War criminal set to become Afghanistan's Chief Justice

According to the Society for Threatened Peoples (STP), an alleged war criminal may soon be named the head of the Supreme Court in Afghanistan. The human rights organization warned on Tuesday that Abdul Rab Rasul Sayyaf was to be nominated by Afghan President Hamid Karzai as a candidate to head the nine-member court. The parliament will most likely accept this candidate, in part because Yunus Qanooni, the influential former Speaker of the Parliament, will support the candidacy of the alleged war criminal. In return Qanooni is to be returned to his former position as Speaker, as the STP has been informed by reliable sources in Kabul. Sources are convinced that the executive committee of the court will appoint Sayyaf as Chief Justice.

"This mass murderer must not be made the guardian of the law in Afghanistan," said the head of the Afghanistan section of the STP, Tillmann Schmalzried. "The parliament, the most important democratic institution, is already controlled by warlords, and now the judicial system is endangered as well. This could condemn the establishment of a democratic Afghanistan to complete failure." The STP urgently called on German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle to block the candidacy of Sayyaf for the Supreme Court.

Sayyaf's worst crime was his leading role in the displacement and murder of the Shiite population of the Afshar district in Kabul in February 1993. Thousands of people were killed at that time. He then had hundreds of the survivors kidnapped and taken to his residence Paghman where they were murdered – some of them tortured to death. When one witness was preparing to show the mass graves to foreign journalists in 2004, the powerful warlord arranged for his execution, even though the death penalty had been officially banned.

The Pashtun Sayyaf was the only Wahhabi among the warlords of the northern alliance, a confederation of militia leaders against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Wahhabi are extremely conservative Muslims who have their base in Saudi Arabia. Thus Sayyaf was tasked with the training of non-Afghan militants during of the uprising against the Soviet Union. He was the trainer and partner of Osama bin Laden and the Philippine terror group Abu Sayyaf.

Karzai assured him of his support as early as 2002, when he placed one of Sayyaf's followers at the head of the Supreme Court. He in turn appointed as judges some 900 Islamic legal scholars who had refused to recognize the constitution adopted in 2004, some of them to provincial courts. Staff members at the Max Planck Institute of Comparative Public Law and International Law, who gave courses for Afghan judges, were shocked to hear these judges openly articulating their rejection of the constitution.