The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. Robert Fisk
well-equipped modern army would be quite another. On the road north again, we noticed, high on the hillsides and deep in the snow, a series of metal turrets with gun barrels poking from them. The Russians had already taken physical control of the highway even though they did not stand beside the road. Soviet tanks had been parachuted into the mountains north of Kabul and the artillery outside Ghazni had also been dropped from the air. Our plastic foliage twitched aside as we cleared the windscreen for Mike. We were becoming experts. Indeed, it was Gavin’s contention that the Russians would inevitably learn about our stage-prop jungle and assume that all modern movies were produced like this, that a new generation of Soviet film-makers would insist on shooting all future productions through car windows stuffed with artificial purple flowers.
And there was plenty more to film in Afghanistan. Even before we arrived, the Karmal government had attempted to slink back into popular support by freeing Amin’s political prisoners. But when the city prison in Kabul was opened, thousands of men and women arrived to greet their loved ones and began throwing stones at the young Soviet troopers around the walls. No one doubted that the previous regime was detested by the population; the newly installed Karmal officials lost no time in letting us know of their hatred. This, after all, was why we had been given visas to come to Afghanistan. In Peshawar, rebel groups had claimed that the Afghan army would fight the Russian invaders, but the 7th and 8th Afghan Divisions in Kabul, both of which were equipped with Soviet tanks, never fired a shot against Russian armour. Their Soviet advisers had seen to that.
Four days later, however, the government’s propaganda went disastrously wrong. Thousands of Afghans – relatives of inmates, many of them in long cloaks and turbans – gathered this time outside the Polecharkhi prison, a grim fortress of high stone walls, barbed wire, jail blocks and torture cells, to witness the official release of 118 political prisoners. But enraged that so few had been freed, the crowd burst through an Afghan army cordon and broke open the iron gates. We ran into the prison with them, a Russian soldier next to me almost thrown off his feet. He stared, transfixed by the sight as men and women – the latter in the all-covering burqa – began shouting ‘Allahu akbar’, ‘God is Great’,* through the outer compound and began to climb over the steel gates of the main prison blocks. Gavin and I looked at each other in wonderment. This was a religious as much as it was a political protest. On the roof of a barracks, a young Soviet officer, his Kalashnikov rifle pointing at the crowd, began shouting in Russian that there were only eight people left inside the prison. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times was in the yard in his big Russian greatcoat. He was based in Moscow and spoke good Russian and he turned to me with his usual irredeemable smirk. ‘That guy may claim there are only eight men left,’ he said. ‘I suspect we’re going to find out he’s lying.’
For a moment, the crowd paused as the officer swung his rifle barrel in their direction, then heeded him no more and surged on through the second newly broken gate. Hopelessly outnumbered, the soldier lowered his weapon. Hundreds of other prisoners’ relatives now smashed the windows of the cell blocks with rocks and used steel pipes to break in the doors of the first building. Three prisoners were suddenly led into the winter sunlight by their liberators, middle-aged men in rags, thin and frail and dazed and blinking at the snow and ice-covered walls. A young man came up to me in the prison as crowds began to break in the roof of a second concrete cell block. ‘We want Russians to go,’ he said in English. ‘We want independent Afghanistan, we want families released. My brother and father are here somewhere.’
I squeezed into the cell block with the mob, and there were certainly more than the eight prisoners to which the Russian officer referred. Blankets had been laid on the stone floor by the inmates as their only protection against the extreme cold. There was a musty, stale smell in the tiny, airless cells. Across the compound, other prisoners waved through the bars of windows, screaming at the crowd to release them. One man in baggy peasant trousers bashed open a hatch in the metal roof of a cell and slid inside, shouting to his friends to follow him. I climbed through a window in the end of the same cell block and was confronted by at least twenty men, sitting on the floor amid chains and straw, eyes wide with horror and relief. One held out his hand to me. It was so thin I felt only his bones. His cheeks were sunken and blue, his teeth missing, his open chest covered in scars. And all this while, the Russian soldiers and the Afghan guards stood watching, unable to control the thousands of men and women, aware that any public bloodletting would cause irreparable damage to the Karmal regime. Some of the crowd abused the Russians, and one youth who said he was from Paktia province screamed at me that ‘Russians are bombing and killing in south Afghanistan’.
But the most notable phenomenon about this amazing prison break-in were the Islamic chants from the crowds. Several men shouted for an Islamic revolution, something the Russians had long feared in Afghanistan and in their own Muslim republics. Many of the youths looking for their relatives came from rural areas to the south of Kabul, where tribal rebellion had been growing for at least fourteen months. Altogether, the government had released more than 2,000 political prisoners in the previous three weeks – it was Babrak Karmal’s first act as president – but the decision had the unintended effect of reminding the crowds of how many thousands of political prisoners were not being released, inmates who had long ago been executed under Amin.
Only in the early afternoon did Soviet soldiers form a line inside the main gate of Polecharkhi with rifles lowered, apparently to prevent the hundreds of men and women from leaving. Conor pulled his greatcoat round him, hands in pockets, the very model of a modern KGB major-general, and walked straight up to the nearest officer in the line of troops. ‘Dos vidanya,’ he said in Russian. The officer and another soldier snapped smartly to attention and we walked out of the jail.*
That same day, Babrak Karmal held his first press conference, a dismal affair in which the new Soviet-installed president – the son of a high-ranking Pushtun army officer, a heavily built man with a prominent nose, high cheekbones and greying hair with the manners of a nightclub bouncer – denounced his socialist predecessor as a criminal and insisted that his country was no client kingdom of the Soviet Union. This was a little hard to take when the main door of the Chelstoon Palace – in which this miserable performance was taking place – was guarded by a Soviet soldier with a red star on his hat, when a Russian tracked armoured vehicle stood in the grounds and when a Soviet anti-aircraft gun crew waited in the snow beside their weapons a hundred metres from the building. So when Babrak Karmal told us that ‘the only thing brighter than sunshine is the honest friendship of the Soviet Union’, one could only regard it as a uniquely optimistic, if not Olympian, view of a world that Dr Faustus would have recognised.
Even the Afghan officials clustered beside Karmal, however, must have wished for the presence of some subtle Mephistopheles to soften the rhetoric as the president’s press conference descended into an angry and occasionally abusive shouting match. The questions that the Western journalists put to Karmal were often more interesting than his replies, but highlights of the affair had to include the following statements by Moscow’s new man: that not one Soviet soldier had been killed or wounded since the Russian military ‘intervention’ began; that the size of the ‘very limited Soviet contingent’ sent to Afghanistan had been grossly exaggerated by the ‘imperialist Western press’; that the Soviet Union had supported the ‘brutal regime’ of the late Hafizullah Amin because ‘the Soviet Union would never interfere in the internal affairs of any country’; and, finally, that Soviet troops would leave Afghanistan ‘at the moment that the aggressive policy of the United States – in compliance with the Beijing leadership and the provocation of the reactionary circles of Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – is eliminated’.
The full flavour of the press conference, however, could only be captured by quoting extracts. Martyn Lewis of ITN, for example, wanted to know about Karmal’s election to the presidency after his predecessor had been overthrown in a coup.
LEWIS: ‘I wonder, could you tell us when and under what circumstances you were elected and – if that election was truly democratic – why is it that Russian troops had to help you to power?’
KARMAL: ‘Mr Representative of British imperialism, the imperialism that three times blatantly invaded