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Afghans homes destroyed for officials { September 16 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15608-2003Sep15.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A15608-2003Sep15.html
Afghans Protest Homes' Destruction
Two Reports Say Neighborhood Razed to Provide Land for Officials' Houses
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, September 16, 2003; Page A13
KABUL, Afghanistan, Sept. 15 -- Sayed Ahmad's mud-brick house looks like it was struck by an earthquake. The main wall has toppled into his yard, where the family cow is tethered to an apple tree. Half the roof has collapsed, and his wife is sweeping rubble into piles.
But this destruction was not an act of God. It was the work of city bulldozers that were sent in last week to force Ahmad and 20 of his neighbors out of the rudimentary homes they had built two decades ago. Once cleared, the army-owned land was slated to be distributed to senior government officials and former militia commanders to build their own houses.
"The police came in and beat me with their guns when I refused to leave," said Ahmad, 56, an army officer and father of six who earns $80 a month. "The machines pushed down the wall and a wardrobe fell on my little girl. Our holy Korans were buried under the earth. I have worked for the army for 26 years, but now the powerful people with guns have humiliated my family and destroyed our home."
A growing scandal over the tiny community known as Sherpur, spurred by two sharply critical reports from a U.N. housing expert and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, has deeply embarrassed the U.S.-backed government. According to the reports, seven cabinet ministers and Kabul's mayor received plots in Sherpur, which abuts the capital's most exclusive neighborhood, for nominal fees.
The dispute has thrown a spotlight on the widely rumored but previously undocumented practices of high-level land grabbing, corrupt municipal real estate dealings and forcible occupation of properties in the capital, where half the population of 3.2 million does not have adequate housing.
"What happened in Sherpur is a microcosm of what has been happening all over the city and the country," said Miloon Kothari, a U.N. special rapporteur on housing and land rights, who spent several weeks here. His final report accused several senior Afghan officials, including the powerful defense minister, of active collusion in official land grabs, and flatly recommended that they be fired.
In his report, Kothari described a "culture of impunity" in which Afghan officials and other powerful individuals can seize homes and refuse to leave them or appropriate valuable public land for their own profit. "There is a crisis of housing and a freeze on land allocation, but that doesn't apply to the wealthy, the well-connected, the commanders or the drug lords," he said in an interview.
Separately, the human rights commission released a report Sunday that described a widespread problem of forcible land occupation and profiteering by "warlords and strong governmental officials." In the Sherpur case, it listed 29 senior officials and other powerful individuals who had received plots for nominal fees, including six cabinet ministers, the mayor, the Central Bank governor and two former militia commanders.
Aides to the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, said he was "infuriated" and "extremely upset" about the charges. At the weekly cabinet meeting today, aides said, he ordered a commission appointed to investigate the Sherpur case and upbraided his ministers on their responsibility to help the poor rather than enrich themselves.
But two of the senior officials who received plots in Sherpur called a news conference today, during which they denied any wrongdoing. The officials denounced Kothari for interfering in Afghan affairs and challenged the work of the human rights commission, whose chairwoman sat in the audience.
"I believe in human rights. I support human rights. This is political terrorism," said Anwar Ahady, the governor of the central bank, who was listed in one of the reports as receiving one plot of land. Like another official, Education Minister Yonus Qanooni, Ahady did not deny receiving the land, but said it had been legally transferred to him on Karzai's orders and that he had done nothing wrong.
Qanooni said there was a difference between "taking land by force and being given land by the current rulers." He demanded an apology from the human rights commission and handed out copies of a letter from Lakhdar Brahimi, the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan, reproving Kothari for some of his public comments.
But Brahimi, in a hastily called meeting today with several journalists, said he had "absolutely no disagreement" with the substance of Kothari's findings. He condemned the destruction of the Sherpur houses as "totally unacceptable" and said he had complained to Afghan officials about the problem of official land grabs and illegal occupation of homes.
The disclosures of high-level land deals came as the Afghan capital is suffering from a shelter crisis of catastrophic proportions. According to officials, the capital's population has nearly doubled in the past two years, largely because of returning refugees, and about half the population lives in "informal" homes without electricity or water, such as tents and abandoned ruins.
City planners have designed blueprints of low-cost housing projects but have no funds to build them. The Kabul municipality has turned away thousands of returned refugees who say they have old deeds to public land plots.
"The housing supply in Kabul does not meet even 10 percent of the demand," said Nasir Saberi, the deputy minister for housing and urban development. It remains unclear how the situation in Sherpur escalated to such a dramatic confrontation and who ordered the land to be distributed to the senior officials. Ahady, Qanooni and others have said the order came from Karzai, but the president's spokesman strongly denied that.
The spokesman, Jawad Luddin, said Karzai had "spoken very clearly" to the cabinet, declaring that no official had the right to individually bestow, sell or occupy city land.
The Sherpur houses were built on land belonging to the Defense Ministry that surrounds an old army base. Some officials said the residents were asked to leave several months ago but refused. Gen. Bashir Salangi, the city police commander whose troops bulldozed the houses, said he would not have given the order without authority from municipal officials.
"Those people [in Sherpur] are liars," he said.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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