The awful logic of genocide

Jean-Francois Revel

THE OCCUPATION of Afghanistan by the Red Army, which has been going on for almost six years now, continues to provoke in the Western democracies a reaction that Montaigne calls "voluntary ignorance." This deliberate neglect of the facts is a wonderful prophylactic against the temptation to act. In this sense, Afghanistan is a reflection of our cowardice. It offers an instructive look at the way the democracies justify, or conceal, their failures in the face of totalitarian expansionism.

Information of Afghanistan is scarce, to be sure, because of Soviet censorship. The Communist powers enjoy an unwritten but tacitly accepted privilege, a privilege practically legalized by international consent, to shape and to ration information that concerns them. By closing Afghan territory to TV teams and non-Communist reporters, by imprisoning journalists and even doctors who have entered the country clandestinely, the Soviets have kept the Afghan horror story from being told by the mass media. Thus they have prevented the vast wave of worldwide opprobrium that would engulf a democracy guilty of far lesser crimes but accessible to news coverage by nature of its politics and principles.

But the blindness of certain Western elites does not result in the main from the practical difficulties of finding out what is going on. The practical difficulties can keep the ostory from the television screens, but there are nevertheless enough stories in the Western press--if they were taken seriously. There is sufficient information available for anyone who wants to think seriously about the situation of the Afghan people. If the free world discards this information or relegates it to the margins of its awareness, that is because it fears it will have to start questioning certain soothing interpretations of Soviet behavior and be forced to face the gravity of the crimes committed against the Afghan people. We can thus, we Western democracies, by looking the other way, withdraw from our moral responsibility and close our bored minds to the continuation of the Soviets' foreign policy. We will spare ourselves from seeing it in order to excuse ourselves from having to oppose it.

The first reason for our resistance to listening to news about Afghanistan (the only form of resistance the West has shown as yet in the Afghan affair) has to do with our desire to interpret the invation of Afghanistan as an accident of Soviet foreign policy. Reread what all our oracles have written about it in the last six years: It was a mistake . . . a marginal act . . . unrepresentative of the fundamental thinking of the Soviet leaders. The Soviets acted without premeditation; they were "caught up in a situation"; they fell "into a trap." The Western powers should, consequently, help them to get out of it, "to save face." How? By not bullying them, by not reawakening their well-known "sense of insecurity."

This analysis, made by most of the statesmen in power in the West during the invasion of 1979, remains the attitude of a great number of commentators today. It entails certain practical prescriptions: We must abstain from arming the Afghan resistance, for fear of provoking the Soviets. Only the fear of foreign intervention, they tell us, will delay the spontaneous departure of the Red Army. In view of the insignificance of our military aid to the Afghan resistance, one wonders how much further this would have to be reduced to "reassure" the Soviets, and how long it will take for their supposed desire to evacuate the country to be demonstrated. And, once gone, will they permit the local Communist regime to be swept out of Kabul, as without doubt it would be after the withdrawal of the Soviet military presence?

Such resignation is both unlikely and illogical given that the 1979 invasion took place precisely because the pro-Soviet Communist regime in Afghanistan could not, given the hostility of the people, remain in power without Soviet help. To imagine that the Soviet army will evacuate Afghanistan without having first gained acceptance for Communism there is to believe that the USSR would withdraw its "advisors" from all countries where it believes the local Communist government lacks local support--a totally unsupported belief. Up until now, quite the opposite has been the rule: The USSR keeps larger troop contingents in place in countries where the pro-Soviet regime is most fragile, most menaced. Which is, to be sure, perfectly rational.

The explanation that the Soviet seizure of Afghanistan is a result of unhappy chance is rooted in a more general theory. According to many politicians and students of politics, the Soviet Union does not nourish long-term foreign-policy objectives, at least not aggressive objectives. Nothing more greatly rouses the fury of certain politicians and international experts, whether journalists or academicians, than references to a global design on the part of the USSR. They admit, to be sure, that the USSR has an overall vision, but they believe it to be strictly defensive. The notion that the Soviet Union has an expansionist design, an imperialistic outlook both ideological and strategic, a program patiently pursued, long planned, unfailingly prepared for setbacks, could only emanate--intheir view--from an idee fixe dating from the cold war. Never mind the classic writings on the subject and the best-attested historical facts. The Soviet Union, they say, does not have, cannot have, a coherent imperialistic plan.

Unhappily, there are few cases where even a summary knowledge of history so completely pulverizes that theory as Afghanistan. From the start of the Revolution in 1917, the new Soviet power moved to eliminate British influence from Central Asia. A Soviet-Afghan treaty of friendship was signed on September 13, 1920, a prelude to a long series of treaties destined to tighten the Soviets' ties with Kabul. The Soviets took up again the geopolitical objective of czarist Russia; but--and this is a major innovation--they added to it their panoply of ideological weapons. In November 1918, in a proclamation entitled "Do Not Forget the Orient," Stalin spoke of the need to "inspire the workers and peasants of these countries with the liberating spirit of the revolution." In characteristic fashion, this liberation ideology was evidently not to be practiced within the USSR itself: The Bolsheviks, who had never stopped denouncing the annexation of Moslem territories by the Czar, refused, once in power, to give these same regions their independence, instead putting down by force the insurrections that followed.

After the Second World War, the Soviet Union capitalized on the void left by Britain's retreat from India, the end of British influence, and above all the new situation that resulted from the creation of Pakistan to tie Kabul's foreign policy to her own. Indeed, why not? There was nothing scandalous in what the USSR was doing. But the democracies should at least have understood nothing of what the Soviet Union was up to in Central Asia. In December 1954, John Foster Dulles refused military aid to Afghanistan and threw that country into Moscow's arms.

Sardar Mohammed Daud, prime minister from 1953 to 1963 and president from 1973 to 1978, permitted the Soviet Union to take over the task of equipping and training the Afghan army. In 1955, Khrushchev and Bulganin, despite their concers in Europe and at home that year, made one of their first foreign trips to Kabul and accorded Afghanistan a grant of $100 million, the biggest grant given by Moscow to any country beyond the Iron Curtain. Such a demarche is incompatible with the thesis that Moscow never had any long-term plans for Afghanistan.

After the coup of July 16, 1973, which brought Daud back to power, the internal Soviet conquest of Kabul was accelerated. While he himself was not a Communist, Daud thought himself strong and wily enough to risk putting Communists in key posts. He did not understand the weakness of his position, given an army in which thousands of officers and men had been trained by the Soviet Union for twenty years. When, on April 27, 1978, the army assassinated Daud and installed a Communist regime in his place, it was picking ripe fruit from a tree planted long before.

Here too the Western experts and commentators who date the Sovietization of Afghanistan from the invasion of December 27, 1979, prove, at best, that they are professionally incompetent. The protectorate had been in the works for decades. The sterilization of Afghanistan, in the classical form of "a friendly government" installed in 1978, was the real turning point. Soviet garrisons took up their positions at various locations in Afghanistan starting early in 1979. Was this the result of "a chain of unfortunate accidents"? Was there no plan behind this?

In August 1979, the Afghan garrison in Kavul realized the the unpopularity of Communist President Nur Mohammed Taraki was starting to provoke rebellion in the country and that it would be prudent to replace him with someone less openly under the orders of Moscow. This garrison was then massacred by Soviet troops, including air units already stationed in the area. How could Western governments not have known about it? After having first killed Taraki, then his successor, Hafizullah Amin, and installed intheir place a "faithful friend," Babrak Karmal, the Soviets knew that no Communist leader in Kabul could stay in power without strong Soviet support. The invasion and the occupation were anything but an "accident" since they constituted the natural consequences of a systematic course of action.

The second reason the West resists information about Afghanistan is the Soviet violations of human rights in that country. These violations are so widespread that our governments are scared even to raise the question, knowing very well that Moscow will, in its usual humiliating manner, refuse even to discuss it. That is why he press and other media greeted so tepidly the February 19, 1985, United Nations report on the condition of human rights in Afghanistan by Felix Ermacora, Special Rapporteur--a report whose very existence is practically miraculous and which deserves a salute on that ground alone, but which was quickly relegated to obscurity. What does it teach us?

The repression takes two forms: the torture and execution of opponents and resistance fighters, and the massacre and deportations of the civilian population. In "Le Grand Jeu Afghan" (Politique Internationale, Spring 1985) Michael Barry reports that between April 27, 1978 (the date of the pro-Soviet coup d'etat), and January 1980, 27,000 people were executed in the Poli Charki concentration camp, situated six miles east of Kabul. "This is not an estimate," writes Barry. "This is the simple addition of the names of the victims posted by the regime in public places to discourage the families from crowding around the gates of the prisons with packages of clothing and food." A major portion of the educated elite, the author adds, perished in this carnage: diplomats, doctors, professors, engineers, non-Communist officials, spiritual leaders. While estimating the number of those shot at "only" 12,000, the UN report corroborates the basic story.

In this context, according to the information received, a number of political prisoners were also tortured. One of the complaints relates to Mr. Sayed Abdullah Kazim, a former dean of the Faculty of Economics, imprisoned at Poli Charki at the same times as Mr. Ludin. In this connection, Mr. Ludin, himself arrested in June 1978 and detained until 11 January 1980 in the Poli Charki prison, revels that he himself was present during the torturing of Mr. Kazim, who had the fingers of both hands crushed under the legs of a chair on which two of his torturers sat. Having himself been tortured, the witness drew the attention of the Special Rapporteur particularly to events which had taken place on the nights of 31 May to 1 June 1979 in the Poli Charki prison. Shots fired in the prison courtyard had been heard by the witness, who was told by the prison guards that about 118 prisoners were being executed. The shooting was followed by the departure of buses carrying the bodies, some of them still showing signs of life. The testimony of a former female detainee of Poli Charki likewise revealed that during her detention between May and November 1978, she had several times heard shooting in the prison courtyard along with the departure of the corpses of prisoners in buses. The same witness spoke of the existence of a section of the prison reserved exclusively for women, and the Special Rapporteur had the occasion to interview a woman who had been incarcerated in that prison.

However, one must add to the official figures the number of those shot unofficially. Amnesty International estimates that 4,854 prisoners have been liquidated more or less clandestinely. And the United Nations report says that approximately nine thousand individuals "disappeared" in Kabul before the coup of December 27, 1979, much as happened in Argentina during the military dictatorship, but without touching off the same indignation in the free world.

As to the massacres of the civilian population, I cite several examples, all drawn from the UN report.

In addition, numerous cases of assassination of women and children were brought to the notice of the Special Rapporteur. They were described as having taken place frequently in villages, as reprisals following skirmishes between the troops and elements of the opposition movement.

Eyewitnesses told the Special Rapporteur of alleged massacres of civilians during the bombardment of villages. According to these witnesses, such acts were part of a deliberate policy, especially over the last two years, to force the people to take flight. In this connection, one witness declared that the country's economy had been completely destroyed by the systematic bombing of rural areas housing about 85 per cent of the population, and in fact occupied by the resistance and regarded as liberated zones.

On 13 September 1982, approximately 105 persons were killed in the village of Padkhwab-e-Shana in the province of Logar, including 61 victims from the village itself. In the course of an infantry operation in the village, the population, consisting of children, old people, and a few combatants, took fright and hid in an underground channel used for irrigation (Karez). To dislodge them, poured a whitish liquid mixed with white powder into three outlets of the channels and set fire to it. Charred and decomposed bodies were brought out by the villagers. The corpses were said to include 12 children.

On 12 October 1983, in the villages of Kulchabat, Bala Karz, and Mushkizi in the province of Kandahar, 360 persons were executed in the village square, including twenty girls and about twenty old people.

In March 1984, several hundred civilians were massacred in the villages of Dash-e-Bolokhan and Dash-e-Asukhan in the Kohistan region.

In November 1984, some forty civilians were massacred in the village of Zirvq situated in the Urgun region after two weeks of steady bombardment. According to the witnesses, several houses were destroyed and the cattle decimated.

Furthermore, the use of poison gas and booby-trapped toys and largely been proved, according to the report.

The devastation of the countryside and the villages, and the deportations of the people (in late 1980, the Soviets emptied Pamir of its entire population), have brought the expected and desired result: famine. This famine is a chronic fact of life for about half a million civilians (close in proportion to the Ethiopian famine). According to the group of doctors known as Medecins sans frontieres, infant mortality caused by malnutrition reached a stupefying 85 per cent in the winter of 1984-85.

Another result was the exodus. More than four and a half million Afghans (a figure we're fairly certain about) have fled their country since 1978, mostly to Pakistan. Given that the official figure of displaced persons worldwide, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is approximately ten million, that means that nearly one out of every two refugees on this planet today is an Afghan. If you add to this figure the number of massacred or starved to death (a figure that can prudently be put at a million) this means that of the 13 to 14 million inhabitants of the country in 1978 there remain today on Afghan soil about eight million. Put otherwide, nearly 40 per cent of the population is either in exile, or dead.

If one notes that the repression started 18 months before the invasion of December 27, 1979, and was directed from the start of Soviet advisors already in place, one cannot escape the conclusion, once again, that the USSR was carrying out a well-thought-through program. It is not credible, as the commentators who wish at all costs to exculpate the Soviets claim, that they gave way to momentary panic. The great "liberal" Mikhail Gorbachev seems to have not the slightest intention of modifying the Soviet political plan for Afghanistan. One of his first declarations on the subject, in March 1985, was to threaten reprisals against Pakistan if that country continued to "meddle in the internal affairs" of its neighbor, which in Soviet language means if Pakistan continues to shelter Afghan refugees instead of repelling them across the border to be massacred on the other side.

Must one conclude that the Soviet Union is invulnerable and can--as South Africa, or Chile, cannot--violate human rights with impunity, shielded by the discreet complicity of an international opinion that knows it is powerless? Perhaps not. What the discreet people find a bit upsetting are the anti-Communist guerrillas: in Angola, in Nicaragua, and above all in Afghanistan. For the first time, the United States Congress, in July 1985, openly recognized the importance of this phenomenon and voted official aid--$15 million to the Afghan resistance.

COPYRIGHT 1985 National Review, Inc.
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