Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium

by Tim Bonyhady

  Western photographers recorded further executions. In a conflict where they rarely witnessed fighting and instead typically photographed its antecedents and aftermath, executions enabled these photographers to record killing taking place. A Soviet lieutenant captured in Nangarhar was the subject in a series of photographs taken by the Italian Salvatore Vitale published by Match and Time. Three Afghan workers outside Jalalabad were the victims in series by Steve McCurry on assignment for Time and by the British freelancer Peter Jouvenal, who sold his to Match. As described by Time, those killed were members of a military road-repair crew executed for collaborating with the Soviet enemy. McCurry’s photograph showed the bodies in the foreground with mujahideen in the background displaying scant interest in the dead. Match reported, very differently, that having been caught using a bulldozer to create new defences, the men were bound together with their turbans, then shot in the head one by one and bayoneted before local villagers who, children included, were then forced to spit on the dead.

  These executions occurred as President Carter began identifying the mujahideen in a new way—lauding them from February 1980 as ‘freedom fighters’ and praising their ‘courage and tenacity’ in seeking independence from the ‘cruel’ and ‘inhumane’ Soviet empire. In keeping with this view, widely embraced in the West, Jouvenal would recall that his ‘sympathy was with the underdogs, the Afghan mujahideen’. He looked on the Soviets as invaders and thought the war ‘very black and white’.

  Alain Mingam of Gamma recorded another execution when he visited Kabul in June in the guise of a tour operator, and Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi’s Islamic Revolution Movement invited him to the village of Farza outside Kabul. The invitation was to photograph the killing of a man who allegedly had denounced several mujahideen to the government, resulting in their executions. While the mujahideen characteristically performed for Mingam, he also shaped their performance, which began with their arrival with the man in Farza and continued after his death when a mujahideen approached his body with a rock held high, as if to stone the already-dead, and another mujahideen held a sabre high, as if to decapitate the corpse.

  The contrast between two of Mingam’s photographs of the man standing impassively with his hands tied behind his back is particularly revealing. In the first, the man is surrounded by mujahideen brandishing rifles and Kalashnikovs including one with bayonet, with a sword held high and a pick held stiffly near the man’s turban, while one has a knife in his mouth. In the second photograph, almost certainly posed at Mingam’s behest, the mujahideen are even closer, with the bayonet, a sabre and two rifle barrels almost touching the man, while the knife is just below his beard, ready to cut his throat. The result is a much more intense if hyperbolic image. It was Mingam’s bestseller from this series, and helped win him a prize in the World Press Photo Contest.

  The international press presented such killings as an inevitable consequence of the conflict. Executions occurred ‘in all civil wars’, Match declared. ‘War evolves its own rules, its own forms of rough justice’, India Today stated. A recurrent issue, as with other wars, was how the presence of photographers influenced what happened. When Pascal Manoukian and Patrice Franceschi made another trip into Afghanistan, Match reported that the Frenchmen’s intervention resulted in two alleged collaborators being taken to Pakistan for trial rather than executed on the spot. By one account, Alain Mingam checked his subject had already been condemned to death by three mullahs. He wanted to ensure the man was not killed because his execution would be photographed. Both Match and the London Observer reported that Mingam appealed vainly for clemency. But Mingam has also been quoted as saying: ‘If I had not been there, the man would not have been shot and then ritually beheaded.’ Mingam ‘could not sleep because he felt like an accomplice’.

  Television had greatest impact, despite not revealing much. American broadcaster Dan Rather, who spent six days in Afghanistan with a film crew in March 1980, was most influential. His program, broadcast on CBS early in April, presented evidence of a massacre by government soldiers in the town of Kerala that had first been reported that February. His claim to have proof that the Soviets were using napalm was doubted with good reason. But, Rather’s prime argument that the mujahideen needed better weaponry was a catalyst for Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson—the hero of the book and movie Charlie Wilson’s War —securing the mujahideen much more American funding. In 1980, Washington provided $30 million, a sixty-fold increase on the year before.

  The Soviet force peaked at 118,000 troops—where Washington had 539,000 troops in Vietnam for a much smaller area—but loomed large in the new war because the Afghan army remained weak, with desertion commonplace. The rebel forces grew as Pakistan picked out seven different mujahideen groups based in Peshawar for American and Saudi funding and these groups offered weapons and money to existing strongmen for whom the conflict was principally familial and tribal rather than ideological. As part of the resultant ‘economy of violence’, some men became full-time salaried fighters. Some strongmen switched sides in return for better weapons or bigger payments. While the communists controlled most cities and towns, the mujahideen controlled most of the countryside, but in some areas the fighting was primarily between rival rebels.

  CHAPTER 16

  The Modern City

  Shukria Raad, who had organised the Miss Afghanistan competition, and Zohra Yousuf, who won it, were among many members of Kabul’s elite who fled in 1980. Having worked for Radio Afghanistan under Taraki, Amin and, briefly, Karmal, Raad escaped early in the year via India and Germany to the United States where she found work as a broadcaster with the Dari-language service of Voice of America. Yousuf, who had studied journalism and French and compered a quiz show on radio and television, followed much the same path to Richmond, Virginia, where she secured a job as a cleaner in a French bakery. But this exodus was eclipsed by an influx of villagers, because Kabul was among the safest places in Afghanistan. While the new arrivals were typically much more conservative than those who had left, the communists ensured that Kabul remained Afghanistan’s most modern city and, in some respects, made it more so.

  Karmal sought to reduce opposition by ordering the removal of most of the red banners from Kabul’s streets and inviting ‘all national, democratic and progressive persons’ to suggest designs for a new national flag. When he reverted to a black-red-green tricolour, Karmal acknowledged that green was the prime colour of Islam, associated in various way with the prophet Muhammad. ‘Worthy Moslems of Afghanistan cherish it,’ he declared. But while he sported a green badge to demonstrate his faith, his preference for red was manifest on the new tricolour which featured a red star. The People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan also retained its red flag, which Karmal proclaimed the banner of Afghanistan’s workers.

  Posters were one of the communists’ tools. While its opponents tried to deface them, the government sought to enhance their impact by holding design courses run by Soviet and Afghan artists and offering prizes for the best designs. Some posters celebrated Karmal, who was also portrayed on giant banners. Other posters presented the Soviets as friends of the Afghan people or represented the mujahideen leaders as American stooges with dollar symbols on their clothes. The government’s prime target was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the rebel leader favoured by Pakistan, who received most American and Saudi funding.

  The government celebrated the Saur Revolution’s second anniversary in April 1980. A commemorative stamp had members of the communists’ ideal society at its centre: an industrial worker holding a hammer, a turbaned peasant holding a sickle, a woman in a smart knee-length dress carrying a handbag, and another woman who wore traditional dress but had her face uncovered. The first Afghan female parachutists—still high-school students with only six weeks of practice behind them, but soon to be trained within the army’s first female unit—performed at the Ghazi Stadium as a mark of the communists’ commitment to equality for women. After attending a performance by these parachutists, a
Soviet journalist observed: ‘Many of the women on the terraces conceal their faces under the chadari—a primitive, medieval susperstition. But parachutists are landing in the stadium and they are women too, who grew up in this country. You don’t have to be a prophet to foretell the victory of the parachute.’

  The National Museum became a subject of controversy in 1981 when Roseanne Klass of Washington’s Freedom House wrote a cover story for Asia magazine accusing the Soviets of ‘raping’ Afghanistan’s treasures. Having heard of the museum’s closure, Klass announced that the Kremlin had seized its collection and moved the Bactrian gold discovered by Viktor Sarianidi to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. She also maintained that the Buddhist complex at Hadda, where Afghanistan’s first open-air museum had opened in 1968, had been ‘reduced to rubble’ by the Soviets ‘who suspected that resistance groups in the Jalalabad area were operating near it’.

  In fact, Karmal had reopened the National Museum with its collection intact and exhibits better than ever, including the first display of the Bactrian gold. Mujahideen had desecrated and pillaged Hadda, prompting the government to fly a dozen European journalists there to see the destruction and Soviet television to feature it. Afghanistan Today, an illustrated book jointly published by Kabul and Moscow, conveyed this ‘vandalism’ through photographs of one of Hadda’s most famous Buddhas initially intact, then headless and handless. After Soviet conservators helped to restore some of the damaged statues, the government displayed them in the museum. The Golden Hoard of Bactria, a large-format book by Viktor Sarianidi, brought his discoveries to an international audience in spectacular fashion through more than 150 colour plates and 250 black-and-white illustrations.

  This cultural commitment extended to a new national institution: a gallery devoted to oil and watercolour painting in a western mode. These were weak art forms in Afghanistan, adopted only from the late nineteenth century, but the Karmal government declared the National Gallery ‘a must’ for ‘the new and evolutionary phase’ of Afghanistan to emblemise its ‘progressive culture’. In 1983, the gallery opened with a collection of more than five hundred works, both international and local. The artists included Simone Shokour Wali who had celebrated the unveiling in 1959 in her painting The Awakening, and in the early 1980s had helped young artists to depict such subjects as Afghans searching for relatives and friends at the Pul-e Charkhi Prison.

  Abdul Haq, a member of a notable Pashtun family who joined Yhunus Khalis’s Hezb, was responsible for many mujahideen attacks on Kabul. From the mid-1980s, Haq achieved exceptional prominence for a field commander, meeting President Ronald Reagan twice while visiting the United States and meeting Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street. Reagan was effusive as he embraced President Carter’s identification of the mujahideen as ‘freedom fighters’ with even more fervour. ‘To watch the courageous Afghan freedom fighters battle modern arsenals with simple hand-held weapons is an inspiration to those who love freedom’, Reagan maintained. ‘We are with you, Abdul Haq’, Reagan declared at a dinner that Haq attended in Washington.

  As usual with the mujahideen, some of Haq’s attacks were targeted, others indiscriminate. His fighters cut off the city’s electricity supply on the fourth anniversary of Karmal’s rule. They blew up a Soviet ammunition depot at Lake Qargha, sending a huge fireball over the capital. They fired unguided rockets that killed many civilians. They planted bombs at the office of Afghan Film killing two of its staff—not out of opposition to film but because they recognised it was an important medium for the government. They also planted bombs at Kabul’s Pamir Cinema, damaging it, then exploded another at the Ariana Cinema, killing three children and wounding dozens during an afternoon screening of an Indian movie.

  The seclusion that the chadari offered in public provided Haq’s men with an opportunity. To enter Kabul while hiding their weapons, they sometimes wore chadaris, as did mujahideen seeking to enter other cities controlled by the government. ‘The bandits dress as women, though this is considered a big disgrace for a Muslim man,’ a Soviet writer railed. Iranian photojournalist Shahrokh Hatami recorded how the communists tried to stop this subterfuge. When he visited Kabul covertly, Hatami’s most striking photograph, published by the West German magazine Stern, was of female security officers in western suits and high-heeled boots checking to see what chadaris hid.

  Italian journalist Vincenzo Sparagna created counterfeit newspapers that reproduced the originals’ appearance but altered their contents, combining serious articles with ones manifestly ludicrous, so readers would soon realise the edition was fake. In 1983, with dissident Russian poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya, he created a fake edition of the Soviet army’s Red Star, which reported crimes committed by the USSR in Afghanistan, encouraged its soldiers to defect and had the Kremlin’s leadership flee into outer space. Its front-page illustration depicted a Soviet soldier breaking his Kalashnikov. In December 1983, the Italian satirical magazine Frigidaire, which Sparagna co-founded, announced that Abdul Haq’s men had distributed 50,000 of these counterfeit newspapers in Afghanistan—bringing hundreds of copies into Kabul on the night of 2 November, accompanied by Lithuanian journalist Savik Shuster and Italian photographer Cesare Dagliana.

  Every copy of this edition of Frigidaire included the counterfeit newspaper, a poster of its cover illustration and a twenty-two-page spread, written by Sparagna and Shuster with forty-five photographs by Dagliana. Some of these photographs showed the mujahideen pasting the counterfeit Red Star on the walls of buildings—including one said to be thirty metres from a Soviet post in Kabul. Other European magazines also carried this story. The Soviets responded that Sparagna was a ‘reactionary’ who pursued an ‘unoriginal method of “ideological struggle”’. More significantly, given how few western journalists entered Kabul covertly and how soon after 2 November Frigidaire published the story, the Soviets claimed that mujahideen had simply stuck the fake Red Star ‘on the clay walls of border area settlements’.

  As the Karmal government struggled to maintain the size of its army, leading it to impose ever stricter provisions for compulsory military service, it put the Ghazi Stadium to a new use. After rounding up potential conscripts, it sent them to the stadium for processing. But because of Kabul’s protection by the Soviets, it was relatively peaceful. While gunfire could be heard at night, the city was quiet during the day and few soldiers were to be seen. A Tass photograph, distributed by the Camera Press in London, showed Kabul’s prime shopping street, Jadi Maiwand, with four lanes of traffic and almost no free parking spaces, unscarred by the conflict.

  Most westerners had no idea because the western press ignored such images and the Afghan government generally barred visits by journalists from outside the Iron Curtain. The people of eastern Europe also knew little as the Kremlin maintained its pretence that its forces were simply assisting ‘a fraternal people’ to create a ‘socialist state’ by building hospitals and schools.

  That changed after Mikhail Gorbachev became the Soviet Union’s leader in 1985. The following February, he identified Afghanistan as a ‘bleeding wound’ for the USSR. Later that year, his Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, declared the Soviets’ role in Afghanistan a ‘sin’. In between, the Afghan government began allowing foreign journalists to visit more freely in keeping with the Kremlin’s new policy of glasnost or openness. One of the first to arrive was Iranian photographer Abbas, a member of the Magnum agency, who created the richest visual record of Kabul in the 1980s.

  Abbas later explained that, with ‘extremist mullahs’ having turned his own country ‘into a fanatic Islamic republic’, he saw ‘no reason to join the western press in glorifying Islamists’ by celebrating Afghanistan’s mujahideen. Instead, he focused on its communists, whom he saw as ‘nationalists eager to modernise their country’, having ‘a hard time presenting their case to the world’ when Moscow was ‘bombing civilians and occupying Afghanistan’. He photographed a city with female factory workers, female dentists treating male pati
ents and a female militia dressed in traditional clothes, including headscarves, bearing Kalashnikovs. He revealed how women’s bodies remained on display for men with pictures of near-nude women on the walls of a Kabul teahouse and documented the new obsession of Afghan men with bodybuilding. He showed that red remained the government’s colour but that most chadaris were blue.

  Abbas was there as the Soviets replaced Afghanistan’s president again—removing Karmal and installing a much more capable leader, Najibullah, who had been one of Karmal’s prime followers since the mid-1960s when he began studying medicine. Najib, as he styled himself for many years because ‘ullah’, meaning God, did not fit his communist identity, was jailed twice for his activism. Still, he graduated, in marked contrast to Islamists Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ahmad Shah Massoud. In 1980, he became head of Karmal’s secret police, KhAD, the government’s most powerful arm—lauded by his admirers as ‘a nightmare for saboteurs and rebels’ but branded by the mujahideen as the ‘Minister for Killing’. When the Soviets forced Karmal into exile in Moscow in 1986, Najibullah, as he reverted to calling himself, became the first Afghan leader since Daoud ousted Zahir Shah in 1973 to acquire power almost peacefully. A rare outbreak of fighting occurred when some of Karmal’s supporters tried to stop Najibullah’s followers removing photographs and posters celebrating the former president.

  Najibullah looked like a moderniser in his business suits, but enshrined Islam as the state religion, proved himself a powerful Islamic rhetorician and regularly attended the Pul-e Khishti mosque, where he had himself photographed at prayer. He dropped the red star from Afghanistan’s flag and turned the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan back into the Republic of Afghanistan to escape the communist connotations of ‘Democratic’. He barred Soviet films, permitted the screening of some western ones and allowed local directors to make detective films, melodramas and love stories. He removed statues of Marx, Engels and Lenin from the university. He promoted national reconciliation through posters and a public sculpture, Motherland Calls for Reconciliation, depicting Afghanistan as a maternal figure with one arm around a government soldier, the other around a mujahideen, and the two fighters shaking hands. He talked of creating a new museum devoted to the Islamic.