Afghanistan, the former hermit kingdom of Central Asia whose name hardly ever appeared in the news, has become one of the world’s human disaster areas. In some ways the country’s fate even rivals that of Cambodia.
When Soviet forces invaded Afghanistan massively in December 1979, a pro-Soviet regime had already been in power since April 1978. The reign of terror unleashed by that regime, indeed, had provoked a generalized insurrection, and threatened to topple Communist rule in this devoutly Muslim land. At the time of the Soviet invasion, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) had already registered about 400,000 Afghan fugitives in Pakistan, escaping the tyranny of Communist Presidents Taraki (April 1978-September 1979) and Amin (September-December 1979).
The new Communist President installed by Soviet troops, Babrak Karmal, promised an end to the methods of terror used by his predecessors. Indeed, the USSR claims to have saved Afghanistan from Amin the way Vietnam has saved Cambodia from Pol Pot, despite the fact that Soviet air intervention before December 1979 makes such a claim untenable. Moreover, in the more than three years of Karmal’s rule, the refugee flow has in fact increased enormously.
As of 1982, UNHCR officials have registered a figure of 2.5 million Afghan refugees in Pakistan; in addition, Iran has requested UNHCR’s help in dealing with 1.5 million Afghan refugees on Iranian soil. While UNHCR has not been able to confirm the Iranian figure independently, there is no doubt that the refugee flow toward Afghanistan’s two Muslim neighbors is of roughly the same scale of magnitude, totaling somewhere between 3 and 4 million. If we also take into account war casualties and prison-camp victims, we must conclude that Afghanistan has lost, through death or flight, close to a quarter of its estimated 1978 population (16 to 17 million). UNHCR concedes that the Afghan refugee flow is the highest in the world for any one national group, roughly equal to the figure for the entire continent of Africa.
Inspection of human-rights violations in Afghanistan presents numerous problems. Access to the country must be clandestine and involves personal risk. The necessary languages—Persian, Pashtô, Russian, and to some extent Urdu—are not likely to be known by any one person. Refugee stories must be collected with great patience and checked doubly and triply. Soviet accounts must be decoded with care, because the USSR twists its version of the facts to suit sudden political changes; for example, although the Soviet Union now concedes that many atrocities occurred under Communist rule in Afghanistan between 1978 and 1979 (this was stridently denied before the invasion), any Russian responsibility for these crimes is repudiated by the Soviet press. According to Moscow, the “excesses” were the fault of misguided Afghan Communists. Actually, however, refugee stories establish beyond a reasonable doubt that there was Soviet participation in a number of the pre-invasion atrocities. Finally, while a certain impartiality must be maintained in assessing Soviet and Afghan guerrilla violations of the codes of war, such as the mistreatment and execution of captives, it is not always easy to judge impartially between the actions of a desperate peasantry and the methods employed by a disciplined modern army like that of the Soviet Union.
As an observer for the Paris-based International Federation for Human Rights, an independent lawyers’ organization, I have had the opportunity both to travel clandestinely in Afghanistan and to interrogate literally hundreds of Afghans of all social classes in their own language (I spent part of my childhood there). What follows is an account of my observations, which must be understood against the specific political background of events in Afghanistan since the 1978 Communist coup.
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To all Afghans, Soviet involvement in the affairs of their previously non-aligned country began on April 27, 1978. On that date, a tiny, hitherto almost unheard-of Communist party seized power with the decisive help of air-force officers trained in the USSR. President Daoud and his family were executed and Communist party secretary Nur Mohammad Taraki assumed the Presidency. Soviet responsibility for this coup has been neither proved nor disproved, but the issue became quickly irrelevant with the USSR’s dispatch of an ever-increasing number of advisers to work at all levels of the Afghan government: military, administrative, educational, and penal. Persecution of religious leaders and mass arrests among the educated elite began almost immediately after the coup.
The first risings against the new regime broke out in eastern Afghanistan in the summer of 1978, doing increasing damage to Communist administration in the countryside. In August 1978, the Afghan Communist party, itself a coalition of two equally pro-Soviet factions, split into its component parts: the Khalq or “People” faction, generally described as hard-line, and the Parcham or “Flag” faction, often credited with being moderate. As a result of the feud, Khalq faction leader Taraki retained power, while Parcham faction leader Babrak Karmal was made ambassador to Czechoslovakia and effectively exiled; other Parcham members were interned.
In March 1979, Soviet tanks were rushed over the border to suppress the rising of the city of Herat, close to the USSR in the Afghan northwest.
On August 4, 1979, the Kabul military high command rose against the Taraki regime; the officers, all Soviet-trained but nationalist and Muslim, wished to install a truly nonaligned regime, end the reign of terror, halt the persecution of Islam, and restore a moderate government. Soviet aircraft crushed the insurrection. But with the disappearance of Communist administration in rural areas and the virtual destruction of the elite of the Afghan army, the institutional framework holding Afghanistan together collapsed. Henceforth the Soviets, faced with a generalized but uncoordinated resistance movement, would find no single representative institution with which to negotiate a settlement capable of being enforced, and thus irrevocably committed themselves to an unending involvement.
On August 15, 1979, a UPI correspondent was informed of an act of repression by the regime: 300 members of the Hazara ethnic group (forming the Shi’ite minority in predominantly Sunni Afghanistan) were trucked to a public field ouside Kabul. Half of the men were doused with gasoline and set on fire; the other half were buried alive with a bulldozer. At the end of the month Taraki went to Cuba to participate in a conference of the nonaligned; he returned via Moscow, meeting with Brezhnev.
On September 16, 1979, Taraki was murdered by his Prime Minister, Hafizollah Amin. The Soviet Union extended recognition to the new President, who vowed to continue “the battle to extirpate all traces of feudalism from Afghanistan.” Amin published a list of 15,000 people who had been executed under his predecessor at Pol-e Charkhi concentration camp outside Kabul.
On November 3, 1979, the Soviet Union dispatched troops to help Amin put down the nationwide insurgency.
From December 3-7, additional troops were landed.
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On December 27, 1979, Soviet troops occupied all the main intersections and roads of the capital and assaulted Amin’s palace, killing him in the process. Karmal, returned from Prague, became the new President. Kabul Radio described Amin as a CIA agent and a sadistic murderer, and posthumously rehabilitated Taraki. According to the Soviet press, the Red Army had responded to the “call for help of the Afghan government,” which was supposedly under attack by CIA agents and Chinese, Pakistani, and Egyptian mercenaries. In order to explain how the government leader who had requested this fraternal assistance was himself killed by his helpers, Soviet apologists have since referred to a secret “revolutionary council” which called for the help and also tried to execute Amin as a hidden CIA agent. For bungling Amin’s capture by killing him, Soviet General Paputin was forced to commit suicide.
On January 5, 1980, President Karmal freed Parcham faction members from the Pol-e Charkhi concentration camp. Then, pressure from rioters at the prison gates forced the freeing of all inmates. In an interview with the West German magazine Der Spiegel, Karmal accused his predecessor of the murder of one million people. Actually, when Pol-e Charkhi was opened 17,000 inmates were found to be missing; if these are added to the list of Taraki’s executions published by Amin, we have a total of some 32,000 executions in one concentration camp outside Kabul in the space of eighteen months. Regional concentration camps also functioned in the north and east of the country, where statistics are not available.
Between January and May 1980, street demonstrations were crushed and the Pol-e Charkhi camp was used again as a detention center.
From February 28-March 2, 1980, Soviet troops employed methods of total war in order to empty the Kunar Valley, in the east, of its population.
In June 1980, Taraki and Amin collaborators were liquidated by the Karmal regime in a major Communist party purge. The Soviet air force seeded border areas and then the interior with small, camouflaged antipersonnel mines which wrought havoc, especially with flocks and the children who guard them.
This brings us to the most recent developments. The refugee flow from Afghanistan has become the highest in the world for a single national group. The insurgency is general. While rival leaders of liberal or religious parties in exile in Pakistan claim moral authority over the insurgency, the guerrillas themselves are generally organized along tribal or regional lines (although loosely affiliated with the political parties in Pakistan in order to receive supplies). The insurgency’s greatest success lies in destroying all traces of Communist administration in the countryside and liquidating virtually any potential collaborator. Afghans employed by the government are often double agents, sabotaging the regime from within.
While admirably suited for resistance, however, traditional tribal structures do not easily provide for political unity. Afghanistan as a state has collapsed, although Afghan nationalism, blended with a passionate devotion to Islam, is everywhere very much alive. The Soviet Union, which elsewhere governs its satellites through local, functioning institutions such as the party bureaucracy and the army, in Afghanistan can only grasp at sand; indeed, the almost total absence of local collaboration appears to be a unique historical phenomenon, hard to parallel anywhere. But then the record of Soviet and Afghan government atrocities since April 1978 would also be hard to parallel elsewhere (except—again—for Cambodia).
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The first measure of the new regime, right after the April 1978 coup, was an assault on Islam, with the arrest of Muslim clerics, a purge of devout officers and cadets, and the introduction of antireligious curricula into the schools.
Fazl Mohammad, an eighteen-year-old, describes what happened in his high school in Ghazni, in southeastern Afghanistan, shortly after the coup:
I was in the twelfth grade. I studied physics, chemistry, biology, and algebra. Suddenly they changed our books—especially the books that had something about religion. They replaced them with books on Marxism and political science. People such as officials who hadn’t previously joined the party were thrown out of work. Our teachers were replaced by Tajiks from Soviet Tajikistan. These Soviet Tajiks now gave the courses. They forbade us to speak in defense of our country. We had to study what our new teachers gave us. We heard on the radio: “We need the soil of Afghanistan, not its population” [this sentence has been reported by numerous independent witnesses]. They arrested a lot of people, especially graybeards and notables: they killed them. . . . They used to say: “What have you learned in the old books? Now read new, Communist, progressive books. That way you’ll make progress like the Soviets and leave your misery. Your religious books couldn’t help you do that.” We couldn’t protest—if we did, they took us away, in a tank.
Gholam Faruq was a seventeen-year-old military cadet when he was arrested for belonging to the outlawed Islamic party:
I was arrested at midnight and taken to the central police station. Until three in the morning they punched and kicked me; then they took me to a jail. There they kept me from sleeping until the next night when they beat me again. For three nights in a row they kept me from sleeping, and they beat me again between midnight and three in the morning. They wanted me to give them the names of my comrades, the Holy Warriors of the Islamic party, to confess the names of the enemies of Communism. They wanted to arrest them too. And I, for three nights—by God!—what I endured. My clothes fell off in shreds. After the third night came a commandant of the Afghan Communist party—he used to hold a command at Bala-Hesar [Kabul citadel] for a long time, and they took me to a prison—by God!—no human being could live in such a cold prison! And I spent three months in Bala-Hesar prison.
We each lived isolated in our own cell, and we weren’t allowed to talk, and for three months I did not see the sun. When I went to the toilet, two guards watched over me with Kalashnikovs—those are Soviet weapons—and forbade me to talk.
Then after three months, at midnight, they took me to the ministry of defense. And there until three in the morning they tortured me with electricity and blows. They didn’t let me sleep. And over my head there was a soldier with a Kalashnikov, the Soviet weapon. And they treated me like that for four nights, without letting me sleep, without giving me anything to eat. They wanted me to name my comrades to them. I didn’t tell them, and for four nights on end they tortured me with electricity and blows. Then they took me from the ministry of defense to Pol-e Charkhi prison.
It’s from Pol-e Charkhi prison that they would take prisoners to the field of Pol-e Gun [“Colored Bridge,” the local pronunciation of the Kabul Polygon field, used for military target practice before 1978], in order to execute them. . . . They took the Holy Warriors of the Islamic party. By God! for a month, every night they took 250 people, 300 people, to martyrdom. Every hour, every second, someone was beaten by the Afghan Communist soldiers.
And one night I even saw the commander of the prison, Sayyed ‘Abdollah, who gathered 300 people of the Islamic party who had been imprisoned there since the time of Daoud, and he sent them in one night to martyrdom. By God, my cell companions changed all the time, and I saw thousands of them go! They would resist when they came to get them, and blood flowed on the ground of the cell, and I had to wipe the blood. And I spent nineteen months like that under Taraki, Hafizollah Amin, and Babrak Karmal. We weren’t allowed to go to the toilet, and we weren’t allowed to talk. And the only clothes we had were the ones we wore when we came. And they gave us food which caused us to defecate all red, and many died.
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But it was not only pious Muslims who were subject to arrest and execution. Liberal, Westernized intellectuals were taken as well. Thus, Dr. ‘Abdollah ‘Osman, thirty-four, was arrested merely for being a member of the educated elite:
I was arrested on the 6th of Qaws [November 27, 1978]. I was working at the university hospital, at 11 in the morning, when two policemen came to arrest me. “We have to question you at the interior ministry,” they said. We walked out, and two cars were waiting. Two policemen rode with me and I was driven to the ministry. At the ministry they asked me: “Why don’t you join the Khalq party?” I said I was not involved in politics, and had never joined any party. They said that the majority of students had already joined the party and held Marxist convictions. The two policemen said then that I hadn’t joined the party because I’d always opposed it; indeed they saw me participate in reactionary demonstrations. Nevertheless they told me that they were disposed to release me in three hours, and that I should wait: they would take me home.
After three hours a ministry employee appeared and began filling a form. Then he fetched another employee, who told me: “Please,” showing me a door. I went down a stair, and found myself between two rows of soldiers with machine guns. There was an automobile they made me climb into, where I recognized other doctors from the faculty. We were taken to Pol-e Charkhi prison where we arrived at nightfall. At the office, they filled out a form which specified that I should be locked in solitary with no possibility of contact with any one. They threw me in a cell and locked it.
It was a disgusting cell. It was already winter and there was no heating. The ceiling dripped. On the floor there were only a thin mattress and two blankets. They told me: “This is where you stay!” After a few minutes in the cell, I felt a natural call, and asked permission to go. They told me that going was against the rules outside the appointed time, and that if I didn’t stay silent I would be beaten. It so happened that the cell next to mine was occupied, and that we could communicate by calling through the wall. We were caught and beaten. For talking through the walls, many people were beaten.
Furthermore, any writing implement or even reading was forbidden. Thus we couldn’t communicate with anyone, nor write anything, nor even read a book. All that was forbidden.
Among the most degrading elements of Pol-e Charkhi were the sanitary regulations. They would take us outside for the toilet. Well, there weren’t really any toilets, but cesspools like we have in the country. We had to stand in line, and we were only allowed three to five minutes to relieve ourselves. Whoever took more time was insulted, pulled out before getting dressed again, and beaten. They said: “Go back the way you came.” I saw people who tried to line up again, and were beaten. Then we were locked again in our cells for another twenty-four hours, sometimes for another forty-eight hours, before we were allowed to the toilets again.
There was a soldier, tougher than the rest, called Gol-Agha. He often beat the prisoners, taking their money and saying: “I am a Khalqi. This is the way things are going to be in a people’s regime (rezhim-e Khalqi)! In a people’s regime, nobody has the right to speak! A political prisoner has no right to a book, or a pen! A political prisoner has no right to walk around freely to think, or to understand! You are all traitors assembled here!” Not only the soldiers talked like this. The commanders often said the same things when they walked by. . . .
Their commander-in-chief was one Sayyed ‘Abdollah. With my own ears I heard him say: “A million Afghans only must remain alive; we only need a million Communists; the others, we don’t need them, we will liquidate them.”
. . . I’ve read things on Nazi, fascist prisons, but I think Communist prisons are even worse. Inhuman conditions. Conditions no normal human being could stand—and many of the prisoners were sick or old. There were even prisoners there in jail since the former regime, under Daoud Khan. In those days they were imprisoned in Deh-Mazang [inside Kabul]. But when Taraki took power thanks to the Russians, they were transferred to Pol-e Charkhi. There were more than 120 of them. Khalqi party members said: “They are Muslim Brothers!” Obviously, in that place, anyone performing his prayers, or calling on his God, was considered a member of the Muslim Brothers.
One night they were all assembled, those former Deh-Mazang detainees, in front of the commander’s office. There they had their hands tied, their eyes covered with a black cloth, and were forced to climb into a truck. They were going to take them to the Pol-e Gun [Polygon] field to execute them near Mount Chahar. That’s where they dug ditches and executed by machine gun. Those who were dead, those who were dying, they themselves pushed them together into the ditches and covered them with earth.
Dr. ‘Osman was freed in the January 1980 amnesty and offered his old post at the university hospital, but like many other Afghan intellectuals he refused to serve under the new regine and made his way to Pakistan in March 1980.
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Unlike Dr. ‘Osman, Kabul University professor “Mohammad Ashraf” (pseudonym), forty, was arrested for admittedly plotting against the regime shortly after the coup, and his experience was consequently even harsher. I interviewed him shortly after his arrival in Pakistan, on March 16, 1980. The professor described how, with his fellow “conspirators,” he was taken to the ministry of the interior:
At the interior ministry there was a place especially set aside for torture, for “investigations” as they called it. The place was called AKSA. It was an underground prison, where we were at first locked in.
Interviewer: How many were you?
Six or seven. From many different places. At nightfall, they began to question us. They found nothing during this interrogation, they had no documents, no proof. But with torture, they made you confess even what you hadn’t done.
Interviewer: Let’s go over this again. Who exactly questioned you?
Afghans. But behind the Afghans there were Russians too.
Interviewer: You saw these Russians?
I saw many of them. We saw them in the corridors, walking by. Those who questioned us took the papers and went to the other rooms to talk with the Russian advisers. We heard them. We saw them. Some nights they came in to look at us.
Interviewer: Describe these Russians. How did you recognize them to be Russians?
By the features. By the faces. I have often been to Russia. I recognize them, their language, their culture.
Interviewer: Do you speak Russian yourself?
No. Only a little.
Interviewer: Continue to describe your first day as a prisoner,
They began the torture, the investigations, at ten o’clock at night. Before, they did not do anything, there was too much coming-and-going in the city; people would come to the interior ministry. Torture began at ten o’clock at night, and lasted until four in the morning. It was electric shocks, and also a sort of electric chair. They would cause electricity to run through the chair, the chair moved, shook, it was . . . sometimes unbearable. And then as I said they hit us with cables, and also with sticks. And then also they would hang us like this [shows]. . . . They would attach these cords to our hands, and then a man would hang from the ceiling, but his toes touched the ground. The toe touched the ground but he half-hanged. It was a hard torture, because it lasted eight hours, or ten hours. You felt tired, exhausted.
Interviewer: Did they do this to you too?
To me too. They hanged me like that. Almost fifty-two hours. Hanging.
Interviewer: Were these Afghans torturing you like this? Were Russians present? Describe exactly.
Afghans tortured us. But I knew, I felt, I saw that there were Russians behind. I could see them walking in the corridor. They read the answer-papers. They added new questions, more psychological, more scientific. And it was like that for twenty-five days, from ten in the night to four in the morning, the tortures, the questions, the interrogations.
The professor was transferred to Deh-Mazang prison in the city, then to Pol-e Charkhi concentration camp. He described the practice of burying prisoners alive:
There was a man there, the commander of Pol-e Charkhi, his name was Sayyed ‘Abdollah. He could decide death for people, he could have them shot at once, he could bury them alive in . . . in the earth.
Interviewer: What do you mean, bury them alive?
Dig the earth, put them in the earth, alive, cover them with earth.
Interviewer: Where did this take place?
In Pol-e Charkhi. And not just once, many times.
Interviewer: Where exactly? In the prison? Outside?
Pol-e Charkhi was divided into blocks. Number one, number two, number four, and number three. Number three block, that’s where it happened.
Interviewer: The burial alive happened in block three?
Yes, the burial alive.
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The professor proceeded to describe the brutality of commander Sayyed ‘Abdollah and the executions he witnessed:
The toilets were situated outside, it was a moment when we could take a little sun, walk, go back and forth, it was the best moment, we waited for it. For hours we waited for the privilege to go to the toilets. So first we passed a corridor, with little windows through which we could see the place of execution. Especially at night, they put people against the wall, and turned on them a sort of blue light. Then they shot them. Collectively. Ten persons. Twenty persons. Sometimes 45. One night 120 persons were killed under that wall. One man ran away, after about fifty meters he was taken by the soldiers, by the officers—we heard about him from the soldiers—and Sayyed ‘Abdollah forced him to present his back; they put bullets in his body.
Interviewer: But the burial alive? Did you actually see this?
Yes. From where I told you. In the place of execution. They dug places. Like graves. Sometimes they made the prisoners do it. They dug, they made them stand inside, and they covered them with earth.
Interviewer: What did the prisoners do?
They cried, God save us! We are Afghans! Muslims! They did as those who are going to die. But many bore it. They remained silent. They knew their fate. They gave themselves up to death.
Interviewer: Did you see this with your eyes, or did you hear about it?
I heard about it, but with my own eyes I saw this three times.
Interviewer: How many people each time?
As I saw it, only one person each time.
Interviewer: In the same way? Standing in the grave, with the earth thrown on them?
Oh, the way I saw it, it was . . . to terrorize the prisoners. To give lessons that way. At night it was done collectively, a kilometer and a half from Pol-e Charkhi, in a big well [sic: a ditch is probably meant]. They threw them in with their hands and feet tied. Other wells they had to dig themselves. Those were graves for the prisoners. They threw them in. Then they covered them with earth with bulldozers.
Most horrible of all was the practice of drowning prisoners in excrement:
Interviewer: You’ve just drawn here a plan of the prison with the outside toilets. Here’s a row of cabins, each with a hole in the floor.
These cabins were made of wood.
Interviewer: The drawing shows a pipe leading the excrement into a great cesspool in the middle of the courtyard. Now, according to the drawing, prisoners stood in line on each side of this cesspool. According to you, executions took place in this cesspool?
Yes. Someone’s cell was searched, and they found a ballpoint pen. That was the most dangerous weapon there. The prisoner was brought before the line of inmates. The commander told them: “He has done something very serious. He has had a pen reach him inside the prison. We are going to teach you a lesson. If any one of you does the same thing, he will be punished the same way.” The prisoner was thrown into the pool of filth. He tried to get out, but it was soft, he sank, the soldiers around pushed him with sticks, and drowned him. He drowned. He died. It was more than three-and-a-half meters deep.
Interviewer: Did this happen once or several times?
Many times. It took place for each block. This lesson was given to the prisoners of each block. From time to time. By burying alive. But drowning in filth, that was their supreme punishment. That served them as a threat. They would say: “Do you want us to drown you in the filth?” [The speaker, very modest as pious Afghans are in general, could not bring himself to pronounce the exact word.]
Interviewer: Did you witness the opening of the prison, the amnesty?
The opening of the prison? So many women came to look for their husbands! The members of their families! They wouldn’t find them in their cells. So the soldiers would tell them: “Many people are buried . . . there.” The ladies surrounded the cesspool, they searched for the bodies with sticks, the bodies of the people of their families. They were weeping at the same time. Weeping, crying. They had their children with them. It was their last hope to find those who had disappeared.
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External witnesses corroborate the testimony of former inmates. Thus, the peasants of the village of Deh-Sabz, near Pol-e Charkhi and the Polygon field, witnessed the executions. The villagers fled to Pakistan before the Soviet invasion, and I interviewed them in Kebabian refugee camp on March 17, 1980, As elder, the peasant Khwaja Sa’id Rahmat, sixty-one, spoke first, but younger villagers joined in:
First, when Taraki took power, 24,000 soldiers died. They brought them from the palace in a truck to the field of Pol-e Gun. They brought them in trucks, in tanks. They threw them in a ditch and covered them with soil.
Interviewer: Were you then living in Kabul?
Right next to Pol-e Gun! At Pol-e Gun they started to do this! Me, my village is right next to Pol-e Charkhi, actually right next to Pol-e Gun. Pol-e Gun, before, was a shooting field, the soldiers exercised there. With machine guns, they exercised there. Before. Then Taraki gave an order, if there’s a mullah anywhere, arrest him. We had a Mawlawi [clerical dignitary] in our village of Deh-Sabz who said that all this was illegal, contrary to our faith, contrary to the Koran; they took him away, they held him eight months. When he came back, when they let him go, the whole village of Deh-Sabz rose up behind him. We had our spades, our sickles, our hoes, some of us had hunting rifles. We rose, right there near the airport. So they came to kill. To kill. Cannons! Planes! The people caught in the village, they shot them! The killing! The bombing! The blood! And underneath, two, two-and-a-half thousand were lost, the living and the dead!
. . . They would assemble everybody. The good officers who were Muslims, the mullahs, everybody, they assembled them to throw them in Pol-e Charkhi prison. And then at night, they blindfolded them, at eleven o’clock. And every night, two trucks, three trucks would come full of them. Well, let International [sic: the United Nations], let International go check there! They’ll see the dead piled one on top of another. That was in Taraki’s time. Hafizollah Amin gave the orders. They dug ditches. Then they threw them in by shooting them with machine guns. People killed, they came from every province! From Logar, from the north, from ShashGoroh, any man who was a good Muslim.
A young refugee: All! All! The good officers! The teachers! The descendants of the Prophet! Any person who wouldn’t walk on the Koran!. . .
Khwaja Sa’id: Exactly! Officers who wouldn’t! Who wouldn’t accept the party! Right after eleven at night, they shot them down, they put them in the earth. . . . With the eyes of my own head I saw them bury people alive!
. . . We couldn’t stay up there long. They wouldn’t let us. They piled up the dead in the ditch. They covered them with earth, but the feet stuck out. We could see legs in darishi [Western dress], legs in kola [native dress], soldiers’ boots. The boots of those Muslims, they tore them off. The trucks were full when they came, like those trucks that carry wood to Jangalak factory. That’s the way they carried their loads, like piled-up wood.
Young refugee: They weren’t carried one by one, but piled up one on top of another. And then they threw them from the truck into the earth. The living and the dead together, they threw them in the ditch and covered them with earth.
Another refugee: I saw this myself!
Young refugee: The living and the dead! I saw this with my own eyes, I was going to cut firewood, at eleven in the morning. They were drenching people with gasoline, alive, [This is probably a reference to the massacre of the 300 Hazaras on August 15, 1979.] One man was covered with gasoline but he tried to run away. The others were too tightly tied up, hands and feet, and they poured gasoline on them. But that man ran away. They shot him. But the others, they set them on fire!
For twenty-four hours, a whole day and night, their fire gave forth such a smell of burned fat! Over our village, such a smell of burned fat! No mistake!
Interviewer: But these executions, who carried them out? Afghan or Russian Communists?
All: The Russians! The Russians! Always the Russians!
Young refugee: They’ve done it all! They put Taraki in power and they gave him the orders! But it isn’t Taraki; it isn’t Hafizollah, it isn’t Babrak Karmal: it’s the Soviets!
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The refugees thus blame Soviet advisers for any atrocity, whether or not Russians were actually seen to be present. In any event the blame is a measure of Afghan hatred for the occupier. But the presence of Russian advisers is attested to at other instances of burial alive. A twenty-eight-year-old guerrilla testified to what he saw on August 8, 1979, in eastern Afghanistan, in an interview taped in Pakistan on March 2, 1980:
I joined the resistance. The front for Laghman was at ‘Ali-Shang. That’s where I saw an example of tyranny which the world should know. There was a little village there, called Qal’a-ye Najil, the Castle of the Grasslands. Opposite was Needle Valley, Darra-ye Mayl. The Afghan army held the entrance to the valley. The Holy Warriors held the hills. One of the resistance fighters was captured, Hajji Saheb Babu. They tortured him to find out where the others were, to find out if the village of Qal’a-ye Najil sheltered any resistance fighters. Then they attacked the village and its mosque. They took 650 poor people and took them to an empty field. They buried all of them alive. In sixteen big ditches. About ten meters by ten, each.
Interviewer: The date?
About the 15th day of the fast of Ramadan (August 8, 1979). After the government forces occupied Qal’a-ye Najil, there was hard fighting with the resistance fighters, and finally the Communists withdrew, leaving 250 dead on the field. No Russian body was left with them. But still, four Russian advisers were killed.
Interviewer: Does this mean that Russian advisers were present when 650 people were buried alive?
Yes! At the entrance to the valley, there was a military camp, with Russian advisers. It was on Russian orders that these people were made prisoners, on Russian orders that they were put to death. But Afghan soldiers did the work. . . .
Since the December 1979 invasion, the more grotesque atrocities of this sort seem to have stopped. With world attention focused on Afghanistan and an increasing number of journalists entering the country clandestinely, such practices would have been bound to become more widely known. It must be emphasized, however, that no war crime committed in Afghanistan since the 1978 Communist coup has so shocked the population as have the burials alive—not even air attacks with various sorts of modern weaponry. There is no doubt that even if Russian troops were now to be put on their best behavior, the political damage has been done; Afghan resistance is to a great extent dictated by the sheer horror of the first years of Communist rule.
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With the Kunar Valley attack of February 28-March 2, 1980, where the civilian population was ruthlessly machine-gunned from armored helicopters, it appeared that the Soviet army was continuing the genocidal policies of the Khalq government. Since that date, however, the conflict has settled into a war of attrition, with the Soviet and dwindling Afghan government troops holding isolated posts and city garrisons, and guerrilla forces roaming the countryside. Probably because troops are needed in other parts of the empire, the Soviets do not seem to be able to commit more than about 100,000 men to Afghanistan; although not enough to subdue the resistance, the occupation forces effectively prevent the guerrillas from freeing their country, and the nation’s various regions remain cut off from one another.
In order to impress upon the guerrillas the utter futility of their resistance, the Soviets seem to have resorted now to a strategy of hot-and-cold: one valley is bombed, but the next is spared and its traditional leaders are offered food, blankets, and other supplies if they will lay down their arms. This strategy has not paid off.
Soviet weaponry, when used, is directed against the noncombatant population as well as against guerrillas, and the pressure is steadily emptying the border provinces of their papulations. Weapons include antipersonnel mines, incendiary bombs, and poison gas.
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Antipersonnel mines: No larger than a child’s hand, these butterfly-shaped, winged plastic mines are scattered by helicopter and detonate when stepped upon. Desert areas are seeded with khaki-colored mines, while pastures and highland forest areas are peppered with dark green mines; in some places the mines are only inches apart. The mines blow off a foot as high as the ankle, or if pressed by hand take it off at the wrist. Flocks are ravaged, and children, who guard the flocks, are the usual human victims. In a Pakistan hospital, in a ward filled with mine victims, I saw two cousins, teenagers, showing identical stumps: each had lost one hand and one foot in nearly the same way. Fleeing a helicopter attack in Paktya province, the first boy had stepped on a mine and blown off a foot; falling forward with arm outstretched, his hand had landed on still another mine. His cousin, the second boy, tried to carry the victim to Pakistan. He had to stoop to clear a path by picking up the mines by the wing and throwing them aside; once, as he did so, he stepped on one mine while holding another, losing both a foot and a hand in his fall. Others carried the adolescents to safety.
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Incendiary bombs: Either napalm or an incendiary bomb much resembling napalm has been used since 1978, although this is denied by the Soviet press. Three peasant women from Sorkh-Rod, interviewed at the Kebabian refugee camp in Pakistan on March 17, 1980, described an air and tank attack on their village the preceding week:
House and village, everything was taken away from us. Everything that we still owned we carried on our heads from our homeland until here. My father and mother and brothers have died in the Holy War. They remain there under the earth. What earth? We don’t even know. People fell on the hills, people fell under the trees, and the trees burned. They sent fire on the trees, and the trees burned.
Napalm has become an infamous weapon, and Soviet propaganda, which berated the United States for using it in Vietnam, denies its presence in Afghanistan with some embarrassment. In November 1980, I searched for traces of it in the Nuristan mountains and found long, burned-out streaks of forest on the wooded hillsides of the area. Partisans had hidden an unexploded canister in a cave; it was broken but traces of a black, gluelike substance clung to its insides. Peasants described how the mountains shot up in flames with a lingering smell of gasoline after air attacks carried out in the fall of 1978, at a time when six Soviet advisers were seen in the district capital of Kamdesh. In the summer of 1981, Christian Science Monitor correspondent Ed Girardet reported incendiary bombs in Panjsher; he too noted the black, gelatinous substance, but fragments brought back for analysis yielded only phosphorus and magnesium components.
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Poison gas: This matter has aroused more of a furor in the West than among Afghans (perhaps because of Western associations going back to World War I). My own interviews yielded confirmation of some sort of incapacitating agents. Peasants from Nuristan and Badakhshan provinces in the northeast spoke of gray clouds released from canisters that had been dropped by aircraft over their valleys; but witnesses said they were able to escape affected areas and suffered no consequences. In the Kunar Valley massacre of March 1980, however, some peasants described incapacitating or even lethal agents, while others, from different villages, reported only having heard of these things. Thus, a mullah from Shinkorak village said that by hiding his face in a cloth dipped in the stream, he avoided suffocating while fourteen people around him choked to death. But this could have merely been tear gas used massively.
Kunar peasant, Gol-Akbar, fifty, questioned in Khazana refugee camp in Bajaur, Pakistan, one week after the February 28-March 2, 1980 Soviet assault on his valley, gave very clear descriptions:
They used something which made us weep. I didn’t see the gas. It went into my eyes and made me weep. We wept as if to weep all the tears of our bodies. And that way the Soviets could capture us, tie us up, load us on their trucks, and take us away. God knows where they take their prisoners. They used something else. It didn’t fall on me. I heard from the others. I don’t know what it is. Maybe a gas, as you say. It burns. It burns the body, it itches. . . .
Interviewer: But you couldn’t see this gas?
No, we couldn’t see it. That’s why I didn’t see it. I don’t know where it came from. From the Soviet Union, I don’t know. They would kill everybody. But that gas didn’t kill. But when it fell on people, they couldn’t do anything. On children; on women; on old people. And when it fell on them, the Soviets would take them and put them in their tanks and carry them away. They took the children. They took the women. They didn’t want to leave anybody.
And then they used something which made us laugh. They threw it, and we would go Ha! ha! ha! as if we were mad. We were mad, just like that, for a half-hour. We were between the tanks, and we laughed! The guns fell out of our hands. We’d forgotten everything. We couldn’t remember the stream. We couldn’t even remember the house! We just stayed like that, laughing. And then we were cured. But those who fainted, they took them away. Some fell in a faint, but the Soviets left, and they were cured later. Those were people from Sanzar village. They would fall asleep, and then little by little get better.
Since these interviews were taped, I have seen photographs taken by the Dutch journalist Bernd de Bruin near Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, in August 1981. The pictures show, first, a gray cloud rising over a fortified farm within a cluster of trees; then, beneath the gray cloud, a yellow cloud emerging very distinctly. The villagers dared to go into the farm only after twenty-four hours had elapsed. They found a single victim inside, an adult male. De Bruin’s pictures show that the face of the body had turned almost black. NATO medical experts concluded that a lethal gas had provoked internal hemorrhage; in this one case, at least, it is difficult to deny that a deadly chemical agent was used.
Guerrillas from eastern Afghanistan questioned by the French Ministry for External Affairs in May 1982 further testified to victims of gas attacks whose blackened corpses disintegrated when picked up by the arms: Mansûr Ahmadzayy, age twenty-four, described how hands or fingers could be pulled off bodies after Soviet aircraft had sent small white balloons over guerrilla positions near Jalâlâbâd, on the road toward Pakistan, in the fall of 1981.
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Although 20th-century totalitarianism has burst upon the Afghan peasants wearing its ugliest face, the initial shock is probably beginning to wear off as the resistance, very slowly, hardens, matures, and learns to organize more efficiently. Yet the testimonies of the first harsh encounter have lost none of their immediacy. Describing the Soviet attack on the Kunar Valley which ended on March 2, 1980, with the death or dispersal of the Afghan population, tribal leader Fazl Manan Pacha, sixty, spoke for all his people:
. . . They came with tanks, with planes, with helicopters, with MIG’s, with all sorts of modern, modern weapons. A division of the Russian army. Powerful. They began in the morning, at six-thirty. First they bombed all the villages, the houses, the little villages, on the hills and in the valley. At that time all the people were in their houses. They were living their life. The children were bombed. The women killed. All those people killed.
The young people who could fight from shelters fought. They fired on the tanks and on the Red Army soldiers. Many people were killed there by the Russians. Many Russians were killed too.
Sometimes the Russian soldiers entered the houses. They were put down by helicopters on the roofs, 200 of them. That way they entered the village and fought in the houses, and the villagers resisted in their own houses. Many people dead, Russians and ours. Women and children too. A terrible scene, terrible, I don’t know how to say. Everywhere wounds. Little children and women. Everywhere crying and crying.
The people resisted as long as they had ammunition. After that they threw stones at the tanks, and sticks. But when they had nothing, the people of the valley fled. Now no one knows where his children are, his wife, his parents. All spread through the hills and the valleys. People on this side [of the Kunar river] escaped. Everything those people had in their houses is destroyed. Now these people have nothing, no means of life.
The bombing which started before the fighting was with all sorts of bombs. Big bombs. Rockets. One sort of bomb caused a great, great heat, and everywhere things caught fire. Another sort of bomb gave a very bad smoke, a pain in the head, a very bad taste in the mouth, a terrible pain in the legs. Now all the main places in Kunar, like Asmar, Shigal, Dangam, everything is in the hands of the Russians. All, all the people who lived in that place are completely, completely gone. Everywhere you look there is death and death and no life; only tanks and trucks with Russian soldiers. I don’t know what’s going to happen to Afghanistan, what’s going to happen to the Holy Warriors. The Russians have no idea of . . . of human life.
The people of these valleys, they were very poor. But their life was happy, with their families, their children. Now their whole life is completely, completely gone because of the Russian army. For nothing. Their whole life is gone. And now they just go and their life has no meaning.
I don’t understand these Russians, these people. I don’t know what they want from Afghanistan. Why they make our life so hard. Why they kill these people fighting for their country. For their faith. For their freedom.
I don’t know what they want.
