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NORMALLY, AMNESTY International is held up by the West as the conscience of the civilised world, an organisation which tirelessly and diligently exposes human rights violations wherever they occur - naming and shaming countries, mostly in the third world, which it believes are not respecting civil liberties. But suddenly, we are being told, that its word should not be taken at face value and we should wait for the ``facts'' before making a judgment.

The reason: Amnesty's demand for an impartial inquiry into the widely reported allegations that the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, aided and abetted by U.S. and British troops, used excessive force to put down an ``uprising'' by Taliban prisoners at Mazar-e-Sharif last weekend, and that this was a breach of the international conventions relating to the treatment of prisoners of war.

An unspecified number of Taliban mercenaries, mostly foreigners from Chechnya, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, were killed and hundreds wounded in what has been described as a massacre, and the most gory episode of the two-month-old war in Afghanistan.

But more about it later, for there have been other incidents of alleged brutality by the Northern Alliance warlords and their foot soldiers.

In one case, which the Pentagon is reported to be investigating, an Alliance commander is said to have admitted executing 160 Taliban cadres captured after a battle in Takteh Pol in southern Afghanistan.

The ``executioner'', Gul Agha, has been quoted as saying: ``We tried our best to persuade them to surrender... but they replied with abuse so we had no choice... They were made to stand in a long line and five or six of our fighters used light machine guns on them.'' It is alleged that they were shot dead in the presence of U.S. military personnel.

The British media has been awash with horrific stories of the conduct of the victorious Alliance troops in dealing with the Taliban fighters, particularly Arabs, Chechens and Pakistanis.

A photograph which has caused widespread revulsion shows an Alliance soldier pulling out gold fillings from the mouth of a rotting Taliban corpse.

In another damning ``evidence'' of the total breakdown of the normal rules of war, The Guardian splashed on its front page a picture of an Alliance soldier picking his way through Taliban corpses and removing their ``boots'' as ``spoils of war''. A correspondent of The Independent reported how even as Gen. Rashid Dostum claimed that the Alliance was treating the Taliban prisoners humanely, his men were kicking bodies of Taliban soldiers to make sure they were really dead.

The Mazar-e-Sharif incident, however, remains the worst case of alleged Alliance ``excesses'' and critics say Britain and the U.S., which have a moral responsibility for the conduct of their allies on the ground, are trying to sweep it under the carpet.

The demand by Amnesty, the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights, the Red Cross and a host of other international and domestic human rights groups for an inquiry has been prompted by reports not from Taliban or pro-Taliban quarters, but from highly respected western newspapers and broadcasters including the BBC. And the most damning indictment has come from an American Taliban, Mr. John Walker, known as Abdul Hamid after his conversion to Islam.

He has given a chilling account to Newsweek of how for four days, Qila-i-Jangi, where the prisoners were detained after apparently being led to believe that they would be allowed to go free once they surrendered their weapons, was bombed to flush them out following an abortive ``uprising''.

He confirmed the version of other prisoners who survived the ordeal that many of those who were killed had their hands tied to their backs.

An Associated Press photographer was the first to report this, and it was then confirmed by a local commander Amir Jan who told The Guardian that he tied their hands because he believed they were ``dangerous'' after one of them blew himself up. The role of two CIA operatives, ``Mike'' who was later killed and ``Dave'', has also been questioned as their interrogation of the prisoners in the presence of two western TV crew led the Taliban to assume that the TV crew were ``American soldiers who had come to film their execution'', according to The Guardian.

A series of what has been described as ``catastrophic'' mistakes reportedly led to the incident that turned the Qila into a Taliban graveyard. Both Britain and the U.S. have rejected calls for an inquiry on the plea that when prisoners revolted and pulled out hidden weapons to attack their captors they effectively turned themselves into ``combatants''.

The Northern Alliance has trotted out the same argument claiming it was acting in self-defence. Human rights groups, however, argue that according to the International Court of Justice self-defence only permits ``measures which are proportional to the armed attack and necessary to respond to it''. They also point out that while the Geneva Convention prohibits POWs from possessing arms it does not say that those who break the norm automatically lose protection.

Critics acknowledge that war is a dirty business, but argue that even in war - especially a war justified in the name of defending ``civilised'' values - there is such a thing as respect for the dead, and magnanimity towards the vanquished. And in Afghanistan, both seem to have been at a discount.

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