A medieval justice, at first glance
CANADIAN GUARDS are working to improve conditions at the Kandahar penitentiary where Taliban are held
GRAHAM THOMSON C ANWEST NEWS S E RVI C EEDMONTON JOURNAL
SARPOZA PRISON, AFGHANI STAN – To step inside the Kandahar penitentiary that holds Taliban prisoners is to stumble backward into the Middle Ages.
This is a dark place of open-pit fires and heavy stone walls where inmates hang dried meat from hooks and grope their way by candlelight.
If you have ever toured the dungeons of an ancient English castle, then you have visited an Afghan prison.
The conditions are appalling and would, at first glance, seem to lend credence to allegations in Canada that Taliban prisoners suffer abuse at the hands of Afghan authorities.
However, these prisoners are not being singled out for special punishment. This is how prisoners live in Afghanistan, whether they staged an ambush against a NATO convoy or knifed someone in a fight.
Next door to the Taliban wing is the section holding the common criminals. The two are identical. Teenage boys live in slightly better conditions in the segregated juvenile section.
Then there is the women’s wing, which echoes with the heartbreaking sound of children. There are 22 children here, the youngest 5 months old, incarcerated with their mothers because they have nowhere else to go. This prison doesn’t know whether it’s medieval or Dickensian.
What’s just as shocking to Western sensibilities is learning women are jailed here for simply disobeying their husbands or rejecting an arranged marriage.
It is into this world that two guards from Canada’s Correctional Service have stepped, hoping to improve life not only for the prisoners but also the prison guards – their living conditions are as dreadful as those of the inmates.
This, after all, is a Third World prison.
“The conditions are terrible,” said Ric Fecteau, who is taking a 12-month leave of absence from his job as a supervisor at the Edmonton Maximum Institution to work here.
“They’re sleeping on a concrete floor with an Afghan-type mattress that needs to be replaced. The walls are crumbling and need to be replastered and rebuilt, so the actual conditions, the sanitary conditions, everything, is terrible.”
Since arriving here on Feb. 2, Fecteau and Linda Garwood-Filbert from the Stony Mountain Institute in Manitoba have laid the foundations for a training program – and have discovered a crucial aspect of life in here, the treatment of prisoners, is surprisingly enlightened.
“The relationship between the prison police and the inmates tells an entirely different story because you would see guards walking right in and having conversations with the prisoners,” Fecteau said. “Here are guards and prisoners being very polite with each other.”
They are also polite to Garwood-Filbert, the only woman allowed inside the male wings. The guards treat her with deference as they accompany her through the dank hallways where peering prisoners stand idly behind locked gates, apparently as curious about the Canadians as the Canadians are of them. There is no tension. Some inmates smile shyly.
Fecteau credits a large part of the relaxed atmosphere to Afghanistan’s complex world of inter-tribal relationships where many people – including the guards and prisoners – are related by blood, tradition or geography.
That goes for the Taliban prisoners. These are not the hardline “Tier 1 Taliban” who are shipped off to the maximum security Pul-i-Charkhi prison near Kabul. These are the low-level fighters who probably picked up a gun or fired a rocket because they needed a job and the Taliban pays well by Afghan standards – about $12 a day.
Fecteau is still finding his way around the Afghan system and acknowledges he can’t know everything that goes on in this medium-security prison, which he visits unannounced at least three times a week. But so far he has seen no evidence of abuse and has even taken a few of the prisoners aside and questioned them through his own interpreter.
“Does your family know you’re here?” he’ll ask them. “Is everything okay? Is there something you need to tell me? Are you being beaten?” The answer, he says, is: “No.”
“Some look quite insulted when I ask them if they’re getting enough to eat or if the staff are treating them well. They start looking a little irritated that you actually asked that question. Now, when you ask them about the conditions they’re perfectly willing to show you the damp floor, the mattresses, the blankets, the things that desperately need to get fixed. But at no point has any one of them ever raised that question (of abuse).”
After 26 years as a prison guard, Fecteau says he’d know pretty quickly if the prisoners were lying or if guards were trying to hide something from him. His relationship with his counterparts here certainly seems friendly and open.
“We try our best to treat everyone equally,” said Colonel Mohammed Ismail, who is eager to show off the prison. “It doesn’t matter whether they are Taliban, political prisoners or other criminals.”
As a journalist, I am not allowed to interview the Taliban prisoners. Speaking through an interpreter, Ismail says the “national security” prisoners are not fanatics and don’t cause trouble. The message from him is everybody gets along about as well as can be expected under Third World conditions.
Indeed, the life of prisoners is on par with conditions for many struggling Afghans on the outside.
The real hardship cases are the women jailed for disobeying sharia laws; they bring their children here if there’s no family to look after them.
“I don’t pretend to understand why they’re there but I have to respect that that’s part of the Afghan culture,” Garwood-Filbert said. “The more we respect the culture the better we can move forward with our issues.”
Those issues include training the guards, fixing up the prison and providing supplies as basic as flashlights for the guards and prisoners to use in the largely sunless cells. Canada will also provide money to expand the prison’s fledgling apprentice programs to teach inmates such employable skills as carpet-weaving and carpentry.
It is all part of the monumental task of helping build a working judicial system in a country with a patchwork of traditional, religious and codified laws where many people are illiterate. Developing a humane correctional system is as important to a functioning judicial system as are the police and the courts – and all are crucial to bringing Afghanistan into the 21st century.
“Right now, the system is not perceived by the people as being impeccable and impartial,” said Gavin Buchan, the main political adviser with Canada’s reconstruction team in Kandahar.
“If it was, that would significantly increase the government’s credibility.”
of Afghanistan is forcing our morals and culture on them, then they turn around and tell us we can't turn over people from Afghanistan, that have broken the laws of Afghanistan, in Afghanistan, to the law enforcement of Afghanistan, because they don't believe in how they might treat their prisoners based on their morals and culture.
