Ernesto Londono/THE WASHINGTON POST - Rabani Gul points to the spot where his father, Mamoor Jilani, suffered a heart attack during a brawl.
MEHTAR LAM, Afghanistan — Much about Maamour Jilani’s death in this eastern Afghan city six months ago is in dispute.
Relatives called it a murder, saying a beating brought on the 52-year-old’s heart attack. Family members of the man charged in the case, however, said a preexisting condition made it an accidental death.
But all agree on one key issue: Tribal elders, not the courts, should be the arbiters.
“We don’t have any faith in the legal system,” said Rabani Gul, Jilani’s son. “Its decisions are not impartial. There will be no justice.”
That vote of no confidence reflects a much broader sense of concern in Afghanistan as the United States and its allies struggle to leave behind a viable justice system.
After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan that helped topple the Taliban in 2001, Western powers attempted to create a more modern justice system, building courthouses and training judges, prosecutors, police and defense lawyers. But the efforts, which cost billions of dollars, have yielded a system that many Afghans deride as corrupt, arbitrary and subject to political interference.
Now the United States and other international donors have begun to spend millions of dollars on projects that aim to better understand and legitimize Afghanistan’s traditional justice system, known as “informal justice.”
“For a long time, the international community thought, ‘We want nothing to do with informal justice,’ ” said Sylvana Sinha, an expert on traditional justice at the Kabul office of the U.S. Institute of Peace. “They’ve now realized the formal system does not have the capacity, and they are starting to find ways to work with the informal one.”
Country’s main arbiters
For decades, councils of elders have acted as the supreme authority in Afghan districts and villages that have had little support from, or access to, the state. The almost exclusively male-run bodies have served as arbiters for everything from land disputes to killings.
Afghanistan’s informal justice system handles an estimated 95 percent of disputes in the country. Some are settled with money, others with a handshake. When it comes to criminal cases, rather than simply punishing an individual, elders aim to find arrangements that restore harmony in communities beset by discord. Sometimes this is achieved through “blood money” payments. In other cases, the tribe or family of a suspect must settle a score by providing the aggrieved party one of its young women.
U.S. officials say they have not abandoned the goal of building a robust court system. But they say they have begun paying greater attention to ways in which they can support the informal system, because it will almost certainly be the only viable dispute resolution system available to most Afghans for years.
Some Western officials in Afghanistan “want to build Switzerland, and they want to do it fast,” said Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, the operational commander of NATO troops in Afghanistan. “What the Afghan people want is security, justice and representation. They need to get back to traditional dispute resolutions. To get that, you need to provide sufficient security for those organizations to get back up.”
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