Afghanistan denies asking UN not to publish rights report

KABUL: Afghanistan denied Sunday that it asked theUnited Nations not to publish a report into rights violations in the country between 1978 and 2001. 

It came after a Swiss newspaper, Le Temps, said that the UN had buried a report that accused Soviets, Islamists and US forces of "atrocities". 

But Waheed Omer, spokesman for Afghan PresidentHamid Karzai, said: "The United Nations has not contacted the Afghan government regarding any such report." 

"If the United Nations wants to publish a report from its headquarters and the (Afghan) government is able to prevent it, I think that is sort of an insult to the United Nations," he said. 

The paper said the UN report "was deliberately suppressed by the United Nations for political reasons". 

"The famous 'mapping report', which was finalised in December 2004 after a year of work, was supposed to be published in January 2005," the newspaper said Saturday. 

"It was not and, after a succession of other reports, was forgotten." 

The report covered the tumultuous period from the military coup in April 1978, through the Soviet invasion and the rise and fall of the Taliban up against the US-led coalition force. 

It accused "Soviets, communist chiefs, Islamist militants and even American forces" of having "taken part to varying degrees in atrocities", the newspaper said, citing torture, summary executions, mass rape and the use of child warriors. 

One of the report's three authors, American Barnett Rubin, said that the UN must have decided not to publish it "at the request of Karzai because it mentioned people still in the Afghan government", the newspaper said. 

But in an email to AFP on Saturday, Rubin said that the report contained previously published material and denied that any "secrets" were being hidden from the public. 

"The report was a compilation of previously published reports. It contained no revelations based on new research. Every statement in the report is already part of the public record," Rubin wrote. 

"No 'secrets' are being suppressed. The report has been freely available on the Internet for over a year."