Afgantsy

will with the civilian population. For the soldiers, this war without fronts was particularly terrifying and confusing. You could be blown up by a mine at any moment. The bearded peasant cultivating his field could next minute be firing at you from ambush or laying a bomb; or you might be shot in the back by a woman or even a child. And so the soldiers learned to shoot first regardless of the consequences. They reacted or overreacted savagely, either to defend themselves or to revenge their losses, calling in an air strike or a bombardment by artillery or tanks against villages they suspected of harbouring mujahedin or of firing on their troops, and leaving them in a pile of smoking rubble.

Alexander Rutskoi, an air-force colonel and Hero of the Soviet Union, told the Russian parliament after the war was over, ‘A kishlak fires at us and kills someone. I send up a couple of planes and there is nothing left of the kishlak. After I’ve burned a couple of kishlaks they stop shooting.’⁹ Vitali Krivenko tells how his company of the 12th Guards Motor-rifle Regiment was manning a roadblock outside Herat. There were two kishlaks nearby. One was deserted, but there were thought to be mujahedin lurking there. The population of the other was friendly. Helicopters were brought in, but they attacked the wrong village. By the time the mistake had been sorted out, the friendly village had been destroyed. ‘So what?’ Krivenko commented. ‘How many other villages got wiped out, for good reason or simply for fun?’¹⁰

Even when soldiers and their commanders had the best intentions, things could go wrong. It is a fundamental weakness of any counter-insurgency campaign that, too often, there comes a moment when a commander’s duty to preserve the lives of his soldiers overrides any wish he may have to spare the lives of civilians. Valeri Shiryaev was involved in just such a case. He was travelling with a convoy of tankers and supply lorries which was half a mile long and moved very slowly. It was preceded by sappers and a few BMPs. The rearguard consisted of more BMPs and four tanks. The convoy came under fire as it was passing through a village. Several tankers were hit and had to be pushed off the road. By the time the shooting had lasted for thirty minutes, four soldiers had been killed and others wounded. In the end the commander of the column ordered the tanks to open fire on the village, even though he knew there must be women and children in it. Each tank fired five salvoes and the village was destroyed. The commander was later reprimanded for not having ordered his tanks to fire sooner.¹¹

The result was devastation. ‘The aircraft flew over the “green zone”,’ wrote Alexander Prokhanov in one of his short stories, ‘dropped bombs, flattened the gardens and the walls around them, reached down to destroy the roots of the plants, diverted and blocked up the underground arteries of the irrigation system, smashed the kishlaks to dust, burned up the very oxygen with the heat of their explosions, and turned the valley into a lunar landscape, grey, friable, where the insects, the seeds, the bacteria, the pollen of the flowers were dying in agony. Sterile and dry, like an overheated crucible, the plain lay bathed in sunshine.’¹²

Several attempts were made by outside observers to chronicle the abuses of human rights committed by all sides in the fighting between 1978 and 2001. In 1984 the United Nations appointed Felix Ermacora, an Austrian human rights lawyer, to investigate, and his reports came out regularly over the next ten years.¹³ The Afghanistan Justice Project (AJP) issued another report covering the period 1978–2001, from the Communist coup in April 1978 until the first year of the US/NATO intervention.

The Afghan and Soviet governments initially refused to cooperate with Ermacora, though he was able to visit Afghanistan several times towards the end of the war and thereafter.¹⁴ His earlier reports were therefore largely based on interviews with refugees. Some four hundred thousand people had already fled to Pakistan before the Russians invaded. By the time Ermacora started his studies, the number had risen to 4 million. By the end of the war, he estimated, there were 5 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan out of a population of 19.5 million.¹⁵

These people provided many credible accounts of specific abuses by Soviet and government forces: arbitrary arrest, detention without trial, torture, execution, the killing of prisoners, individual and collective rape, the killing of women and children, the bombardment of villages, and the massacre of civilians. Not surprisingly, the witnesses were unable to give details of the units involved or their commanders. It was usually unclear whether the crimes were committed by Afghan or Soviet soldiers, though there is little doubt that Afghan soldiers were as brutal as the Russians in their treatment of Afghan civilians.¹⁶ The AJP report, which accepted that the Soviets had ended the mass slaughter which took place under Taraki and Amin, nevertheless concluded that they bore a general responsibility even for abuses committed by their allies because of their entrenched position in the Afghan government and military.¹⁷

The insurgents were also guilty of major abuses. The Pakistan-based groups threatened women who failed to conform to their strict ideas of Islamic propriety, assassinated opponents, and maintained prisons in Pakistan where they held, tortured, and in some cases executed Afghan refugees they suspected of opposing them.¹⁸ They systematically, and often indiscriminately, wiped out ‘collaborators’ and ‘spies’ inside Afghanistan, sometimes with their families, sometimes whole villages.¹⁹ In one incident in the Pandsher Valley, Masud’s men are said to have taken prisoner a thousand men from the 14th Afghan Brigade and shot the lot, so that the river ran red with blood.²⁰

The atrocities committed by the mujahedin were in part a reaction to the brutality of the invaders and the Afghan government forces; but they were also a reflection of traditional Afghan methods of warfare. In autumn 1989 Andrei Greshnov interviewed Mohamed Hamid, a highly intelligent rebel prisoner, in the Kabul interrogation prison. Greshnov asked him about the popular attitude to Soviet soldiers. ‘It varied. In general nobody was happy with the arrival of foreign forces, or with the government which they had put in place. I personally saw what the shuravi (Soviets) got up to in the provinces: they would wipe out whole villages in retaliation for one rifle shot. You yourself travel round the country and have seen for yourself how poorly people live there. People live comparatively well only in the cities. I thought a great deal about what was going on in my country and wrote to my brother, who was studying in the USSR. He and I have taken a different path in life. Part of the population of course supports the present regime. But those who do that are already infidels and they will have to pay for the blood of Muslims that they have shed.’

Greshnov asked whether Hamid had ever had to kill Soviet soldiers, or to take part in the torture of prisoners. He answered, ‘I had to fight, not with my tongue but with a machine gun. People who wanted to cut off heads went ahead and did it. People who didn’t want to didn’t do it. Incidentally, torture and the cutting off of heads are not some kind of special regime thought up especially for Soviet soldiers. Any infidel can end up without his head, including an Afghan. Everybody has his own view of the world. Some people cut off heads, others don’t. I prefer to sell my enemy for cash to people who are willing to buy, rather than to torture him. I saw that in the province of Logar. In the region of Sorkhab we destroyed a column and took several Soviet prisoners. They cut off the heads of the soldiers but they sold the officers. Prisoners were mostly sold to Germany, where they were bought by various human rights bodies who paid good money for them.’²¹

The mujahedin were willing to bargain with the Soviets as well. A Soviet officer of Tajik origin based in Shindand, Feliks Rakhmonov, was responsible for relations with the local population. He was liked both by the soldiers and by the Afghans, with whom he maintained contact. The locals would bring back soldiers who carelessly allowed themselves to be taken prisoner. On one occasion the Afghans brought Rakhmonov three soldiers in a donkey cart. The prisoners’ hands were tied with their own belts. Rakhmonov exchanged the prisoners for some flour and several canisters of diesel oil. After that—not surprisingly—the number of Soviet soldiers who were taken for profit began to rise.²²

The AJP report was highly critical of the Russians and the Afghan government. But it was equally clear about the abuses committed by the mujahedin. It gave names of commanders and their bands for the period of the Soviet war. It went on to document in considerable detail the crimes committed by all sides during the civil war, including the forces commanded by Masud and Hekmatyar—the bombardment by rockets and aircraft, the massacre and rape, which laid waste much of Kabul in 1993 and 1994 and resulted in an estimated twenty-five thousand dead between January and June 1994; the murderous regime of the Taliban which followed; and the atrocities on both sides which accompanied the American-backed campaign to expel the Taliban in 2001.²³ These equalled, if not exceeded, the horrors that occurred between 1979 and 1989.

It is not easy to get these stories into a proper perspective. Atrocity stories spread like wildfire in all wars. Some are true. Some are exaggerated in the telling. Some are invented for purposes of propaganda. The revolt of