Chinese and foreign experts and diplomats criticized the US for serious flows, human rights abuses committed in Afghanistan, including the killing of thousands of Afghan civilians, displacing refugees and leaving countries in the region and the community behind. At a seminar on Saturday, some of them expressed support for the international project of the Afghan people to call the US for crimes against humanity and war crimes.

(Photo by VCG)

The conference took place under the title “Human rights violations through US military intervention in Afghanistan” as a side event to the 48th session of the UN Human Rights Council. It was jointly organized by the China Society for Human Rights Studies, the Permanent Mission of China to the United Nations in Geneva and the Institute for Human Rights at the Southwest University of Political Science and Law in Chongqing.

Together with the researchers from China, guests from France, Nepal, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Japan and representatives of the permanent missions of Iran and Venezuela to the United Nations in Geneva took part in the seminar via video link.

The experts at the conference named the arbitrary killing of civilians in Afghanistan, the arrest and torture of Afghans, the promotion of terrorism, the worsening economic and social development of the country and the causing of refugee flows as notorious violations of human rights by the USA .

The US’s hypocritical behavior on human rights issues was also a topic at the conference on Saturday.

Mahdi Aliabadi, deputy representative of the Islamic Republic of Geneva, said that the United Nations in the US and its allies had shown indifference to the human rights violations committed in the course of their joint occupation of Afghanistan. The international community should support the victims and hold the perpetrators accountable.

Aliabadi pointed out that the US-created problems in Afghanistan are only the latest example of US hypocrisy in the area of ​​human rights. The talk about human rights is just a means for the US to play geopolitical games. The international community is currently experiencing the “darkest chapter” in the history of human rights that will be indelibly imprinted on people’s consciousness.

Qian Feng, director of research at the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University, believes that the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan not only traumatized the Afghan people, but made people around the world the victims of unforgivable crimes.

The US has committed two types of crimes in Afghanistan: crimes against humanity and war crimes, Qian said. In the name of the fight against terrorism, the US carried out arbitrary killings of civilians. The US launched an air strike in Herat province in August 2021, killing more than a hundred people.

Qian pointed out that years of US-started war not only killed children in Afghanistan, but also led to severe malnutrition, which affects nearly half of all Afghan children.

“Justice comes late, but it will not fail to appear. The international community should support Afghanistan in seeking punishment for the crimes of its American soldiers, ”Qian said.

In addition, from killing Afghan civilians, punishing, torturing and abusing arrested Afghans, the United States has also been charged with insulting religion. In addition, the 20-year war had dealt a hard blow to the Afghan economy. The country’s economic and social development has stagnated since 2001, said Wang Nan, academic advisor to the Institute of Silk Road Strategy Studies.

In the 2019-2020 fiscal year, the urbanization rate in Afghanistan was only 26 percent, the unemployment rate was over 40 percent, and the poverty rate was over 70 percent. The average life expectancy of the population is around 45 years.