Dutch court sentences Afghan man to 12 years for war crimes 

THE HAGUE, Netherlands (CN) — A Dutch court on Thursday convicted an Afghan refugee of war crimes for abusing prisoners in Afghanistan in the 1980s and ordered him to spend 12 years behind bars. 

Judges at The Hague District Court found Abdul Arief, who was living in the Netherlands under the name Abdul Rafief, guilty of war crimes for subjecting political prisoners to inhumane and degrading treatment at the infamous Pul-e-Charkhi prison in Kabul, where he worked as its top commander for nearly a decade. 

During an hourlong hearing, Presiding Judge Els Kole described conditions in the overcrowded precision, which was sweltering in the summer and freezing in the winter. Food was scarce and what was available was infested with insects. Afghanistan's communist government, which came to power in a military coup in 1973, used the facility to house political prisons and anyone it considered an enemy of the state. 

“The man has been involved in serious abuses in the prison. He treated the inmates cruelly and degradingly,” Kole said.

Arief claims it is a case of mistaken identity.

“I am not the person you are looking for,” he told the court at the opening of the trial in February. During that hearing, the defendant had to be brought to the courtroom in a wheelchair and told the judges he didn’t even know who he was before falling asleep.

The 76-year-old did not attend Thursday’s hearing. 

Under a legal principle known as universal jurisdiction, countries can prosecute offenders of very serious crimes even if they did not occur within their territory. 

Arief's lawyer Marijn Zuketto argued the conflict was an insurgent action that didn’t rise to the level of war and that if his client should face charges, it could only be in Afghanistan. “We disagree with the court on nearly every point,” Zuketto said. 

During a week of hearings in February, the three-judge panel heard evidence from 24 witnesses spread across nine countries. On the first day of the trial, Abdel Wadood, an elderly man with a bushy, grey beard, described his lasting complaints from his imprisonment, including difficulty sleeping and concentrating. “I regret he does not repent his acts,” Wadood said of Arief. 

Dutch authorities were first tipped off to Arief in 2012, after a series of blog posts claimed that a man living in the southern town of Kerkrade under another name was actually the former prison chief. According to investigators, evidence collected during a search of his house show that Rafief was not his real name and his military service records had been altered to hide his true identity. 

Insiders sometimes refer to The Hague District Court as “the busiest ICC in town,” referring to the International Criminal Court, which is located nearby. Over the past 20 years, the local court has heard cases from Iraq, Rwanda, Bosnia, Ukraine, Syria and more under universal jurisdiction. Afghanistan only became a member of the ICC in 2003, so crimes that occurred before then cannot be prosecuted before that court. 

Arief is the sixth man to face charges in the Netherlands related to crimes in Afghanistan. Heshamuddin Hesam, the former head of the Afghan military intelligence service and deputy minister of state, was also sentenced to 12 years in jail for torturing prisoners during the 1980s.

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