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15-06-2005: "Okee...."

Gisteren was het een jaar terug dat we Pim in Hem hebben begraven. Ik werd gisteren ook gebeld door AZG dat eindelijk de hoofdverdachten zijn gearresteerd... hieronder het (in het engels vertaalde) artikel in de waalse krant Le Soir. Ik hoop meneer Yakub Khan ooit nog eens in de ogen te kijken....

Hélène De Beir’s Murder: Arrests

Article by Alain Lallemand, reporting from QALA-I-NAW (North-Western Afghanistan) – Le soir – 14th June 2005

Last Thursday, Yakub Khan, the police chief of Qadis (Badghis province), the prime suspect for ordering the murder of five MSF-Holland employees last year – including the Belgian expatriate Hélène de Beir –, has been suspended, then arrested and transferred by helicopter to Kabul.

The Karzai Government did more: in the last few days, the governor of the province, the district chief in Qadis and the chief of the provincial police have all been suspended from their posts. Although the vice-governor has not been sanctioned, his house was searched on 8th June, and several cubic metres of illicit munitions were found.

On June 2 2004, with no apparent reason, no looting, a MSF-Holland vehicle was ambushed 44 Km east of Qala-I-Naw, the provincial capital, on its way back from the MSF clinic in Khayrkhana – near the Turkmen border.

Hélène De Beir, director of the Khayrkhana clinic, died on the scene. Subsequently, MSF made the historic decision to leave Afghanistan.

It soon became clear that this murder had been ordered by Yakub Khan.

President Karzai honours his word: the Khan family gets dismantled

This corrupt police officer, linked to the opium traffic in the valley, had already been withdrawn from his position as Qadis police chief in May 2004. Yakub had then declared to a Kabul Government delegate that “if I want this road to be safe; it will be safe; if I don’t want it to be, it won’t be”. He was then reinstated as police chief.

One year later, confronted to the Karzai Government’s inaction regarding the case, MSF-Belgium and MSF-Holland made an appeal to the Afghan president just days before his visit to Brussels. In the morning of 11th May, Guy Verhofstadt – Belgian prime minister – mentioned the case to Karzai, and so did, in the evening, the president of the Senate, Anne-Marie Lizin. She even obtained this statement from Karzai: “OK, we will arrest those responsible”. Less than a month later, Karzai has apparently honoured his word.

Making a clean sweep

This clean sweep goes beyond the case of the murders of five MSF workers: Kabul also got the whole Khan clan upon their knees – over eight brothers and cousins from a prestigious Baghdis family, who were in control of the administrative and police powers in the province. Assisted by his brother Zaher Khan, mujahid commander of the “17th division” and warlord, unrepentant towards Kabul, the police officer Yakub Khan controlled the extortion in the opium traffic: the valley of Qadis in Qala-I-Naw was still, in 2004, one of the six main centres of poppy production in Afghanistan.

This family regime imposed through terror (executions, torture) has blocked any development project in this province since 2001. It is the only one of 28 provinces in a new Afghanistan that does not have main asphalt roads.

It is a fake poppy eradication declaration, opposed by the minister in charge of the fight against drugs, which seems to have provided the opportunity for making a clean sweep.

A crucial step

The arrests and sanctions will not be sufficient to have MSF return to Afghanistan, but it does mean a crucial step in the fulfilment of a promise made by Hamid Karzai, towards the father of the Belgian victim, Francis de Beir: the court case of the murderers soon in Kabul?