West ignored accounts of Taliban abuse, scholar says

Four days before the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Dr Nilab Mobarez attended lunch at the French ambassador's residence in Tashkent.

She said a leading French "expert" on Islam and adviser to the Quai d'Orsay was holding forth about Afghanistan. "He said: 'Afghanistan is of no international interest.' (He said) that it was an internal conflict and that the Afghans would have to sort it out themselves."

Dr Mobarez and her family fled Afghanistan in 1989, when she was 28. She told the expert that he was short-sighted, that the Taliban regime threatened Asia and the entire world. She did not imagine that her prediction would prove horrifically true so quickly.

"We're very bitter," she says of herself and other Afghan intellectuals who have tried for years to draw the world's attention to their country.

When Ahmed Shah Massoud spoke before the European parliament last March, he addressed himself publicly to President Bush, Dr Mobarez recalls. "He said: 'Be careful. The fire will spread; it can go as far as America'. And nobody listened." Massoud was assassinated, almost certainly by agents of Osama bin Laden, on September 9th.

Dr Mobarez has political refugee status in France but she does not want to give up her Afghan nationality. "The history of my country has been so tragic that it makes me feel a stronger attachment. Now that I've seen the misery of my compatriots, it strengthens that even more," she said.

I met Dr Mobarez in Dushanbe, as she left the Panshir Valley after a two-week stay there.

The association she founded a year ago runs a mother-and-child clinic in the valley. But until three weeks ago, public interest in the West was almost non-existent. She pays an Afghan gynaecologist to run the clinic when she is back in France, where she holds a full-time job as a hospital emergency room doctor.

When Dr Mobaraez returned to Afghanistan with the help of the United Front for the first time last June, the misery she found surpassed anything she had imagined.

"There are 100,000 refugees in the United Front zone," she said. "Four refugee camps in the Panshir Valley. The Taliban had a scorched earth policy when they attacked the Shamali plain in 1998. There were a lot of massacres; they arrested 17,000 women, whom they took first to Jalalabad and then to Kabul, where they're imprisoned in the Russian embassy."

Even warnings from the UN Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, last February went largely unheeded, Dr Mobarez says.

"The refugees at Hozabaddin are eating grass. There are three families living in each tent meant for one family. Thirty times as many Afghan women die in childbirth as in Europe. A quarter of all babies die before the age of one. These figures have been published by the UN and by all the aid agencies. Everybody knows these figures, and nobody gave a damn until three weeks ago."

That the world is finally noticing Afghanistan is little comfort to Dr Mobarez.

"First because we lost Massoud, and because if it hadn't been for the World Trade Centre, they still wouldn't care. There are already 800,000 people displaced internally in Afghanistan, and bombardments will displace more. There are 200,000 in the camps at Herat - known as 'plastic city'. People freeze to death there in winter. Everyone knew that. But instead of doing something, they lost interest. They said it was an internal conflict."

Dr Mobarez blames the US for "sub-contracting" its policy on Afghanistan to Islamabad. Now her worst fear is that Washington will again let Pakistan have a say in choosing a new leadership for her country.

Dr Mobarez can be reached by email at zaranka@worldonline.fr