Socialist Viewpoint

The U.S. government has criticized the showing by Germany’s main public broadcaster, ARD, of a controversial documentary dealing with an alleged massacre of Taliban prisoners in Afghanistan.

The documentary alleges that U.S. troops watched as opposition Northern Alliance troops killed between 1,500 and 3,000 Taliban prisoners in November last year—an allegation flatly rejected by the U.S. government.

The documentary was broadcast on Wednesday evening under the title Das Massaker in Afghanistan—haben die Amerikaner zugesehen? (The massacre in Afghanistan—did the Americans stand by and watch?). It was produced by the independent Irish journalist Jamie Doran, and has been shown on Britain’s Channel 5 and the Italian public broadcaster RAI, ARD said.

The documentary cites several eyewitnesses who claim that several thousand Taliban fighters being transferred to a prison were diverted en route and killed by members of the Northern Alliance, which was allied with the United States when it attacked Afghanistan to remove the ruling Taliban and Al Qaeda forces following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

The Taliban were either shot or packed into containers, where they suffocated, the witnesses claim.

Doran claims that at least 150 U.S. troops, plus an unknown number of CIA operatives, were working with the Northern Alliance in the area and could not possibly have been unaware of what was going on. Doran said he had no sympathy with terrorists, “but killing prisoners is a war crime.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. State Department in Washington, Larry Schwartz, said U.S. officials were puzzled that “a respected broadcaster would show a documentary whose facts are completely false, and that unfairly characterizes the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.”

A spokesman for the U.S. Embassy in Berlin told F.A.Z. Weekly that no official protest had been lodged, out of respect for press freedom, but that ARD had been made aware of the U.S. position that “no U.S. troops were present at that site at that time.”

All U.S. troops serving in Afghanistan were debriefed after their missions, said the spokeswoman, who spoke on condition that she not be named, “and not one soldier witnessed or took part in any atrocity.”

But the broadcaster, while not taking any position on the validity of claims made in the documentary, stood by it as a solid piece of journalism. Doran worked with “an extreme amount of courage, attention to detail, and good contacts,” said the director of ARD’s Berlin studio, Thomas Roth.

—Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 19, 2002