The Guardian of Liberty - Nemzetőr, 1988 (11. évfolyam, 1-6. szám)
1988-01-01 / 1. szám
Bl-MONTH LY B 20435 V THE GUARDIAN OF LIBERTY (NEMZETŐR) VO,] XXXII JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1988 "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion" Article 18 Universal Declaration of Human Rights WILL INVADERS QUIT AFGHANISTAN? W ill the USSR really quit Afghanistan? Will a few, many or all the Soviet armed forces stationed there, an estimated 115,000 men, leave this tarditionally non-aligned, Islamic country? Was Mikhail Gorbachev in earnest when he made a conditional promise on February 8 to begin the pull-out on May 15 and complete it within the following ten months? Such questions are being asked worldwide as the Kremlin and Gorbachev personally come under increasingly heavy international pressure to order the withdrawal as soon as possible but without creating a political situation that would perpetuate the present (bloody turmoil, which started with the Communist coup d’état in April, 1978, and greatly intensified with the Soviet invasion in December, 1979. The Soviet Communist Party leader is under no less pressure from within his own country. In recent months the ordinary people of the USSR have become more and more disillusioned and war-weary; he is far from being the only Russian to describe the Afghanistan war as a “bleeding, wound“. One of the positive aspects of his policy of glasnost (openness) is that the still strictly controlled official media are now being allowed, indeed encouraged, to publicise the true feelings of soldiers and civilians about selected aspects of the conflict. For example, Pravda, the Party daily, recently quoted extraordinarily frank poems which had been read out at a Soviet military canteen in Kabul. One, written by an army surgeon, expressed the mounting resentment among the troops that no adequate monument has yet been erected in the USSR to their compatriots killed in Afghanis-tan, conservatively estimated by non-Communist military commentators to total 12,C00, not including many who died of disease. According to this poem, “Many of Russia’s sons / Have fallen on Afghan soil. .. “ Reading this must have shocked those of the Soviet people who had been deceived into believing the Kremlin’s pre-glasnost claim that members of the USSR’s “limited contingent“ seldom, if ever, engaged in combat. Some of the other poetry was about the rarely reported subject of the presence of a significant number of Soviet women soldiers. One of them, Irena Morazova, an engineer NCO who has been awarded a medal, read out a poem she had herself written; her mention of “ .. . our hands are blistered and we feel the dangers“ suggests that women are sometimes in combat areas. Although glasnost has allowed the Soviet public to be told belatedly about the soldiers’ hardships and personal distress, this “openness“ does not extend to reporting the incomparably more terrible aspect of the war: the dire suffering which the USSR has made the Afghan people endure since it invaded their homeland in December, 1979. In particular, the official Soviet media still say nothing about the Russian forces’ practice in recent years of killing the entire populations of selected villages suspected of aiding the guerrillas. Detailed eye-witness descriptions of such all too frequent atrocities, as well as the routine destruction of houses and crops, have been given by refugees. Nor does the Kremlin permit reporting of the main facts about the Afghan refugees: that they total about 5,500,000, the overwhelming majority living in Pakistan and Iran; that they fled there solely because of Soviet military activity; that they are the largest refugee comunity in the world; and that they equal more than a third of Afghanistan’s population before the invasion. B y far the most candid Soviet reporting on the war is in samizdat (self-publishing), the collective name for various unofficial, privately-circulated news-letters and commentaries, many widely read. One such recent “publication“, an open letter to the inhabitants of Kiev, claimed that more than 30,000 Soviet soldiers had died in Afghanistan — many more than estimated by Western defence correspondents. The letter added: “Comrade Gorbachev wants to withdraw the troops but, from what we know, elements in the Party and army shamelessly... make use of the war to test our defence systems and the practical military abilities of young soldiers“. This open letter was issued by “the Shevchenko (Continued on page 2) Afghan Mujahidin(guerrilla) leaders (here: at a mountain base plot the next battle) reject talks with Kabu Communist regime IN THIS ISSUE Will Invaders Quit Afghanistan? 1 Super-Power ’Responsible for Terrorism 2 "AVANTGARDISM" 3 Journalist Jailed for 10 Years 4 Ceausescu's 70th Birthday/Ruins... 5 Trade Union for Unemployed 5 USSR: Ambiguous Nationalities Policy 6-7 Frank Talk about Pollution ... 8 Cross-Border Action against Gas 8 World's Highest Abortion Rate 9 KGB Officer Heads Religious Council 9 Ten Years for Libyan Gunman/News 10 Eastern Europe 40 Years ago (XX) 11-12