"Dance of Death"

As the Northern Alliance rolls up the Taliban in the growing rout, we hear
stories of revenge killings by Alliance fighters and I'm reminded of a story
I was told by an aid worker in the region. Forced out of Afghanistan, he
moved to Peshawar, just across the Khyber Pass in Pakistan. There he rented
a house from a Pashtun, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. His
landlord was a cultured fellow, the worker said, proficient in seven
languages and the No. 3 man in the university. At dinner one night, the
worker told the landlord the Taliban would never be taken seriously as a
government among civilized nations if they continued their atrocities.

In the most recent, they had rounded up 3,000 to 4,000 Hazaras (another
ethnic group), forced them into boxcars in the heat of summer and cooked them
to death. The landlord replied that this measure had been necessary in
response to the Hazaras' "Dance of Death" video. To produce it, they had
beheaded Pashtuns with a large sword and continued to tape as the bodies
twitched violently until they fell. This culture of revenge -- in a country
that has been at war for 22 years -- will present the biggest obstacle to
establishing a stable government and a lasting peace.

Ed Fowler

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(c) 2001 Millennium Relief & Development Services, vol. 1 no. 11
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