Afghan human right activists have opened the country’s first war crimes museum on the site, taking a first step towards national reconciliation for victims of atrocities. At the foot of the snow-capped Hindu Kush mountains stands a tall, white marble monument and, nearby, the single-storey museum which leading rights advocate Nader Nadery said represents the Afghan public’s demand for justice. The museum aims to commemorate the death of tens of thousands of people in the past four decades of war and revolution that have blighted Afghanistan.
Inside the museum, glass cases display a vast and heartbreaking array of objects found in the mass grave outside Faizabad, capital of remote Badakhshan province. Torn pieces of cloth, mangled shoes, rusty handcuffs and small personal belongings such as prayer beads and false teeth bear testimony to lives violently snuffed out and bodies tossed like garbage into a hole in the ground.
Hundreds of photographs, mostly black and white, of teenage boys and elderly men with beards and turbans – and every age in between – adorn the walls. “The demand from the public for justice led to establish this human rights victims’ war museum,” said Nadery, a senior commissioner with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) at its opening. “The objective is to make sure the victims are remembered and that war crimes never happen again,” he said, adding: It is like the Holocaust museum.”
The decision to build the monument followed the discovery here in 2006 of a mass grave containing the remains of more than 300 people. The victims were murdered in a “systematic mass killing” of people believed to have been opponents of Afghanistan’s communist regime, which took power in 1978, sparking a nation-wide armed resistance which lasted 10 years and cost millions of lives, said Samar. With the country now in the grip of an Islamic insurgency, Afghan civilians are still victims of both sides, dying in insurgent attacks and counter-insurgent operations alike.