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Hekmatyar Exposes Heinous U.S. Crimes To Annan
By Nadeem Shaker, IOL Afghanistan Correspondent

KABUL, March 6 (IslamOnline.net) - Former Afghan prime minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar sent a message to U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan detailing the heinous crimes perpetrated by U.S. forces against the Afghan people.
The message, a copy of which was obtained by IslamOnline.net, put forward a plan to settle the Afghanistan crisis only if Annan was interested in taking some concrete steps to resolve the problem.
The barbaric U.S. bombardment of the Afghan people exacted a death toll and wrecked appalling havoc on Afghan towns, stressed Hekmatyar, noting that Annan must have heard about the tragedy of the Afghan people from humanitarian relief agencies.
The eight-page message dwelt on the unimaginable destruction done by the U.S. forces in the country since 2001, citing as an example the U.S. incursion into the district of Helmand, which left up to 17 women and 45 children killed.
The Helmand operation came in retaliation for an attack on the U.S. troops, who failed to hunt down the perpetrators and decided to bombard innocent civilians for five consecutive days.
Another brutal aggression, the message said, was when the U.S. jetfighters bombarded a wedding ceremony using 1,000-Kg bombs, claiming the lives of 117 civilians and wounding 53 others.
The unbridled U.S. raids and ethnic cleansing are only aimed at terrorizing and coercing the Afghan people into cooperating with U.S. troops, said Hekmatyar, who played a key role in the war against Soviet occupation forces in the 1980s.
He said the Americans should bear in mind that the Afghan people cannot be arm-twisted to cooperate with the aggressors.
The ethnic cleansing operations, in effect, revealed the true face of the Americans to the Afghan people and uncovered their evil intentions, he underlined.
When will the inhuman U.S. bombardment and ethnic cleansing operations, carried out under the pretext of cracking down on Taliban and al-Qaeda fugitives, come to an end? Hekmatyar wondered.
When will the United Nations stop justifying the U.S. reprisals on innocent people and demolition of entire villages? He asked.
Hekmatyar further said the Afghan people are longing for the protection of an impartial peace keeping force, adding that the current International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was formed by the U.S. and not the U.N.
It is crystal clear that U.S. President George W. Bush wants to be crowned as the conqueror of the world and to that end, he does not care about the lives of innocent Afghans, he charged.
For A U.N. Pivotal Role
Hekmatyar further asserted that if the U.N. wanted to play a pivotal role in settling the Afghanistan crisis, it should withdraw all foreign troops from Afghanistan and take effective measures to prevent the influx of weapons to the country by road and air.
He also proposed reforming the Afghan provisional government in a way that suit all Afghans.
The U.S., Russia, Britain and Germany should pledge not to provide any assistance to the Afghan government or groups, he added.
The former prime minister pressed for organizing fair and free general elections in accordance with a timetable setting up unanimously by all Afghan factions in an extraordinary conference.
Hekmatyar stressed that the international body should play an effective role in holding this conference to avoid a repetition of the past mistake of allowing the Americans and the Russians to dictate their terms and choose certain factions.
All Afghan factions should guarantee that the Afghan soil would not be a source of instability in the region, a launching pad for terrorism or a fertile ground for poppy trafficking and cultivation, he added.
Husbanullah Mutawakel, a well versed expert in the Afghan affairs, said the message carries Hekmatyar''s signature inked on previous messages which means that it is an authentic one.
"The timing of the message comes in view of the current situation in Afghanistan and the deteriorating security conditions, especially when some ISAF countries have declared their pull-out from the country, in addition to the Iraq crisis, which has caught the world attention," he remarked.
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2003-03-10 Mon 11:57ct