DEPOPULATION CAMPAIGN BRUTALLY CHANGES VILLAGES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605700002-5
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 2, 2012
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: January 15, 1986
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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ARTICLE APPZARED w/Jt 1iv( l uiv rug i
ON PAGE AI- 15 January 1986
Afghan farmer holds "butterfly" mine dropped on his village last. year.
Depopulation-Campaign
Brutally Changes Villages
Fourth of fine articles
By James Rupert
Special to The Washington Post
BARAKAT, Afghanistan-
Surrounded by rocky, snow-cov-
ered hills, this village is a man-
made oasis.
Like all villages here in the
harsh; dry lands of Ghazni Prov-
ince, Barakat was founded
around a reliable water source,..
and generations of villagers,
have slowly carved its sun-hard=.
ened hillsides into green fields
and orchards. A villager insists-
that no one- wants to leave
Barakat. In Persian its very
name means "Blessing."
But of about 1,5041 residents
before the war, villagers say
between 150 and 200 have been-
killed. And with the fighting
here getting worse, about a.
quarter of the families have fled.
to Pakistan, Kabul or to the vil-
lages of relatives.
During. a month-long tour
through southeastern - Afghan-
istan, I found that the story var-
ied in each village, but the gen-
eral pattern was clear. Direct
attacks on villages?by the Soviet
Army and Air Force, often as-
sisted by Afghan government
troops, are expelling farmers
and shepherds who. support the
AFGHANISTAN
THE NEW BATTLEFIELDS
mujaheddin-the Afghan re-
sistance fighters.
"The Soviets know the mu-
jaheddin need the villages,"-one
Afghan told me. "They want to
kill the fish by emptying the
water."
This remains a hidden war.
With journalists legally barred
from entering Afghanistan, it is
impossible to be certain about most, of what is happen- --
ing here. But everyone-the Soviet authorities; the
Afghan resistance leaders and the villagers. of
Barakat-agrees that the war and the suffering are
growing.
In large areas of Afghanistan, the Soviets and the mu-
jaheddin are fighting a new kind of battle in the coun-
tryside. It is not a battle for physical control of villages,
but a battle over whether villages shall continue to ex-
-"Ms is genocide," said Michael Barry, an American
sc ar and human rights researcher whoa visits Afghan-
iela regularly. Barry and others worry that the wide-
s'}S ad destruction of farms-plus three years of poor
mall in much of Afghanistan-not only have forced
uch of the population, but now threaten famine for
ffo-se who remain.
Those who have left-nearly a third of Afghanistan's
16 million people-now live in teeming refugee camps
in Pakistan and Iran. There, Afghan specialists say,
their new environment already is changing Afghan so-
ciety as a whole in ways that could lead to further in-
stability in the region..
Whatever its ultimate effects on Afghan society, it
was clear in the villages that the depopulation campaign
has brutally changed the lives of individualAfghan&
In Barakat, "the Soviets bring jets, because` they
know we help the mujaheddin," Bismullah Kheir Mo-
hammed, a resident, said. In October, the Soviets and
Afghan Army troops staged a four-day sweep through
Barakat and nearby villages, killing 20 people and tak-
ing 12 young men to serve in the Afghan Army, villag-
ers said.
The villagers said the Soviets had entered the nearby
hamlet of Gabrubr and killed Abdul Gul, 55, and Niaa
Gul, 70. "They were just farmers," Bismullah said, "and
they took their money from the house to keep the So-
viets from stealing it."
"When the Soviets searched them and found the mon-
ey, they stole it and strangled them. We found their'
bodies two days later, when the Soviets left," he said.
A young- man from nearby Bedmoshk told a horrify-
ing tale of Soviets who held a 14-year-old boy and slow-
ly killed him when his parents would not pay a ransom.
"They tied him to a tree and beat him and stabbed him
with a bayonet," the man said. "Finally they shot him."
Four members of the International Humanitarian
Inquiry Commission visited Bedmoshk two days later
and said they confirmed the torture and killing of the.
boy, among other atrocities in the area.
"Even one bomb here is a disaster," said a young
guerrilla, himself a farmer in Barakat. "It takes more
than a month just to repair a bomb crater in a field. But
these killings, for no reason, are the actions of animals.
Who can know why they do such things?"
For the people of Pirangai, in Paktia Province, the
horror of the war has come from bombings. In early
November, they said, a Soviet jet thundered overhead
and dropped two big canisters that exploded in midair.
The canisters scattered hundreds of small "butterfly" antipersonnel mines over the village, some of which
were still there when I visited.
"We have heard about Soviet bombs that look like
watches or toys," Sahab Gul, a shopkeeper,. said...` So we
always tell the children not to pick up strange objects."
continued"
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Three children had hands or feet blown off by the
butterfly mines, .which are designed to maim rather
than kill. A young boy, Wali Khan, said his grandfather
had taken his 11-year-old cousin to doctors in Pakistan
after the boy lost a hand and part of his face while ex-
amining one of the mines.
"We are ready to fight them if they come to us," said
Gut, his voice quivering with anger. "But they want to
make us leave by injuring our children." Few in the vil-
lage have left, he said.
Invoking an Islamic conviction, he said: "It is better
to be tortured in the jihad [holy wart and go to paradise
than to live with our bodies ruined like this."
Leaving for Pakistan
Of 32 villages I saw during my trip, none was un-
touched by the war. But even where villagers have re-
covered from such attacks, their lives remain difficult,
and abandoning their homes for the relative safety of
Pakistan remains a much discussed option.
Three years, of meager rain and snowfall have dried
up the weaker water sources in this and other regions
of Afghanistan, leaving downstream villages in a virtual
state of drought. Swedish, doctor Johan Langerfelt, a
member of the Humanitarian Inquiry Commission mis-
sion, said the group's four-week study last fall showed
that irrigated farming production in Wardak, Ghazni
and Logar provinces had dropped by as much as 80 per-
cent. He suggested that only heavy snowfall this winter
would avert famine in 1986.
An Afghan agronomist who surveyed much of south-
ern Wardak Province last fall said he had found 70 per-
cent of families living on bread and tea. "They are not
even consuming sugar,, which is a sign of extreme dis-
tress," he said.
In what many specialists regard as a "prefamine" de-
velopment, families have sold or slaughtered much. of
their livestock, which they could no longer afford to
feed.
Even in the villages that have not been abandoned,
most young men have left, making farming even more
difficult. "It is dangerous for young men to stay," a vil-
lage elder in southern Wardak said. "The Soviets may
come and kill them or take them for the Army."
Many families have sent some of their sons to fight
from nearby guerrilla bases and sent others to Pakistan
or Iran to find jobs that will' bring the family needed
cash. Old men once retired from farming have gone
back to work, tending as much of the land as they can.
The Soviet campaign to empty the villages has been
uneven, but most intensive in Afghanistan's eastern
half, according to Barry, who has researched the issue
for human rights organizations and led the fall Human-
itarian Inquiry Commission mission.
Barry said the Soviets systematically have created
broad free-fire zones along the country's most strategic
road, which arcs from Mazar-i-Sharif in the north
through Kabul,'to Kandahar in the south.
The Soviets have also depopulated areas along im-
portant resistance supply'routes.
Following a resistance supply trail from Pakistan, my
guerrilla escort and I crossed one such region, the plain
of Zermat, south of Gardez.
Hiking all night to avoid helicopter attack on the ex-
posed plain, we walked through the abandoned ruins of
a dozen villages. Moonlight shone through the shell-
shattered walls of homes and mosques,, and we had to
watch our step to avoid falling into craters left where
bombs had collapsed the underground irrigation system
on which the region's fragile farm economy depends.
Amid the devastation, a few families stubbornly had
refused to leave. Mohammed, a farmer and a resistance,
fig}er, described how he and a few others farmed un-
dercover of night to keep food and shelter available for
guerrilla caravans passing through.
"The Soviets have done everything they could" to force
the villagers out, he said. "Their helicopters shoot any-
thing that moves-even a farmer hoeing his field or an
animal grazing."
"If I could, I would go tomorrow to Pakistan like the
others," Mohammed said, "but we must stay for the ji-
had,"
Barry stresses the drastic scale of the depopulation
of Afghanistan. His census last fall of 23 villages in
southeastern Afghanistan showed that 56 percent of
the households had been abandoned.
The Pakistani and Iranian governments estimate that
about 4.5 million Afghans have sought refuge in their
countries, a figure Barry compares to ' the U.N. High
Commissioner for Refugees' estimate of 10 million ref-
ugees worldwide. His voice rising, he asked, "Why don't
people in North America pay more attention to this?'
The Lasting Scar
In the single room of a trailside teahouse crowded
with mujaheddin, a French medical team of three wo-
men examined Hakam Khan. In the yellow glow of a
kerosene lamp, a surgical scar, improperly healed,
snaked across his stomach like a shallow trench.
Answering the doctor's questions, Hakam Khan ex-
plained that he had no idea what surgery had been per-
formed on him when he went to a Kabul hospital last
year with stomach pain. Now he was having trouble
with the scar, and the French doctors, he said, were the
only people around to ask for help.
The women had hiked 12 hours that day, crossing a
mountain range. As soon as they had collapsed bn the
floor of the teahouse, mujahaddin had begun presenting
their medical problems.
"It's always like this," Dr. Louise-Marie de la Mata
said with a sigh.
In Wardak, as elsewhere in Afghanistan, it is only
small groups of overworked French doctors who pro-
vide medical care for local residents. For resistance
commander Amin Wardak, the volunteer doctors and
their tiny hospital-sent by the Paris-based Doctors of
the World organization-are a critical part of the battle
to prevent the depopulation of the province.
Wardak's fledgling civil administration also runs
schools and aids farmers.
"It is especially important to keep prices down," he
emphasized. "We have arrested many government
agents who came to the countryside to buy up animals
and foodstocks at high prices-all to empty the coun-
tryside of food."
Wardak and other commanders established rules to
prevent speculation in limited food supplies and are
looking for ways to improve production. A beginning
agricultural development program involves an exper-
imental farm testing new strains of wheat.
But the most significant factor keeping people in the
villages in southern Wardak is that the Soviets have not
applied the same degree of. pressure as elsewhere.
Without effective antiaircraft weapons, Wardak-like
any commander-is unable to protect even remote vil-
lages from Soviet attack.
Vantr ied
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. According to Barry, the lack of air defenses places
Afghanistan's resistance commanders in a dilemma:
"Either they can fight and eventually lose their popu-
lations, or they can keep their populations, but by not
fighting in that area."
Forging. Sense of Nationality
To the casual observer driving on the back roads of
Pakistan near the Afghan border, it can be difficult to
tell the better-established refugee camps from Pakis-
tani villages. $oth are built of mud bricks, using pre-
cious timber only as roof beams, and the people look
much alike- turbaned men, and women draped in sheet-
like burkas, with lace-covered "windows" for vision.
.The difference is that the refugee camps are larger,
often holding as many as 20,000 to 30,000 people.
Many observers believe that this unprecedented con-
centration. of Afghans, often including different ethnic
groups-Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hiizzaras and oth-
ers-is helping to spawn a sense of. national identity. .
"When these camps first began springing up, even
before the Soviet invasion, Afghans from different
tribes and regions began to get acquainted," Prof. Rasul
Amin, formerly of Kabul University's social sciences
faculty, said. "Now we've even begun to see some of
them intermarry."
The mixing of ethnic groups remains. limited, accord-
ing to Amin, because many camps are homogeneous,
often with the populations of - entire villages having
moved intact to a single refugee camp.
At Kacha Gari, a large camp near Peshawar, refu-
gees spoke about how their lives have changed.
"Here, there are so many children in school," one
man said. How many, he was asked-75, 80 percent?
He frowned. "No, not like. that. Maybe one-in four," he
said.
Stephen Keller, an American professor who runs an
education program for Afghans in Peshawar; said- most
of the few refugee children in school study for only
about. three years. He and many educated Afghans said
that most, average Afghans retain a long-standing indif-
ference toward education-a. .sentiment that hardened
into antipathy during 1978 and 1979, when Afghani-
stan's first communist ruler, Noor Mohammed ;'{'araki,
tried to enforce literacy classes and lessons ii Marxism
on the population. -
Keller insisted, though, that even the limited spread
of education among Afghan refugees represents an im-
portant change.
"To get an idea of where these people started, you
just have to see that before the war; only 7 percent of
rural Afghan men could read; and only 2 percent of wo-
men,"-he said, "and most of them were government
functionaries."
The Afghan., guerrilla war. against: Communist rule
began in 1978, and-the first refugees began-gathering -
in Pakistan within months. Such long-term refugees,
living in older camps such as Kacha Gari, chafe at their
dependence and idleness over the years.
"This is not life; this is only passing the. dike," said
Mohammed Yussuf, a middle-aged former farin!r, of his
seven years as a refugee. "Before, when i;'oWned my
land, I was indpendent. Now I can only find'a little work
as a butcher. We get rations from the camp,; but no one
wants to live that way."
For Keller and other observers, the frustrations of
this growing refugee population-the world's largest-
represent a potential threat to stability in the border'
area of Pakistan. "Whether they are educated or not,
there is no future for the rising generation, either with-
in the camps or in Pakistan," Keller said.
Barry said he believes the camps favor the growth of
Islamic fundamentalism among -Afghans. "Fundamen-
talism is the wave of the future in Pakistan, and the
choices made by the ' Pakistani establishment weigh
heavily on the options available to the resistance par-
ties," he said.
Barry warned that a sense of despair. within the
camps could embitter young Afghans, leading them to
turn to terrorism. "I think we're going to see a Pales-
tinization of the Afghans," he said.
Next: Aid to the Afghan guerrillas
Continued
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A dense cloud of smoke and dust rises from a village in Afghanistan during a bombing raid by a Soviet SU24 jet in September 1884.
A cemetery beside a supply trail of the resistance forces in Paktia Province marks the site of a Soviet air raid more than a year ago.
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Two boys, above, stand is rubble of their Barakat home, bombed by Soviets. Left, Bismullah
... - -
--- &---A his now.ahundeeed farm.
of S
that
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