The new holocaust

Rosanne T. Klass

AFGHANISTAN is being turned into a charnel house.

It is not only that the Soviets and their puppets have executed or tortured to death thousands of political prisoners.

It is not only that they attack civilian targets--wedding parties, farmers in their fields, villagers in the bazaars--or that they single out medical facilities for destruction.

It is not only that they pursue, rocket, and strafe the slow, plodding caravans of refugees--women and children, mostly-fleeing to sanctuary in Pakistan and Iran.

It is not only that they burn crops, destroy granaries, and kill flocks and herds to induce famine, or that they smash the irrigation systems and spared poisons on the land to turn it into a permanent desert, in emulation of Genghis Khan.

No, I am referring now to the deliberate Soviet policy of sending Soviet ground forces into the villages of Afghanistan to rape, to loot, to burn, and to murder most horribly, leaving the mutilated dead as a warning and an omen to survivors. The message is clear: submit, get out, or die hideously.

These are not the sporadic actions of uncontrolled troops gone berserk. They are systematic campaigns of butchery, carried out by Soviet--not Afghan army--troops, some of them special units. The massacres occur in all parts of the country, as would be expected in a calculated policy of terrorization.

The policy is not new; it began with the invasion in 1979. Two years ago, in Oslo, an Afghan from the Panjsher Valley told a human-rights panel about returning to his village in 1980 and finding the village elders, including his own father and grandmother, decapitated by Soviet soldiers who had, with grisly cynicism, put the men's heads on the owmen's bodies, the women's on the men's.

The number, ferocity, and frequency of these atrocities are increasing as the Russians move methodically to crush and empty out the country. They are becoming commonplace. Yet one sees nothing about them in the press, hears nothing on the air. No American journalists bothered to cover the Oslo hearings, though they were invited and Europeans came. Survivors and eyewitnesses can be found in the Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan, but reporters do not seek them out. Indeed, when their stories are made public, they are usually not reported; and when, occasionally, they are reported, they usually don't get into print. A top editor at a major U.S. news organ told me three years ago: "Torture is not news."

The editors' explanations are always the same: With journalists barred from Afghanistan, the information cannot be verified.

What newspaper, one wonders, declined to publish the news of Lidice in 1942 because it couldn't get a reporter into NAzi-occupied Czechoslovakia? Or who, before repoting the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane, insisted on smuggling a reporter into occupied France to make sure that the French Resistance was not exaggerating? For that matter, what reporter has yet made an investigative tour of the Gulag camps to make sure they really exist? When did the press begin to assume that what they cannot see for themselves does not exist, no matter how extensive and detailed the eyewitness testimony?

In May, freelance journalist Rob Schultheis went to the Munda refugee camp in Pakistan and interviewed survivors of an atrocity campaign carried out by Russian troops in the LAghman Valley in eastern Aghanistan in late April. In a single district, nearly eight hundred people were slaughtered, from pregnant women and newborns to the aged--shot, burned alive, hanged, bayoneted, tortured to death, killed with grenades, decapitated, beaten to death, mutilated. Schulthesis's taped interview was broadcast on National Public Radio in June. It went unnoticed by the press.

Dr. Juliette Fournot is director of the Afghanistan program of Medecins sans Frontieres (Doctors without Boundaries), the French humanitarian organization that has been sending medical teams into Afghanistan clandestinely since 1980. A petitie young woman who spent part of her childhood in Afghanistan and speaks the languages, Dr. Four-not has since 1980 logged thousands of miels inside AFghanistan on horseback and on foot, checking on the operation of the MSF program. In May of this year, just about the time Schultheis was interviewing the Laghman survivors, she was in the southern province of Paktia, interviewing survivors of another, similar atrocity committed six months earlier far to the north, beyond the high mountain ranges, in Baghlan Province. With the snows melted, the few survivors had abandoned their destroyed homes to seek safety in Pakistan's refugee camps.

Dr. Fournot took notes on the interviews with the cool precision of a doctor writing up a patient's medical history. Based on those interviews, this is her account of the massacre:

On 15 Kaous [December 7], a group fo Soviet solders entered the village of Bilwom at Issa Khel and searched the houses looking for young men to impress into the Afghan army. During the search, several women were raped and a grenade thrown into their house as the soldiers left the village. The Mujahedin in the region, hearing of this, set up an ambush in the path of the returning Soviet troops and attacked the convoy at Chardara. The sixty men of the band were under the command of Sher Mohammed Khan. Seven tanks were destroyed by rocket fire and burned; one tank hit a mine and exploded. At the end of the hour-long battle Sher Mohammed had been wounded in the face, one Mujahed was dead, and six others had been wounded.

On December 12, five days later, at about 11 A.M., four hundred Soviet soldiers circled the villages of Rarao Keshlok Payan, Rarao Keshlok Bala, Tal Gouzar, and Sar-e-Washa, which were close to the site of the December 7 ambush. Tank reinformcements arrived about 2:30. The Soviet troops then systematically entered every house, killing all the occupants, including women and children, often by shooting them in the head. Three pregnant women were disemboweled. The houses were put to the torch, and the fires burned for five days. The troops carried off the money and valuables that the villagers had brought them in the hope of saving their lives. Commandant Mohammed Wali (Mullah Raz Mohammed is his nom de jihad [the resistance in Afghanistan has been proclaimed a "jihad," a holy war[), alerted to the attack, arrived about 4 P.M. and attacked the Russians. During the fighting between the Russians and the "Muj" [short for Mujahedin[ the survivors in the stricken villages fled.

The following morning, Mohammed Wali rounded up carts and filled each with the corpses of twenty or more women and children and sent them into the town of Kunduz, escorted by old people.

The people of Kunduz, horrified by the massacre, closed their shops and took to the streets in protest. The riots spread to all parts of the town. The Parchamis [Afghan Communist Party members[ joined in as well. By the end of the day the Soviets had broken up the demonstrations. They threw the bodies of the victims (women and children) outside the town. The Mujahedin then carried them back to their native villages (Rarao, Tal Gouzar, Sar-e-Washa), and they were buried. After several days of digging through the ruins of the burned houses, a total of 630 people were buried.

Subsequent to her on-the-spot inteview with Mohammed Wali, Dr. Fournot received a complete list of the names and ages of the dead, village by village, and has provided the author with a photocopy. It contains the names of 620 men, women, and children. One page is missing, which apparently contains another 11 names, bringing the total to 631--twice the number murdered at Lidice, where the Nazis killed only the men. Correspondents for Reuters and Agence France-Presse interviewed the atrocity survivors in Pakistan. But the story never appeared. AFP in Paris told an inquirer that no report had been received by the home bureau but that, in any case, AFP would not be interested in the story.

When the first reports of the Nazi slaughter of the JEws emerged from occupied Europe in 1942, they were dismissed as "unsubstatiated," their sources labeled as hysterical and unreliable. A decade ago, nobody was willing to believe what was happening in Cambodia until half the nation was dead. We hear constant regrets, not that nothing was known about these events until it was too late. We hear the slogan, "Never again."

But Afghanistan is "again,c and it is happening now. Already an estimated one million Afghan civilians have been murdered and the killing continues every day.

COPYRIGHT 1985 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning