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Afghanistan
Endless Civil Wars Due to Communist Savagery
Ninety-nine percent of the population of Afghanistan is Muslim. The country
encountered Islam during the caliphate of Osman. It fell into the hands
of the Samanids during the second half of the ninth century, then came
to be ruled by the Ghaznavids in the tenth. Afghan territory was then
occupied by India's Moghuls, and then frequently changed hands until the
beginning of the eighteenth century.
 Nadir
Shah, who ascended to the Iranian throne in 1736, added Afghanistan to
his territories within a few years. After he was killed in an uprising,
the state that he had established was quickly torn apart by internal conflict.
Guard commander Ahmad Abdali was then chosen as shah by a number of tribes,
and eventually managed to get the whole country to accept his rule under
the name Ahmad Shah Durrani. His territories extended from Kashmir to
Delhi and the Amu Darya (Oxus) River to Oman, and were so extensive that
the Afghan Empire was the second-largest Islamic state in the world in
the second half of the eighteenth century, after the Ottomans.
The empire did not last long though, and was soon drawn into a great
civil war. British forces took advantage of the confusion to occupy Afghanistan.
For a long time afterwards the country was unable to form a long-lasting
government due to outside interventions by Britain and Russia, and suffered
periodic internal conflicts. Muhammad Nadir Khan, who came to power in
1929, was able to provide a brief period of stability, yet Russia still
continued to interfere in Afghanistan's internal affairs and tried to
dominate the administrations that came to power. Their relationship was
so close that Afghanistan was the first country to recognize Russia's
communist Bolshevik regime.
In 1973, the Soviet Union brought about a coup in Afghanistan. The pro-Western
Zahir Shah was overthrown and Daoud Khan (Muhammad Daoud) came to power
in his place. After that, Marxist officials and officers began to be influential
in the Afghan administration and were appointed to key posts. Daoud Khan
wished to be free of Russian influence and to draw closer to Islamic nations.
The agreements he reached with Pakistan caused the increasingly powerful
domestic communist organizations to join forces. It was already clear
that this policy of drawing closer to Islamic nations would provoke a
Russian reaction. In 1978, Marxist generals in the army and a number of
communist civilians staged a Russian-backed coup. All of Daoud Khan's
family and close associates were slaughtered. The organizers of the coup
announced that they would run the country with a communist regime, and
they also began a fierce war against religion. The Black Book of Communism
describes the communist regime's hatred of religion:
Shortly afterward the government began an antireligious crusade. The
Koran was burned in public, and imams and other religious leaders were
arrested and killed. On the night of 6 January 1979 all 130 men in
the Mojaddedi clan, a leading Shiite group, were massacred. All religious
practices were banned.51
The Afghan communists were purely and simply the hired tools of the Soviet
Union. They operated in accordance with the directives of "advisors"
from Moscow, and carried out massacres of their own people, as these figures
showed them. In the short time they stayed in power they wreaked frightful
terror:
[Afghanistan scholar] Michael Barry describes one such incident: "In
March 1979… 1.700 adults and children, the entire male population of
the village [of Kerala], were all assembled in the town square and machine-gunned
at point-blank range. The dead and dying were thrown into three mass
graves and buried with a bulldozer. For a while afterward the women could
still see the earth move slightly as the wounded struggled to escape,
but soon all movement stopped. All women fled to Pakistan…" At the same
time, terror reigned in Kabul. The Pol-e-Charki prison, on the eastern
outskirts of the city, became a concentration camp. As Sayyed Abdullah,
the director of the prison, explained to the prisoners: "You're here
to be turned into a heap of rubbish."52
In his book Le Résistance Afghane (The Afghan Resistance), Michael
Barry describes other practices of the prison governor:
Torture was common; the worst form entailed live burial in the latrines.
Hundreds of prisoners were killed every night, and the dead and dying
were buried by bulldozers. Stalin's method of punishing entire ethnic
groups for the actions of some of its members was adopted, leading to
the arrest on 15 August 1979 of 300 people from the Hazaras ethnic group
who were suspected of supporting the resistance. "One hundred fifty of
them were buried alive by the bulldozers, and the rest were doused
with gasoline and burned alive." In September 1979 the prison authorities
admitted that 12.000 prisoners had been eliminated. The director of Pol-e-Charki
told anyone who would listen: "We'll leave only 1 million Afghans alive
- that's all we need to build socialism."53
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RED
ARMY MINES ARE STILL TAKING CASUALTIES
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As
for those who reject Allah's Signs, and kill the Prophets
without any right to do so, and kill those who command
justice, give them news of a painful punishment.
(Qur'an, 3: 21)
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All of these practices were directed from Moscow. In fact, all the chaos
in Afghanistan had been planned beforehand by the Soviet Union. The Soviet
regime had decided to have the communists in Afghanistan stage a coup
and then occupy the whole country under the pretext of defending that
so-called "democratic" regime. As many historians now agree,
it was the fact that the communists saw the rapid rise of Islam at the
time as a threat which prompted Moscow to take those measures.
Finally, on Dec. 27, 1979, the Red Army used the resistance by the Muslim
mujahadeen to the communist regime in Afghanistan as a pretext to occupy
the country. The savagery meted out to the people of Afghanistan grew
in scope still further.
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AFGHAN REFUGEES
1979: A total of 600,000:
400,000 fled to Pakistan and 200,000 to Iran.
1980: 1.9 million to
various countries
1983: 9 million: 5.6
million to Pakistan, 3.4 million to Iran
1990: 6.2 million:
3.3 million to Pakistan, 2.9 to Iran
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The Red Army remained in the country as an occupying power for exactly
10 years. It tried to put down the entirely justified resistance of the
mujahadeen groups by employing the most ruthless and savage methods imaginable.
One Afghan fighter describes the methods employed by the Red Army:
The Soviets attacked every single house, looting and raping the women.
The barbarism was worse than instinctive, and appeared to have been
planned. They know that in carrying out such acts they were destroying
the very foundation of our society.54
The Soviet Army used the most cowardly methods possible against the Muslim
Afghans: mines were made in the shape of toys to encourage unwitting Afghan
children to pick them up, captured guerrillas were horribly tortured,
and civilians deliberately bombed. Instead of pursuing individuals one
by one, they preferred to massacre entire villages at a time.
In an interview, Felix Ermacora, special rapporteur for Afghanistan for
the U.N. Human Rights Commission, maintained that the United Nations was
covering up the Russian savagery in Afghanistan. By referring to the Laghman
massacre committed by the Russian administration, Ermacora stated that
all the villages of this pretty city to the northeast of Kabul were wiped
off the face of the map. Almost the entire population was wiped out. In
the Karga district alone 1,500 people were killed, mainly women and children.
All the animals there were killed too, right down to the dogs. All the
houses were pillaged, and the tea and sugar stolen right out of the kitchens.
Red Army soldiers drove over homes in their tanks, knowing full well there
were women and children taking refuge within. Parts of bodies were visible
between the tank tracks.55
By the end of the decade-long Soviet occupation, tens of thousands of
people had been killed, and as many again crippled. Afghanistan today
imports more artificial limbs than any other country on earth. Red Army
landmines robbed tens of thousands of Afghans of their arms and legs.
After the Soviets finally withdrew, Afghanistan collapsed into chaos
and a bloody civil war began.
The Taliban administration which seized power in 1998 actually increased
the social tension and poverty in the country by implementing a very strict
regime. We hope that the new regime established after the collapse of
the Taliban can put an end to the violence and poverty that rose to terrible
heights with Moscow's provocations in the 1970s followed by the Soviet
occupation.
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THE
LEGACY OF COMMUNIST
SAVAGERY
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Throughout
the communist occupation, houses were plundered, women
raped, and houses with children inside either burned
or crushed by tanks. These are some images of those
10 years of occupation.
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