their throats slit. Others, thrown in to the city's overcrowded jail, were executed by firing squads or crammed in to tractor-trailers, where they sweltered all day in the summer sun -doors shut- until most perished from suffocation or that heavy trucks hauled the bodies to the nearby desert and dumped them in heaps like trash, according to the reports."
http://rawa.fancymarketing.net/dogs.htm
Need some more proof?
"Hazara leaders claim their group, about 10 percent of Afghanistan's population, suffered the worst atrocities at the hands of the Taliban. They claim as many as 15,000 Hazara were killed in a religiously motivated slaughter in Mazar-e-Sharif and other parts of Afghanistan."
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/ ... 09-ON.html
15,000 people. Massacred.
Hard to believe?
Maybe your eyes will convince you. Go view the videos on this site:
WARNING!: THE IMAGES ARE *EXTREMELY* BRUTAL AND DISTURBING! I'm not kidding even a little bit. They are horriffic.
http://rawasongs.fancymarketing.net/movies/movies1.htm
Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA)
You can watch a woman being executed by the Taliban in the main soccer stadium in Kabul. You can watch a group of people have their throats cuts in public by the Taliban. You can see a picture of a woman horribly burned by her Taliban husband. You can see two men hanged by the Taliban. You can see more people being murdered in other areas by the Taliban, and yet more people getting their throats cut by the Taliban. You can see video of a mass grave of 600 people killed by the Taliban, including women and children.
Get the idea? You're talking about a group of mass murderers, women beaters, and extremely dangerous and violent men, who met their end with the same sympathy and the same compassion, that they showed to others. That is, none. The method of their death is, if anything, befitting of their life and in many cases far more peaceful than what they offer others. Those who live by the sword, and would gladly put others to the sword, have no right to sympathy when they are put under the sword.
Is the Northern Alliance better? Sad to say, they are in fact worlds better. Just ask the women who can finally go out in public and (gasp!) actually show their faces, or (shock!) learn to READ!
The truth is, that the Taliban are so extreme, that ALL the other countries of the region consider them to be out of control religious fanatics. The Supreme leader of Iran (generally known as the most Islamic country in the world) describes them thus:
"What is being done in our neighbourhood in the name of Islam by a bunch unaware of this religion, is neither connected to Islam nor accepted by its' principles...They are the best example for what is called reactionary, prejudiced and far from human realities." -Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
http://www.growley.com/war/taliban.html
Paft, you absolutely waste your sympathy on people no better than the worst nazi concentration camp guards. The truth is they earn no sympathy, and they deserve no sympathy. The world, and their own country, is a better, safer, and more sane place without them.
Even their fellow Afghanis think so.
Regards,
-Bouncer-
