Afgantsy
Page 31
During the war the fortress at Badaber was used for the storage of arms and ammunition, and as a training base for the fighters from Burhanuddin Rabbani’s Jamiat-i Islami. According to Rabbani, the base was entirely under his control: the Pakistan government did not attempt to interfere with what went on there. From 1983 Soviet and Afghan government prisoners were taken there to work in the ammunition stores and in the nearby quarries. They were kept in underground prison buildings—zindands. In 1985 there were about twelve Soviet prisoners there—most of whom had been captured by Masud’s men in the Pandsher Valley—and forty Afghan government soldiers and policemen. The men were worked very hard and the non-Muslims among them were given Muslim names as a preliminary to their conversion. It was by these names that their guards addressed them and by which they were expected to address one another.
At about six o’clock on the afternoon of Friday 26 April, so the story goes, most of the mujahedin guards were at prayer on the drill square. Only two were left to guard the prisoners. They were overpowered by a particularly powerful Ukrainian named Viktor Dukhovchenko (whose Muslim name was Yunos) and placed in the custody of one of the Afghan prisoners and a Soviet prisoner called Mohamed Islam. The other prisoners then broke into the armoury and seized the weapons. Their original plan was to make a break for freedom. But at this point the remaining guards were alerted by Mohamed Islam. They surrounded the compound and prevented the captives from escaping. The prisoners then barricaded themselves into the armoury, setting up heavy machine guns and mortars on the roof. Detachments of mujahedin and Pakistani army units including tanks and artillery were brought up, but their initial attempts to recapture the fortress were repelled.
Rabbani arrived at the base in the late evening to negotiate with the insurgents, promising them their lives if they surrendered. They demanded instead that they should be allowed to see the ambassadors of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, and representatives of the Red Cross. They threatened to blow up the armoury if their demands were not met.
Rabbani rejected these demands. He narrowly missed being killed by a rocket fired by the insurgents and some of his bodyguards were seriously hurt. The following morning he ordered an all-out attack on the fort, supported by rocket artillery, tanks, and helicopters. The outcome was never in doubt, but it was determined when the armoury blew up and the prison was practically destroyed. Some say the building exploded when it was struck by an incoming shell; others that the insurgents blew it up themselves. Three of the insurgents survived, badly wounded. They were finished off with grenades. The explosion destroyed many of the attackers as well: some Russian accounts claim that 120 mujahedin were killed, along with up to ninety Pakistani regular soldiers and six American instructors.25 The story later circulated that Soviet special forces were preparing to free the captives when the tragedy occurred.
The following day Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, the most extreme of the mujahedin leaders, issued an order to his men that in future no Russians were to be taken prisoner.
Neither the Soviet nor the Pakistani government had any interest in publicising these events. The Soviets were still maintaining that the ‘Limited Contingent of Soviet Forces in Afghanistan’ was not engaged in war; the presence of Soviet prisoners of war in far-distant Pakistan could not be reconciled with that bland line. The Pakistanis were equally maintaining the fiction that they were giving no assistance to the mujahedin: they sealed off the area of the prison and neither journalists nor foreigners were allowed near the place. An issue of the Peshawar newspaper Safir, which had carried a report of the incident, was destroyed.
Despite the official reticence, the news did seep out, but the details remained fragmentary and disputed. Some of the Afghan prisoners escaped in the confusion, eventually made their way home, and were able to provide the only direct accounts of what had happened. An American satellite is said to have transmitted a photograph on 28 April showing that the training camp had been destroyed by an explosion which had left a crater eighty yards across. The American radio station Voice of America reported on 4 May that twelve Soviet and twelve Afghan prisoners had been killed in the blast. The electronic intelligence branch of the 40th Army picked up exchanges between the Pakistani helicopters and their base. On 9 May an official of the International Red Cross informed the Soviet Embassy in Islamabad that there had been a rising in the camp. On 27 May the Soviet news agency Novosti reported, ‘Kabul. Popular meetings are continuing across the country in protest against the death in an uneven fight with the counter-revolutionaries and regular units of the Pakistan army of Soviet and Afghan soldiers kidnapped by the rebels on the territory of the DRA [Democratic Republic of Afghanistan] and secretly transferred to Pakistan. Peasants, workers, and representatives of the tribes are angrily condemning the barbaric action of Islamabad, which is crudely distorting the facts in a clumsy attempt to evade responsibility.’
The records of the prison camp were destroyed in the explosion, and so there was no reliable list of names of those prisoners who had died. Confusion was compounded because such lists as existed gave only the Muslim names of the prisoners, and their original names could only be reconstructed on the basis of fragmentary evidence. After the war was over the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the GRU and the Veterans Committee of the Commonwealth of Independent States all made it their business to piece the story together. The first breakthrough did not come until December 1991, when a delegation led by Rabbani visited Moscow to persuade the new Russian government to cut off aid to the Communist government of President Najibullah. The mujahedin refused to negotiate on prisoners until they had received satisfaction on the main issue. They insisted that, in so far as there were any Soviet prisoners in their hands, they were guests and free to return home or go elsewhere as they pleased. But a Pakistani Deputy Foreign Minister with the delegation gave the names of five of the Soviet soldiers believed to have perished at Badaber.26
Badaber was visited in 1992 by Zamir Kabulov from the Russian Embassy in Islamabad, who subsequently became Russian Ambassador in Kabul. The search was given a renewed impulse in 2003, thanks to the efforts of the Veterans Committee under General Aushev. Over the years seven names were established fairly securely: several were awarded posthumous medals for valour. Applications for awards on behalf of three others, Igor Vaskov, Nikolai Didkin, and Sergei Levchishin, were turned down by the Russian Ministry of Defence in 2002 because the evidence was insufficient.
One mother continued to hope that her son would return, long after all reasonable grounds for hope were gone. Alexander Zverkovich was an apprentice welder in Minsk in Belorussia when he was called up in 1983. In March 1984 his mother, Sofia, heard from his commander that he had gone ‘missing in action while carrying out his military duties’. Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, she went with other mothers of missing soldiers to Moscow to ask the authorities to help find their sons and bring home those who had survived as prisoners of war; but without result. In the mid-1990s she appealed to the courts to rule that her son was dead, so that she could receive the benefits to which she was entitled. But in 2006 her hopes were revived when she learned that her son had participated in the rising in Badaber. ‘They say a monument has been put up in Moscow to those who took part in the rising,’ she told her local newspaper. ‘The radio said that some of them survived. Some people in the village even said that they had seen Sashenka [Alexander] on the television… I’ve even been to fortunetellers. Some say he died; others maintain that he is alive and living beyond the ocean. I’d give anything to know the truth, however bitter it was.’ Alexander Zverkovich’s name is one of the seven on the list of those who died at Badaber.
The whole truth—even the names of those who died—may never be known for sure. The Pakistani intelligence authorities refused to release whatever documents they may have had, and other accounts of the tragedy were based on circumstance, hearsay, and wishful thinking.27
– TWELVE –
Within weeks of sending the troops into Afghanistan, the Politburo was already talking about how to get them out again. After visiting Kabul in February 1980, Andropov reported that the situation was becoming more stable, although the Afghan government needed to overcome their domestic dissensions, improve the fighting capacity of their army, and strengthen their links with the people. Ustinov was cautious: it would be a year, or even two, before the troops could be withdrawn. Brezhnev agreed; and suggested that it might even be necessary to increase the numbers somewhat. Gromyko thought it would be prudent first to seek guarantees of Afghanistan’s security from China, Pakistan, and others.1
The caution was entirely justified. The massive popular demonstrations in Kabul in late February, and the action which the 40th Army took to bring them under control, demonstrated beyond a doubt that the situation in Afghanistan was not stable at all. Major military operations started almost immediately in the Kunar Valley and in the Pandsher.
Brezhnev Looks for a Way Out
It took some time before the Soviet leaders were willing to recognise that their hope for a quick exit was vain. Brezhnev told the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, in May 1980 that he knew that the troops would have to leave: ‘I will make it my personal business to impose a political solution. You can count on me.’ A month later he ordered the withdrawal of units which were no longer needed in Afghanistan and told Andropov to discuss the details with Karmal.2 In the winter of 1980–81 the Soviet Ambassador in Islamabad talked with the Pakistani President, Zia ul-Haq (1924–88), about the possibility of talks under the auspices of the United Nations. Ustinov, once a hawk, began to have serious doubts, and wrote to the Politburo saying that no military solution to the war was possible, and it was necessary to find a political and diplomatic way out.3 Andropov, too, had lost his appetite for foreign adventures: when the Polish crisis blew up later in 1980, he said, ‘The quota of interventions abroad has been exhausted.’4 In the autumn of 1981 he and Ustinov sponsored a paper by the Foreign Ministry proposing proximity talks between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Andropov succeeded Brezhnev in November 1982. At Brezhnev’s funeral he assured Zia ul-Haq of the ‘Soviet side’s new flexible policy and its willingness to bring an early solution to the crisis.’5 The only condition was that Pakistan stop its aid to the mujahedin. By then Gromyko had already chaired an interdepartmental meeting on plans for a Soviet withdrawal.
In February 1983 Andropov told the Secretary General of the UN with considerable force that the Soviet Union had no intention of keeping its troops in Afghanistan indefinitely. The operation was expensive; the Soviet Union had plenty of domestic problems; and the war had complicated the Soviet Union’s relationships with the United States, the Third World, and the Islamic world. Speaking very slowly and emphasising each word, he added that he sincerely wanted ‘to put an end to this situation’. The argument, commonly bandied about in the West, that Soviet troops had never withdrawn from any country where they had once been stationed was disproved by history. But others were interfering in Afghanistan’s affairs. ‘Soviet troops would have to stay for as long as necessary because this is a matter which concerns the security of the Soviet Union’s southern border.’6
Andropov’s good intentions were undermined by his own failing health and by the shooting down by Soviet fighters of a Korean airliner on 1 September 1983, which led immediately to further worldwide condemnation of the Soviet Union for what President Reagan called a ‘massacre’. His efforts ran out of steam even before he died in January 1984.
His successor, Konstantin Chernenko, was also seriously ill and barely able to take a grip on policy. He died on 10 March 1985. By now it was obvious to the senior Soviet politicians that the Soviet system was not working as it should. Within hours of Chernenko’s death they elected Mikhail Gorbachev as his successor, because he was young, energetic, imaginative, and—they believed—orthodox.
Gorbachev Moves
Gorbachev came to power determined to press ahead for a solution in Afghanistan. As a first step he requested a policy review from the Committee on Afghanistan, which was told to look into ‘the consequences, pluses, and minuses of a withdrawal’. Later he decided that this committee of old men was a brake on progress and abolished it.7
Some Western accounts said that Gorbachev gave the generals a year to finish the job by military means, and that in 1985–6 the pace of the fighting was increased to the highest level of the war. Kryuchkov, always a hostile witness, claimed that Gorbachev first criticised the Ministry of Defence for not prosecuting the war more energetically, but soon swung to the other extreme.8 There were of course some major military operations in 1985, notably the Kunar offensive in May–June. The Special Forces Brigade was introduced in the same year, as the Russians moved away from massive ground operations towards more flexible actions in support of the Afghan army, backed where necessary by long-range bombers from Soviet territory. But Soviet casualties peaked in the period before Gorbachev came to power and began to fall from May 1985 onwards. That is hardly compatible with a ‘Gorbachev surge’.9
Whatever the truth of the story, Gorbachev made up his mind well before the year had expired. In October 1985 he summoned Babrak Karmal to Moscow and raised the prospect of Soviet withdrawal. Karmal was shocked to realise that the Russians needed him less than he needed them. He went white and said, ‘If you withdraw the troops now, next time you will have to send in a million.’10 Gorbachev told him that Afghanistan would have to be able to defend itself by the summer of 1986. The Soviet Union would no longer help with troops, though it would continue to supply military equipment. Karmal should forget about socialism, share power with others, including the mujahedin leaders and others who were now his enemies, and restore the rights of religion and the religious leaders.
Anatoli Chernyaev, the former Party official whom Gorbachev had appointed as his diplomatic adviser earlier in the year, commented in his diary, ‘Ten of our boys are dying every day. The people are disenchanted and ask: How long are our troops going to remain there? And when will the Afghans learn to defend themselves? The main thing is that there is no popular base, and without that no revolution can defend itself. What’s recommended is a sharp U-turn, back to free capitalism, to Afghan and Islamic values, to a real division of power with the opposition and even with the enemy… I advised that a compromise should be sought even with the leaders of the mujahedin, and of course with the emigration. Will Karmal go that far? Above all, is he capable, is he sufficiently in command of the situation, for his present enemies to go to meet him?’11
Gorbachev now made clear to the Politburo that he was determined to grasp the nettle. Deliberately playing on his listeners’ emotions, he read out letters received in the Central Committee from the parents of those who had died.12 Many were signed. Women spoke of the moral as well as the physical damage being done to their sons. Officers, and even one general, said that they were no longer able to explain to their men what the war was about. Soldiers complained that, because of the press restrictions, the newspapers were reporting that all the fighting was being done by the Afghan army, which was the opposite of the truth. ‘In whose name are we in Afghanistan? Do the Afghans themselves want us to do our “international duty” in their country? Is it worth the lives of our boys, who don’t understand what they are fighting for? What are you doing, throwing young recruits against professional killers and gangsters? You people in the Politburo made a mistake, and it is up to you to put it right—the sooner the better, while every day sees more casualties.’ The Politburo agreed with Gorbachev’s conclusion that the object of Soviet policy should now be to build up the Afghan state and leave.13
Gorbachev went public in February 1986, when he told the delegates to the XXVIIth Party Congress in Moscow that the Soviet troops would leave once a political solution had been negotiated which left Afghanistan as a friendly, independent, and non-aligned state, with guarantees a
gainst external interference in its affairs.
Although the war was by now increasingly unpopular among the people and the military, it was not of course enough for Gorbachev simply to take the decision to leave. He had also to face up to a difficult problem of domestic politics which has puzzled other nations finding themselves in similar circumstances. How could the Russians withdraw their army safely, with honour, without looking as if they were simply cutting and running, and without appearing to betray their Afghan allies or their own soldiers who had died? The 40th Army had not been defeated on the battlefield; but how was the obvious blow to the prestige of the Soviet Union and its army to be avoided?
Moreover, Gorbachev had to persuade the other parties to the war—the mujahedin, eternally warring among themselves but determined to get rid of the godless Communists in Kabul; the Pakistanis, who wanted to see a friendly Islamist government there; and the Americans, many of whom wished to wipe out the memory of defeat in Vietnam by making the Russians pay the highest possible price in blood and humiliation, at whatever cost in Russian, or indeed Afghan, lives. It is not surprising that the negotiations went on much longer than Gorbachev had envisaged.
The first need was to beef up the Afghan government. The Russians had lost faith in Babrak Karmal: they found him weak, indecisive, and increasingly addicted to drink. In April 1986 they decided that he must go. Gorbachev called on him in a Kremlin hospital where he was being treated for kidney trouble, but failed to get him to leave quietly. Karmal returned to Kabul in a huff and on 1 May Kryuchkov was sent to have another go at him. Their first meeting was interrupted by a noisy street demonstration of support for Karmal. Kryuchkov said coldly that he knew perfectly well how such demonstrations were organised and within five minutes the demonstrators had dispersed. On that visit Kryuchkov got nowhere. But he returned to Kabul a few days later and, after twenty solid hours of persuasion, Karmal finally agreed to resign.14 The reason given publicly was that he was suffering from ill-health, a line which was somewhat dented when the Soviet doctors, who had not been properly briefed, reported that his health was fine.15 He was replaced by the younger and more effective Najibullah, the head of the secret police, the KhAD. Karmal hung on as President, without effective power, until Najibullah was elected to the post in November 1986. He then went to Moscow—ostensibly for medical treatment, but actually into permanent exile—and died there a decade later.