AFGHANISTAN - Controversy Over Execution & Karzai-Sayyaf Links.

Fledgling efforts towards establishing the rule of law in Afghanistan took a great leap backward last month. In secret, President Karzai ordered the execution of Abdullah Shah, a man who could have revealed atrocities committed by one of Karzai's closest advisers. Before Shah was executed, he said he was responsible for crimes during Afghanistan's civil war in the early 1990s but that he had been acting under orders. With his death, the truth about horrors of Afghanistan's past - and who in the top leadership might have ordered those crimes - has been buried. Shah, who was convicted of several murders including the killing of an infant, died April 20, but the execution was made public only after Amnesty International condemned it.

Shah was widely known to be a commander under Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a warlord who leads a Wahhabi militia that human rights groups say was involved in mass rape and the disappearance of hundreds of people. Reportedly Sayyaf gave the orders for many crimes, including murders committed by Shah. Before he died, he told a foreign reporter that he had asked that he be transferred to the custody of another ministry where he might have some protection from what he said were plans to silence him.

In Afghanistan, those who benefit most from the international community's silence on accountability for war crimes include many powerful figures with links to criminal or extremist networks, or both. Since the defeat of the Taliban, Sayyaf has had extraordinary power over Karzai. Shortly after the interim government was established in December 2001, Sayyaf leaned on Karzai to appoint as Supreme Court chief Mawlavi Fazl Hadi Shinwari, an extremely conservative former head of a religious school in Pakistan. Shinwari has since appointed like-minded mullahs as judges across Afghanistan, with the power to ban any law they deem contrary to the "beliefs and provisions" of Islam.

Shinwari has been quoted as saying Shah should have been executed even before the trial was over. And the trial, Amnesty International said, fell short of international standards: Shah had no defence counsel and witnesses were not subject to cross-examination.

The execution, Amnesty said, "may have been an attempt by powerful political players to eliminate a key witness to human rights abuses".

Many of Shah's victims wanted to see him executed, but they also want the truth to be known about everyone responsible for war crimes in Afghanistan. The former mujahedeen, both within Karzai's administration and outside it, have grown powerful as the world has shut its eyes to their crimes. But now they have grown powerful at the expense of Karzai's own power base.