Monday, Oct. 04, 2004

Ahmad Nader Nadery

By Tim McGirk

Foreign occupation is always awful for a country's human rights, as Afghans discovered under the Soviets in the 1980s. So was the warlordism endured after the Soviets packed up, and so were the dictates of the Taliban. A new era of liberty is dawning in Afghanistan, but try telling that to Ahmad Nader Nadery, 30, the country's most prominent human-rights activist. Nadery's job remains highly hazardous—which means the bad days are by no means over.

Nadery is head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, an official body established in 2002 under the country's new constitution. That was a good sign: over the previous decade, Nadery had waged a kind of guerrilla war for human rights that got him arrested several times, exiled in Pakistan and, in 1996, flogged in front of a crowd for not wearing a turban. Yet his current official status isn't protection enough. Nadery's group is trying to expose a range of crimes committed over the years by the country's regional warlords, including executions, forced marriages and war crimes. But the warlords are still powerful figures: they occupy provincial governorships and sit in the Cabinet of President Hamid Karzai. "What Nadery is doing is extremely dangerous," says John Sifton of the New York City-based Human Rights Watch. "He's challenging the military factions. And he's very courageous." After Nadery exposed a land-grab scandal by several top officials in Kabul in September 2003, his friends bundled him off to safe houses around town. Nadery shrugs off the danger: "This is commonplace for human-rights workers."

Nadery was inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., whose biographies he read as a law student at Kabul University. He says that life in Afghanistan is improving dramatically. "Women have more rights, and there's political freedom and expression," he argues. "But we've lost opportunities. The warlords are a huge obstacle." The commanders' behavior is often barbaric: Nadery's group recently discovered that in August, during a four-day clash between the armies of two warlords near Herat, one commander beheaded four prisoners and skinned alive his captured rival. Nadery is also investigating several cases of alleged sexual abuse of Afghan prisoners by American soldiers and three incidents in which Taliban suspects died while in U.S. military custody. U.S. authorities confirm the deaths occurred but have yet to issue the results of their inquiries. "I was never expecting this behavior," says Nadery, "from people fighting for democracy." The fight for a civilized Afghanistan is still raging, and Nadery is one of its stoutest warriors.