Students Still Missing After Security Raid

The authorities are refusing to provide details about the fate of up to 30 Pashtun students arrested last month in a raid on the Kabul university campus, where inter-ethnic tensions had been running high.

The security services refused to respond to IWPR inquiries into the whereabouts of the detainees, who were rounded up in the early hours of August 14. The raid came the day after a blast in the Khushal Mena area, near the university, killed two medical students and injured an engineering student.

The university authorities and relatives of the arrested youths - mostly medical students and all Pashtuns - have no idea where they are being held.

In the raid on the university's central hostel, security officials targeted Pashtun students and a number of those arrested were politically active, IWPR can reveal.

Officials gave conflicting reasons for the raid. According to one account, the decision was taken after they concluded that the blast casualties were the result of a botched attempt to make a bomb.

"When the identity of the dead men was established - that they were students - the government decided to search the hostel to prevent any more such incidents," said Minister of Higher Education Abdul Munir Mehrwar.

Deputy security minister Helaluddin Helal - who refused to talk to IWPR - was recently quoted in Kabul Weekly as giving three other reasons for the operation: students were keeping weapons at the hostel; there was concern about some of the people who had been seen around the building; and the hostel manager, a Pashtun, wasn't up to the job.

Describing the raid, a student, who did not want to be named, told IWPR that at around midnight soldiers from the Kabul garrison surrounded the hostel while armed police and intelligence officials stormed the building and searched rooms. "They broke the locks off cupboards and searched between books and even sheets of paper," he said.

Another student, shaking with anger, said the security officials demanded to know the students' ethnic background before searching hostel rooms, only entering those of Pashtuns. "Our main guilt is that we are Pashtun, and because of that we sometimes get called Taleban, al-Qaeda or terrorists," he said.

The raid followed weeks of heightened ethnic tension on campus after fist fights between students of Pashtun and Tajik origin.

Some of the latter viewed the operation as fair retribution for what happened under the Taleban, who were mostly Pashtun. "After the police forces searched the students' rooms, the Pashtuns were angry. They forget that the Taleban searched our homes, even clothes belonging to our women," said veterinary student Mohammad Shafiq.

A number of the detained students belonged to the Afghan Millat Party, a liberal Pashtun party led by Anwar al-Haq Ahadi, head of Afghanistan's central bank. The party's spokesman, Brigadier Azizullah, claims the security operation was an effort to undermine it, "Opportunists want to knock down rivals… they want to block the political activities of our party."

IWPR reporters attempted to interview high-level security officials about the whereabouts of the detained students, but were met with hostility at the mention of their names. It is assumed that they are being held at intelligence agency offices around the capital.

For now, fear blankets the campus. "Many students are unsure of the situation and have even left the university," said one Pashtun student.

A female Tajik student said the tensions at the university, long a hotbed of political activism, reflected the problems facing society at large. "The day after it [the security operation] happened, I realised why our country has been mired in so many problems in the last two decades. It is all because political parties use young people for their political ends."

However she held out some hope that the situation on the campus would soon be diffused, "Fortunately the heads of faculties and the teachers are working to stop the tension amongst students."

Hafizullah Gardesh is an IWPR reporter. Rahim Gul Sarwan is an IWPR-trained journalist. Additional reporting by IWPR reporter Farida Nekzad.