Old Atrocities, Now Official, Galvanize Afghanistan
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times
Pictures of some of the people arrested, tortured and killed by the Afghan Communist government on display in Kabul on Monday.
By ROD NORDLAND
Published: September 30, 2013
KABUL, Afghanistan — So many people were buried alive by bulldozers in
the barren fields around the Pul-e-Charkhi Prison on Kabul’s outskirts
that guilty soldiers later said it was like an earthquake as their
victims tried to claw their way out.
Thirty-four years later, the names and details of nearly 5,000 of those
victims — arrested, tortured and killed by the Afghan Communist
government in 1978 and 1979 — have resurfaced, cataloged in records
released in September.
The so-called death lists were originally compiled by the Afghan
government. They languished, unreleased, for decades, until unearthed by
Dutch investigators and published on the Web site of the Netherlands national prosecutor’s office.
The Afghan government’s reaction to the release of the lists was
initially cautious, and President Hamid Karzai was quoted as saying that
reconciliation was more important than prosecutions.
It is a sensitive issue in Afghanistan, and not just because so many
former Communist officials now hold high positions in government,
especially in the military and police hierarchies. Calls to prosecute
old Communists inevitably lead to calls to prosecute all those who came
after them and committed massacres of their own during the three decades
of conflict that followed.
But as word spread among thousands of relatives of the victims, the
death lists went viral, lighting up social media among a younger
generation, and bringing calls from older people for prosecutions.
Finally, pressed by Sima Samar, the head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, President Karzai declared Monday and Tuesday national days of mourning.
Mosques in Kabul and throughout the country were thronged with mourners
for the victims on Monday, and many memorials were planned in rural
villages that were particularly hard hit by the wave of torture and
killings carried out by Afghanistan’s intelligence service at the time.
Just in the village of Gul Qala, in Kabul Province, 25 people were on
the newly released lists. They were all relatives of Mualavi Abdul Aziz
Mujahid, a former jihadi commander and a politician; they included
uncles, cousins and in-laws.
At the time, Mr. Mujahid was 10 and knew little of the ferment around
him, until he saw an older cousin, a religious scholar and a farmer
named Shah Dahla, arrested by plainclothes agents.
Mr. Dahla had just returned from the muddy fields, barefoot, and the
agents refused to allow him a moment to rinse off his feet and put his
sandals on.
The memory reduces Mr. Mujahid to tears 34 years later.
“Over the years, I have seen a lot of dead bodies in a lot of battles,”
he said. He later fought the Communist government, the Soviets and then
other jihadis in the civil war, and finally the Taliban. “But this
person’s innocence hurts me deeply.”
Mr. Dahla’s son, Mohammada Jan, said his mother and his siblings never
fully accepted that their father was dead, though they suspected it.
“Even so, when we found out from the Internet that it was confirmed,
everyone cried,” he said. Mr. Jan was 15 at the time of his father’s
disappearance; he, too, choked up at the memory of his being taken away
unshod.
The death lists include victims’ names, dates of death, father’s name,
occupation, hometown and the charges against them — usually reduced to
one word, including “anarchist,” “fundamentalist,” “Maoist,” “Khomeini.”
The chain of events that led to the lists’ discovery began with an
asylum request by Amanullah Osman, the head of interrogation for Afghan
intelligence in 1978 and 1979, who fled to the Netherlands in 1993. In
his asylum interview, according to the prosecutor’s office, Mr. Osman
admitted to signing documents concerning people who were to be executed.
“That was expected and desired of me,” he said. “If you don’t go along
with it, you can never attain such a high position.”
The Dutch denied him asylum but never expelled him, and eventually
opened up a war crimes investigation. That led them to a 93-year-old
Afghan refugee in Germany who gave them the death lists, which she had
gotten from a former United Nations official, Felix Ermacora, who had
never released them. Dutch authorities said they were confident of the
lists’ authenticity.
The prosecution was dropped in 2012 when Mr. Osman died, and the Dutch
decided to release the lists. “The close relatives of the deceased in
this case have the right to know the truth about the circumstances of
the disappearance and the final fate of their loved ones,” the
prosecutor’s office said.
The overwhelming public response in Afghanistan has forced the
government to make some acknowledgment, said Ahmad Nader Nadery, a
former member of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and
the author of a still-unreleased report on mass graves throughout Afghanistan. But he added that the lists had stirred a fresh wave of concerns among officials.
“The government was afraid as always that this was the beginning of a
process, and it will not stop just in this era of the Communists,” Mr.
Nadery said. “Those in the government were also involved in the ’90s,
and the Taliban also committed similar atrocities.”
One particular target of popular anger is Assadullah Sarwari, Mr.
Osman’s boss at the Afghan intelligence agency in 1979, who was
initially sentenced to death but later had his sentence reduced to a
19-year prison term.
Shalizai Didar, a former governor of Kunar Province, said 11 people from
his family were on the lists, along with 100 people he knows. “We
demand from the government to execute Assadullah Sarwari — not only him
but also his colleagues.”
Another former official who is frequently mentioned is retired Gen.
Abdul Wahid Taqat, who headed the intelligence services under the last
Afghan Communist government. General Taqat called the publication of the
lists a plot against him to thwart his own presidential aspirations.
“I am ready to answer for our part, but how about thousands of others
who were killed,” Mr. Taqat said. “It is not only the Communists, but
dozens of Afghan leaders have killed innocent people for the sake of
their Russian and British bosses. If those leaders can be prosecuted,
then I am ready to be prosecuted as well.”
Mr. Mujahid, the former jihadi commander, said he would like to see them
all brought to court — including some of his contemporaries, jihadi
leaders who fought the civil war that followed the Communists and
brought in the Taliban.
“They should all be prosecuted, no exceptions,” he said. “In the name of
democracy, Taqat and all those people are just walking free.”
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