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National Geographic : 1993 Oct
Contents
In the confusion we have not learned the boy's name. We have no way of asking wheth er he will live or die. I look for him later in the corridors of men, women, and children with bullet wounds, gaping shrapnel holes, and limbs mangled by land mines. But it is hope less. He has been swallowed up by the chaos. DD HIM TO THE LIST of war casualties. A million Afghans killed. Two mil lion driven from villages. More than five million made refugees in Paki Sstan and Iran. In all, half the na tion's people are dead, disabled, or uprooted. "The war mutilated our homeland," says Muhammad Eshaq, historian and former mujahid. "It destroyed everything. You can not set off dynamite inside a house and not expect the windows to be broken." The trouble began with a family quarrel in 1973. Zahir Shah, the last Afghan king, was overthrown by his envious first cousin and brother-in-law, Muhammad Daoud, who dis banded the monarchy and declared himself president. Five years later he and his family were killed in a coup by the underground Afghan Communist Party. Irreconcilable with Afghan ways, commu nism never gained the support of the people. Instead the communists inspired the uprising by the mujahidin, who were well armed by the United States and Saudi Arabia with weapons smuggled in from Pakistan. In October 1979 Prime Minister Hafizullah Amin had his boss, President Noor Muhammad Taraki, smoth ered with a pillow. The killing took Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev and his colleagues by surprise. Fearful that a client state was on the verge of collapse, in December the aging "cold warriors" ordered the Soviet Army to invade. The Soviets installed Babrak Karmal, a banished former Afghan ambassador and party leader, as president. Yet even with the help of 115,000 Soviet troops, including elite special forces, Karmal in seven years could not defeat the mujahidin. In May 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev replaced Karmal with the chief of RICHARD MACKENZIE, editor-in-chief of Global News Service, based in Washington, D. C., is an authority on Afghanistan who has made numerous treks across that country in the past eight years. STEVE MCCURRY'S photographs of the Afghan frontier appeared in the June 1985 NATIONAL GEO GRAPHIC. His most recent story for the magazine was on Sunset Boulevard in the June 1992 issue. the secret police, Dr. Najibullah (like many Afghans, he has only one name). A program of national reconciliation was announced. But it was too little too late. Frustrated by the continuing conflict, which was costing the Soviets ten billion dollars a year, Gorbachev in November decided to cut his losses and with draw Soviet forces. Two years and a few months later the last Soviet troops were gone. President Najibullah's position became increasingly untenable. As the situation imploded, he tried to escape. At 2 a.m. on April 16, 1992, he and a small group were stopped by Afghan militiamen as they tried to enter the airport in four blue-and-white vehi cles with UN flags flying. "We are under orders. No one leaves or enters the airport," a young captain told him. Najibullah said he just wanted to see his wife and children, who had already fled to India. But the captain did not budge. "A lot of people would like to see their fam ilies," he replied coldly. He turned the presi dent away. Later that morning, Najibullah took sanctuary in a UN office building in Kabul. The communist era was over. THE AFGHAN PEOPLE will not soon forget the abuses at the hands of the communist regime. Conservative estimates place the number of "disappeareds," or people dragged away by the secret police and never seen again, at 35,000 or more. Many were taken to the Pul-i -Charkhi prison, a stone fortress outside Kabul's eastern suburbs, which rises from a bleak plain like a ghost ship on a dead sea. Built by Czechoslo vakia in the mid-1970s, it holds as many as 20,000 inmates-perhaps the largest prison in south Asia. It was also, say human rights groups, a place where torture and atrocities were practiced for more than a decade. On the eve of what would have been the 14th anniversary of the communist coup, I drive out to the prison, where I find a scene of madness. Sadar Muhammad, an Interior Ministry colonel, is struggling to maintain control of the prison's criminal wing while at the same time trying to empty it, under orders from the dreaded secret police (known as KhAD), as a gesture of goodwill toward the populace. But inmates, confused by rumors, are on the verge of rioting. A fire truck stands ready at the huge steel gates. NationalGeographic, October1993
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