DYING IN BITS: A refugee camp in Mazar-e-Sharif

The facts are only now coming out. At 10 a.m. on the morning of the 20th day of the holy month of Ramzan a line of pick-up trucks carrying armed soldiers drove into the Pashtoon village of Bargah at the foot of a snow-covered mountain plateau in northern Afghanistan. It was December, a time when Washington was congratulating itself on the defeat of the Taliban and commanders in Kabul were pledging a new era of peace and reconstruction in a country torn apart by war. The villagers of Bargah knew better. By the end of the day, 37 Pashtoon men were dead.

Although Bargah is now under the control of an Uzbek Junbish commander, witnesses in the village say the Ramzan attack was carried out by rival Hazara soldiers who follow a local commander named Rasool. The leader of the Junbish is General Abdul Rashid Dostum, now deputy defence minister in the Interim Administration Government. The Hazara group, the Hizb-e-Wahadat, is led by Mohammed Mohaqqeq, planning minister. Rasool was once Mohaqqeq's bodyguard.

At the heart of the problem lies an entrenched hatred of Pashtoons who were seen as the beneficiaries of the repressive Taliban regime. "When the Taliban fell, our houses were looted and our villages near Mazar-e-Sharif were attacked," says Asah Khan, a village elder who led 200 Pashtoon families to safety in Ghor Tepah village in Faryab province. For the past three months they have relied on the generosity of local families. But Ghor Tepah is in Afghanistan's "hunger belt" and food is in short supply. So is money. These people cannot afford to travel and must stay. Ethnic genocide is again a byproduct of the war against the Taliban.

-Rory McCarthy

Judgement Day

ON TRIAL: Gates

The Microsoft antitrust case heads for its climax on March 11. That day the court will decide whether Microsoft should be forced to offer a version of the Windows operating system without "middleware"-software like Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player-that now come bundled with it. Nine US states support this stand. Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has said the company will be forced to withdraw Windows from the market if the judgement goes against it. That would lead to many a crash.

MAKING NEWS
President General as Dictator

Musharraf's defence

A collateral victim of the Daniel Pearl murder is Shaheen Sehbai, affable editor of Pakistan's leading English daily The News. He's quit, accusing the Pervez Musharraf Government of pressuring him to sack three reporters-Kamran Khan, Amir Mateen and Rauf Klasra-for filing stories that "damaged Pakistan's national interest". It was Khan's report on Omar Saeed Sheikh, Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist and prime suspect in the Pearl murder, that was the last straw for the military establishment. Khan revealed Sheikh had confessed to a court that the Jaish was involved in the attack on the Jammu and Kashmir Assembly on October 1, 2001, and on the Indian Parliament on December 13.

The London-educated terrorist, according to The News' report of February 17, also told his interrogators that Pearl's abduction was carried out by fellow Jaish leader Mansur Hasnain, the chief architect of the Indian Airlines hijacking in December 1999. The Pakistan Government promptly labelled the reports "fictitious". In his resignation letter, Sehbai said the Government also stopped all advertisements to The News. That's a general becoming a dictator.

-Shishir Gupta