Afghanistan Vice President Accused of Torturing Political Rival

A political rival of Vice President Abdul Rashid Dostum of Afghanistan said on Tuesday that he had been tortured and raped with an assault rifle after being abducted by General Dostum last month.

In an interview with The New York Times, the political rival, Ahmad Ishchi, said he was badly abused by the general, who was the acting president at the time because President Ashraf Ghani was out of the country, and by the general’s men.

“I can kill you right now, and no one will ask,” Mr. Ishchi said General Dostum told him. He claimed the vice president stepped on his throat and pressed down after he had already been beaten and bloodied.

General Dostum’s office, in a statement, called the accusation a conspiracy to defame the vice president. The statement said Mr. Ishchi had not been abducted, but rather had been arrested by security forces on charges of supporting the opposition, for which he remains under investigation.

“It’s clear there are puppet elements that are trying to influence the international perceptions, and our advice to them is to avoid rushing and premature judgments,” the statement said.

Multiple witnesses reported seeing General Dostum personally beating Mr. Ishchi and having his men drive away with him in a truck during a buzkashi match in northern Afghanistan last month. Despite repeated requests, General Dostum and his staff would not comment on the accusations at the time.

“If he has animosity with me, I would have no problem if he had killed me with a bullet,” Mr. Ishchi said in the interview. “My character needs to be restored, my rights have been trampled. They should tell me the reasons. If he is the vice president, I am also a human, I have a right to live in this country.”

Many of the Western embassies in Kabul expressed concern on Tuesday about Mr. Ishchi’s accusations, which he also made to other news organizations, and called for an investigation.

“The E.U. and its member states present in Kabul, Australia, Canada and Norway, call for a fair and transparent official investigation as regards reports of gross human rights’ violations and abuses against Mr. Ahmad Ishchi as well as concerning the allegations made against the 1st Vice President, General Abdul Rashid Dostum,” the European Union said in a statement on Tuesday.

Haroon Chakhansuri, a spokesman for the president, said the government was committed to investigating the accusations.

“For Afghan government, nobody is above the law,” Mr. Chakhansuri said. “We will fully investigate the allegation. Rule of law and accountability begins from government itself, and we are committed to it.”

General Dostum is a former warlord with a history of accusations of human rights violations and abuse, including physical acts of retaliation against allies and rivals. In the past, the United States government, despite counting General Dostum as one of its earliest allies in the war, had urged the former president, Hamid Karzai, against using the general as a campaign ally.

When President Ghani, a Western-educated technocrat, selected General Dostum as his running mate two years ago in an effort to gain the support of his ethnic Uzbek constituency, it immediately raised concerns. Many feared that Mr. Ghani would struggle to contain a man he had once described as “a known killer.”

As part of a campaign to improve the general’s public image, Mr. Ghani’s aides convinced General Dostum to release a statement apologizing for past crimes and privately stressed that he would have limited authority as vice president.

In the years since then, however, that sense of marginalization has sparked several outbursts by General Dostum in which he complained about not being trusted. And in a news conference in October, he issued a veiled threat that he might turn his anger against the government if disrespect of him continued.

“When Ghani brought Dostum onto his ticket in 2014, he repeated the same mistake that has plagued Afghanistan since 2001: subordinating human rights and governance to political expediency,” said Patricia Gossman, senior researcher on Afghanistan for Human Rights Watch.

“Ghani knew Dostum’s record, and he knew the risks — and wrangled an ‘apology.’ But the fact is warlords and strongmen throughout Afghanistan continue to operate with impunity, and that’s why the effort to build a stable Afghan state, one where there’s respect for the rule of law, has largely failed.”

The rivalry between Mr. Ishchi and General Dostum dates back about three decades, to the final days of the Soviet-backed Communist government in Afghanistan.

General Dostum outmaneuvered Mr. Ishchi to become the head of a regional paramilitary force, but Mr. Ishchi refused to serve as a subordinate of the general, remaining one of the political pockets that the general could not control in his northern stronghold.

The recent hostility broke out on Nov. 25, in northern Jowzjan Province, during a game of buzkashi between horsemen belonging to Mr. Ishchi on one side and General Dostum on the opposite.

Mr. Ishchi, 63, said that the vice president summoned him over and was already fuming when he met him. He said General Dostum started insulting him, and then had his bodyguards throw Mr. Ishchi to the ground and stepped on his throat.

“He pressed for about two minutes like that,” Mr. Ishchi said. “There were around 2,000 people in the arena watching.”

He said his hands were tied behind him, and he was driven to General Dostum’s home in the back of an armored vehicle. “They stuck to me like a wolf does to sheep – tearing my vest, taking off my cape, my boots, and my pants,” he said.

In General Dostum’s private prison, he said he suffered intense abuse, including repeated beatings and being raped with the barrel of a Kalashnikov rifle by one of Mr. Dostum’s men, leaving him internally injured. His account could not be independently verified.

Mr. Ishchi said he remained a prisoner of General Dostum for five days before being handed over to local intelligence officers. The agency kept him for 10 days, releasing him after his wounds – he said his face looked “like a liver” the first time he looked in a mirror – were mostly healed, under the care of a doctor at the intelligence agency.

“What is my crime?” said Mr. Ishchi, showing a reporter bruises on his legs. “What right does he have to beat me up, to take me to his private prison? I will do anything I can to restore my honor, any door I can go to.”

The New York Times

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