The Guardian of Liberty - Nemzetőr, 1989 (12. évfolyam, 1-4. szám)

1989-01-01 / 1. szám

Izvestiya Man Says Invasion Was "a Mistake" S trong criticisms of the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan more than nine years ago have been expressed in recent months by Alexander Bovin, one of a few Soviet journalists who are being given the privilege of practising glasnost to the full extent per­mitted by the Gorbachev administration. Bovin, a senior correspondent of Izvestiya, the Soviet Government daily, participated with Vladimir Basov, of the USSR State Institute of International Relations, and Vik­tor Liubovtsev, a political commentator, in a discussion programme televised from Mos­cow on January 16. After advocating frank speaking on the Afghanistan problem, Bovin said: “What is happening there today... is the result of the mistake which we made at the end of 1979 when we agreed to introduce troops into Afghanistan — what was called ’the limited contingent of Soviet troops’ — and we are now reaping the fruits of that.” He acknowledged that it was difficult to explain why the USSR invaded. It was “a delicate matter” and there was a lack of “real information” and documentation. Instead of Basov. Liubovtsev and himself taking part in the programme, “our responsible political figures” and “the marshals and generals” should be “sitting here” and explaining, he said. Later in the discussion Basov commented that although it was a mistake to send Soviet troops into Afghanistan, the circumstances should also be taken into consideration, nam­ely that “when a neighbour’s house is on fire and a person — a good neighbour — rushes for help, in situations like that you usually do not weigh up the positive and negative factors that will ensue.” Bovin interrupted: “As far as houses are concerned, that is fine. But have we not be­come firemen too often? Do you remember Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968? [References to the Soviet invasions of those countries.] Have we not offered too many fire services?” He was even more frank in an article in the December 31 issue of Komsomolskaya Pravda, mouthpiece of the Komsomol, the Communist Party vouth organisation. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “it took nearly ten years, it took thousands of deaths, vast material cost, a fail in our country’s prestige and the exacerbation of the international atmosphere to understand — understand not in theory but in practice — that every people has to decide its own fate itself, without out­side interference. “This conclusion is drawn not because we proved ourselves impotent to change the natural course of events in another country. This conclusion is drawn because the very attempt to change that course of events was mistaken in principle.” In the December 17—23 issue of Argumenty i Fakty, a Moscow weekly that practises glasnost to the full extent officially allowed, Bovin complained that his contribution to a recent Soviet television programme had been cut without his agreement. However, the magazine published the ex­cised material in the form of an article. It mentioned “the struggle” within the leader­ship of the Afghan Communist party, the PDPA, and “the personal ambitions, sym­pathies and antipathies of particular notables” within that party. Bovin met members of the Kabul regime, generals, provincial governors and academics during a two-week visit to Afghanistan last November. As a result he wrote in his article: “The combat capability of the republic’s arm­ed forces leaves much to be desired. People evade military service. Desertion is frequent.” He added that the “protracted presence” of the “vast detachment“ of Soviet advisers in “all spheres and at all levels, including the armed forces, has meant that our Afghan friends [the Kabul regime] have started find­ing it difficult to make independent decisions, to act independently and to rely on their own forces. And now this is having a parti­cular effect.” Aged 58. Bovin has written for Izvestiya for well over 25 years and has travelled widely. He has also been a consultant on Press matters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Sovie Union. The Times, the authoritative London daily, on January 14 published an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda’s Kabul correspon­dent, 32-year-old Mikhail Kozhukov. Wound­ed twice during his three and a half years in Afghanistan, he holds the Order of the Red Star for his eye-witness accounts of combat. “All the truth about this war will never be written or told,” he said in English to The Times reporter. “There are some things which I know that I will not even tell my son, let alone a foreign journalist. I consider that the war is so bad that those people who are lucky enough not to have seen it, must not know the details.” There are also elements about the Soviet decision to intervene which Kozhukov believes will take years to be made public. He said: “When glasnost gets to this topic fully; when all the details are known about the decision of 1979; about all the faults of the [Afghan] revolution and the Party and of those Soviet officials involved... when all of us have a clear picture of these nine years — then maybe we will know.” Kozhukov added that restrictions on his reporting had been a constant source of bit­terness among ordinary Soviet soldiers. “The question they ask me a thousand times is ’why don’t you write the truth?’ They mean that we didn’t describe their feelings and events correctly; that we tried to make things sound beter than they were.“ MILLION AFGHANS DIED IN WAR (Continued from page Ij cent. The population of the Kabul area tripl­ed over this period. The report concludes that in the long term the effects of the disintegration of Afghan society will be even more damaging than those of war casualties. The decline in agriculture, for example, may prove to be permanent, mak­ing the resettlement of the refugees more dif­ficult. The depopulation of a semi-desert country means increasing and sometimes ir­reversible erosion and aridification of entire regions. More than 15 per cent of Afghan refugees were born in the camps in Pakistan and have never seen their homeland. Although many have received a rather better education than their parents, their future is uncertain unless the return and resettlement of the refugees can be achieved quickly and Dr. Sliwinski warns that they could repeat the experience of the Palestinian refugees. Nevertheless, the report says, a collective consciousness of a free people and nation has emerged among the Afghans despite the human tragedy and the disintegration of their traditional society. The strength of this con­sciousness helps to explain their stubborn re­sistance to armed invasion be a super-power. The research project headed by Dr. Sliwin­ski was sponsored by three French organisa­tions, the Secrétariat d’Etat aux Droits de l’Homme, Médecins sans Frontières and the Bureau International Afghanistan; and by the Swedisch Committee for Afghanistan and the International Catholic Child Bureau (Switzer­land). 2 ^VIOLATIONS Pakistan has accused the Kabul regime's armed forces of committing 495 air and ground violations of the Geneva accords on Afghani­stan since May 15, 1988. An officia! spokesman told journalists in Islamabad recently that 50 people were killed and 147 injured during these intrusions into Pakistani territory. RAMPAGING CADETS KILL BABY Rampaging Afghan cadets killed a six-month­­old baby and at least two adults and injured 35 other people in two brawls in Tashkent, capital of Soviet Uzbekistan, early in January. Some Soviet Press reports said that the trouble started when cadets tried to sell cigarette­­lighters, sun-glasses and other goods at inflated orices in a collective farm's market. But the Tashkent media claimed that Afghan "hooligan elements" rioted when under the influence of alcohol and drugs, throwing stones at passing vehicles and pedestrians. However, according to unofficial reports, fighting began when local people became enraged by seeing Afghans flirting with Uzbek girls. Later, cadets again rampaged. After being placed in a suburban hostel they smashed furniture and windows, set fire to or otherwise damaged 20 cars and destroyed a roadside office belonging to the traffic police. Some of the cadets had smoked a local drug, anasha. The many young men involved in these two incidents are from the Higher School of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, in training for mili­tary or police work for the Marxist PDPA regime in Kabul. About 10,000 Afghans are studying in the USSR. Most of them, including about 1,600 in Tashkent, are in universities and schools in the Central Asian constituent republics border­ing Afghanistan. Many of these students are reportedly wor­ried about their future. They were sent to the USSR by the discredited Kabul regime, which regarded them as politically "reliable," and wonder what will happen to them when the last Soviet troops leave their homeland. JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1989

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