The World Was Going Our Way

by Christopher Andrew

  We are calling on the army and the people to rise up against the despot Zia ul-Haq, the servant of Satan - the United States of America - and to prepare him for the fate of the Shah. Satan is frightened that the Islamic Revolution, started in Iran, will spread to Pakistan. This is why Satan is generously supplying Zia ul-Haq with arms with which to kill believers. Zia ul-Haq has flooded our country with various unbelieving Americans and impure Chinese who are teaching him how to kill pure Muslims. He believes in their advice more than in the teachings of Allah. Zia ul-Haq is a mercenary dog who is living on Satan’s dollars. He has ordered Zia ul-Haq to establish a cruel and bloody regime and to crush the Muslim people who are now living with no rights.

  At the same time corruption and hypocrisy are eating away at our society. Crime is increasing. The reason is not only a lack of true belief, but the increasing gap between the rich and poor. As All-powerful Allah teaches us: ‘A man will only receive when he is zealous.’ Our prophet Muhammad, may Allah bless him, called on us Muslims to work honestly and hard in respect of the Almighty. This means that a Muslim must only receive what he has earned by his own labours. But Zia ul-Haq and his clique are unlawfully making themselves rich from other people’s work. Even the Zekat [obligatory alms to the needy - one of the pillars of Islam] has become a thing of personal gain to them. Taking advantage of the fact that no one can control them, they award a large part of the Zekat. But the Most High ordered us that: ‘Charity is for the poor and beggars, for the deliverance of slaves, for those in debt, for actions in the name of Islam and for travellers as declared by Allah. He is knowing and wise.’ And our prophet Muhammad, and may He rest in peace, taught us that the Zekat must all be used for the needs of the poor, orphans and widows. Ask our poor people whether they have received much charity from the Zekat. Collecting the Zekat by force, Zia ul-Haq and his clique are not only insulting true Muslims. They are shamelessly ignoring the teachings of Islam. And they manage to hide their own money from the Zekat. All Muslims should know that Zia ul-Haq recently stole millions. He keeps his riches abroad as did the former Shah of Iran, knowing that sooner or later he will be forced to flee. He is hoping that Satan will protect him from the anger of the people. Meanwhile he is serving Satan faithfully by ensuring favourable conditions for the dominance of non-believers. He knows that this will lead to further theft from Muslims.

  The clique of Zia ul-Haq has carried out a census of the population and its housing. This was also inspired by Satan as a way to introduce new taxes and labour conditions in contradiction of the teachings of Muhammad, may Allah bless him, for he said that anyone who oppresses a Muslim is not his follower.

  Zia ul-Haq is leading the country to disaster. He wants to ride on the atomic devil and become a despot over all Muslims.

  But Allah is great and just. Only dust remains from the enemies of Islam, but the warriors for the true faith are remembered for ever.

  Everyone must join the fight in the name of Islam against the bloody dictator Zia ul-Haq.

  Allah is great!101

  Other Service A leaflets purported to come from dissident Islamic officers, condemning Zia as a hypocritical traitor who, while professing friendship for Iran, was secretly plotting with the Americans to bring down the Islamic Republic. The Service A forgers threatened Zia with assassination. ‘Next time’, they told him, ‘you will pay for it as Sadat did.’102

  Murtaza Bhutto, meanwhile, with the assistance of Najibullah, acting as a KGB surrogate, was preparing a real plot to assassinate Zia. Though the evidence comes exclusively from former Al-Zulfikar sources, it appears that Zia narrowly escaped two assassination attempts early in 1982. The weapon in both cases was a Soviet SAM-7 (surface-to-air) missile. On the first occasion, in January, two Al-Zulfikar terrorists carried a SAM missile in the boot of a car to a deserted hillside in sight of Islamabad airport and awaited the arrival of a Falcon jet bringing Zia home from a visit to Saudi Arabia. But the poorly trained terrorist who fired the SAM did not wait for the red signal in his viewfinder to turn green, indicating that the missile had locked on to its target, and the attack failed. A few weeks later the Pakistani press revealed that on the morning of 7 February Zia would be arriving at Lahore aboard his personal plane. The two terrorists drove to a public park beneath Zia’s flight path with another SAM in their boot, waited for the Falcon jet to come into view and fired the missile. Once again, however, they ignored some of the instructions in the SAM-7 manual. This time the terrorist who fired the missile waited for the green signal but failed to follow the manual’s advice that the aircraft should be watched through the viewfinder until it was hit. The missile missed its target, though on this occasion the Falcon pilot saw the SAM-7 being launched and took what turned out to be unnecessary evasive action. The strict censorship imposed by Zia’s regime prevented any mention of the assassination attempt appearing in the Pakistani press. The two terrorists escaped back to Kabul.103 Two more SAM-7 missiles smuggled into Pakistan for a further attempt on Zia’s life later in the year were seized by the police before they could be used. As Murtaza’s paranoid strain became more pronounced, he suspected a bizarrely improbable plot between the Afghan regime and Zia to exchange him for the mujahideen leader, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and moved to New Delhi.104

  Without any credible strategy to bring Zia down, the Centre could do little more than continue to publicize imaginary plots against him, chiefly from a supposedly secret Islamic opposition within the Pakistani armed forces. Some of Service A’s fabrications appear to have deceived the Indian press. In 1983, for example, the Delhi Patriot published a text allegedly prepared by a clandestine cell calling itself the Muslim Army Brotherhood (Fauji Biradiri), which denounced the Zia regime as ‘a despicable gang of corrupt generals . . . more interested in lining their own pockets than in defending the nation’, who had ‘betrayed the ideas of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and were leading the country to ruin’. A recent history of Pakistan concludes: ‘Nothing resembling the Muslim Army Brotherhood materialized in the more than ten years that Zia remained at the helm of state affairs, and it would appear to have been the invention of fertile minds in the neighbouring state [India].’105

  In all probability, however, the ‘fertile minds’ were those not of the Indians but of Service A. Allegations of the Zia regime’s corruption were also a regular theme in KGB disinformation. Zia was said to have large amounts of money in Swiss bank accounts, into which American arms manufacturers paid 10 per cent commission on their sales to Pakistan. KGB disinformation also claimed that Zia had a special plane in continual readiness in case he and his family had to flee the country.106

  In Pakistan, as in India, some of the most effective active measures were based on fabricated evidence of US biological and chemical warfare. 107 Operation TARAKANY (‘Cockroaches’) centred on the claim that American specialists in this field had set up a base in the US bacteriological laboratory at the Lahore medical centre, which was secretly experimenting on Pakistani citizens. Outbreaks of bowel disease in the districts of Lishin, Surkhab and Muslim Bag and the neighbouring areas of Afghanistan, as well as epidemics and cattle deaths in Punjab, Haryana, Jammu, Kashmir and Rajasthan in western India were alleged to be the result of the movement across the Pakistani border of people and cattle infected by American germ-warfare specialists. On 11 February 1982 the Karachi Daily News reported that Dr Nellin, the American head of a research group at the Lahore medical centre, had been expelled by the Pakistani authorities. The Pakistani newspaper Dawn reported on 23 February:

  Following the expulsion from Pakistan of Dr Nellin for dangerous experiments on the spread of infectious diseases, an American delegation of doctors is paying an urgent visit to Islamabad. Their aim is to hush up the scandal over the work of the Lahore medical centre and to put pressure on Pakistan not to make known the work which was carried out at the centre . . . The fact that a group of American doctors has made such an urgent visit to Pakistan confirms that Washington is frig
htened that the dangerous experiments on new substances for weapons of mass destruction might be revealed. It supports the conclusion that Pakistan intends to allow the Americans to continue to carry out dangerous experiments, probably because these new weapons could be used against India, Iran and Afghanistan.

  In May 1982 the KGB succeeded in taking the story a stage further by planting reports in the Indian press, allegedly based on sources in Islamabad, that the United States had stockpiled chemical and bacteriological weapons in Pakistan:

  According to information received from local military sources, chemical reagents have recently been sent to Pakistan from the American chemical weapons arsenals on Johnston Island in the Pacific Ocean and in Japan. They will be positioned in areas not far from Islamabad, Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar. According to the sources, these reagents are the same as those used by the Americans during the Vietnam War. According to the same reports, the reserve of American chemical and bacteriological weapons in Pakistan is intended for possible use by American rapid-deployment forces throughout South and South-West Asia. Agreement on the stationing of chemical and bacteriological weapons in Pakistan was reached between Washington and Islamabad as early as August 1980 when the agreement on the stationing of the American bacteriological service on Pakistani territory was officially prolonged. Point 2 of Article 5 of this agreement gives the Americans, in the form of the International Development Agency of the USA, the right to evaluate periodically the work and make suggestions for its improvement. In practice this means that the Americans have full control over all aspects of the work in Pakistan on new forms of chemical, bacteriological and biological weapons. This makes it possible for the USA independently to establish how chemical reagents must be stored and used in Pakistan. Confirmation of this is the well-known work in the medical centre in Lahore where American specialists have invented new forms of bacteriological and chemical weapons.

  Within the Centre, Operation TARAKANY was considered such a success that Andropov made a special award to the resident in Pakistan.108

  Anti-American black propaganda, however, failed to disrupt the increasing co-operation between Zia and Washington. Though Zia spurned the offer in 1980 of a $400-million economic and military aid package from the Carter administration as ‘peanuts’ (a mocking metaphor doubtless derived from Carter’s background as a peanut farmer), in 1981 he accepted an offer from the incoming Reagan administration of $3.2 billion spread over six years.109 During the war in Afghanistan the CIA supplied over $2 billion of covert assistance to the mujahideen through the Pakistani ISI. There was close liaison between the CIA and ISI with a series of exchange visits by their chiefs, Bill Casey and General Akhtar Abdul Rahman.110 KGB active measures had no discernible effect in undermining either Zia or ISI support for the mujahideen. Until Zia’s death in 1988 in an air crash whose cause has never been convincingly explained, his regime proved one of the most stable in Pakistani history.111

  When Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir, became Prime Minister after Zia’s death in 1988, she showed little enthusiasm for mujahideen operations in the final stages of the war.112 Had she become Prime Minister earlier or Zia been assassinated in 1982, the history of the war in Afghanistan would have been significantly different. The KGB had been right to identify Zia’s personal commitment to opposing the Soviet invasion as crucial to Pakistan’s covert role in Afghanistan but had failed in its attempts to put effective pressure on him to diminish or end it.

  20

  Islam in the Soviet Union5

  During the Cold War the Soviet Union contained the fifth largest Muslim population in the world - less than Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh, but more than Egypt, Turkey or Iran.1 Tsarist Russia’s imperial expansion into the Muslim world had begun four centuries earlier with the conquest of Kazan by Ivan the Terrible’s ‘Soldiers of Christ’. The multicoloured onion domes on St Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square supposedly represent the severed, turbaned heads of eight Muslim leaders killed during the conquest. Russia’s occupation of Muslim territory continued at intervals for the next three and a half centuries. The Bolshevik Revolution, however, brought with it the promise of liberation for the Muslim peoples of the Tsarist Empire. Lenin and Stalin, then Commissar for Nationalities, jointly declared on 3 December 1917:

  Muslims of Russia! Tatars of the Volga and the Crimean! Kyrgyz and Sarts of Siberia and of Turkistan! Turks and Tatars of Trans-Caucasus! Chechens and mountain peoples of the Caucasus! And all of you whose mosques and places of worship have been destroyed, whose customs have been trampled under foot by the tsars and the oppressors of Russia! Your beliefs, your customs, your national and cultural constitutions are from now on free and safe. Organize your national life freely and with no hindrance. You have the right to do so.

  In reality, Soviet persecution during the generation which followed the Bolshevik Revolution was far worse than anything endured by the Muslim subjects of the later Tsarist Empire. Islam was condemned as a relic of the feudal era which had no place in a society of ‘advanced socialism’ and was therefore ‘doomed to disappear’.2

  During the Great Patriotic War Stalin saw all Soviet Muslims, like the Volga Germans, as actual or potential traitors. The Muslim peoples whose territory had been invaded by the German army (Karachai, Kalmyks, Balkars and Crimean Tatars) as well as the Chechens and Ingush, whose republic had barely been reached by the Wehrmacht, were deported by the NKVD to Siberia and central Asia, mostly during 1943-44, in horrific conditions. One of the Balkar deportees later recalled, ‘They only gave us fifteen minutes to gather a few belongings and we didn’t even know what was going on. It was only when they put us in the train wagons that we realized we were going far away.’ Though hundreds of thousands died from starvation and cold during the deportation and in the ‘special settlements’ in which they were dumped, Beria declared the whole operation a complete success and promoted a decree by the Supreme Soviet ‘on decorations and medals for the most outstanding [NKVD] participants’. There was no word of official criticism until Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’ to the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956 denounced the deportations as ‘crude violations of the basic Leninist principles of the nationality policies of the Soviet State’. Over the next few years most of the surviving deportees, except for the Crimean Tatars and Volga Germans, were allowed to return to their homelands. They found their houses occupied, most mosques demolished and many family gravestones ripped up for use as building materials.3

  Public discussion of the deportations remained officially taboo until the final years of the Soviet era. As even Soviet analysts concluded, however, the experience of deportation and persecution, so far from weakening Islamic belief, actually reinforced it. The deportees who returned to the North Caucasus were the most religious group in Soviet society.4 Until the late 1980s Moscow routinely described the Muslim population of central Asia and the Caucasus as ‘backward peoples’.5 A Turkmen woman educated in Russian schools later recalled being taught that her culture was as primitive as ‘that of the Australian aborigines’.6 The KGB, however, was struck by the tenacity with which this primitive culture was preserved. In the Muslim republics, it concluded in 1973, ‘Religion is identified with the nation. The fight against religion is seen as an attack on the national identity.’7

  From the Second World War onwards the cornerstone of Soviet policy to its Muslim peoples, as to the Russian Orthodox Church,8 was the creation of a subservient religious hierarchy. Moscow maintained firm control of the four Islamic ‘directorates’ (each headed by a mufti) established or re-established in 1943, at the same time as the revival of the Moscow Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church. The most important was the Central Asian Spiritual Directorate of Muslims (SADUM), with its headquarters in Tashkent, which covered the five central Asian republics (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan). Because SADUM was responsible for a majority of Soviet Muslims, its head was often referred to as the Grand Mufti. Both SADU
M and the madrasahs which it administered in Tashkent and Bukhara were heavily penetrated by KGB agents.9 Since only graduates of these madrasahs, which had a total enrolment limited to about eighty,10 were legally entitled to conduct religious services, the KGB thus had an informal right of veto over the admission of ‘undesirable’ Muslim clerics. Those identified as KGB agents in files noted by Mitrokhin include imams at mosques in such major Muslim centres as Tashkent, Dushanbe and Chimkent.11

  The selection of the eighty-two-year-old Ishan Babakhan ibn Abdul Mejid Khan as first head of SADUM in 1943 inaugurated a family dynasty of outwardly subservient Grand Muftis which endured until Soviet rule in central Asia began to crumble in 1989. Babakhanov’s son, Ziautdin (Grand Mufti, 1957-82), proved ‘slavishly loyal to the Soviet regime’. His series of fatwahs in the late 1950s condemning pilgrimages to traditional Muslim holy places within the jurisdiction of SADUM was doubtless prompted by the KGB’s fear of their potential both for spreading Islam and encouraging anti-Soviet protest.12 Ziautdin Babakhanov was also used both to host a series of international conferences and to head delegations abroad by Soviet Muslims, all of which faithfully promoted the Soviet worldview and suppressed evidence of Moscow’s campaign to discourage Islamic practice. The pattern was set by the first conference chaired by Babakhanov at Tashkent in 1970 on ‘Unity and Co-operation of Muslim Peoples in the Struggle for Peace’, attended by delegates from twenty-four Muslim countries. Though there were strident denunciations of American, Israeli and South African ‘imperialism’, Moscow received fulsome praise for its supposed commitment to the welfare of its Muslim subjects.13 The formula changed little for the remainder of the decade. At an international conference at Dushanbe in September 1979 convened by SADUM at the secret prompting of the KGB on ‘The Contribution of the Muslims of Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Volga to the Development of Islamic Thought, Peace and Social Progress’,14 Babakhanov repeated his by now ritual attacks on ‘US, Israeli and South African imperialism’.15 Mingling at the conference with Muslim delegates from thirty countries were officers and agents of the KGB Fifth Directorate and the local KGBs of Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Bashkiria and Tataria.16 SADUM was also used to provide cover for KGB agents travelling abroad. Between 1953 and 1970 (the only period for which Mitrokhin’s notes contain statistics), ten KGB officers and over fifty agents went on operational missions to Saudi Arabia on the pretext either of going on pilgrimage (Haj) to Mecca (a privilege allowed to very few Soviet Muslims) or of visiting Islamic theological schools. 17 In the 1970s at least one KGB agent, codenamed NASIB, was elected to a leading position in the World Islamic League.18