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

1989-01-01 / 1. szám

Wanton; Destruction in Afghan Valley Soviet and Afghan-regime forces carried out a “vicious, deliberate and wanton destruction of all means of survival" during their occupa­tion of the lower Panjshir valley in northern Afghanistan, according to an international aid mission which visited the area recently. The Panjshir lies 120 kilometres north-east of the Afghan capital, Kabul. In many areas, the mission says, barely a house is left stand­ing, while the villages of Tawakh, Obdara and Qaraba have been “bombarded beyond the needs of mere destruction to a state where, from a distance, they resemble freaks of geo­logical activity.'1 The mission's report comments that the reason­ing behind such annihilation of human dwel­lings is "impossible to comprehend." The middle part of the valley, although never occupied by Soviet forces, has also been largely destroyed by intensive aerial bombing and ground attacks. Almost the whole of the val­ley's civilian population have fled as refugees. The aid mision's visit was sponsored by non­governmental aid agencies and included agri­cultural, civil engineering and medical experts from the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, the humanitarian organisation Médecins sans Frontières, and the Bureau International Afgha­nistan. The experts were asked by the Afghan resist­ance commander in the Panjshir, Ahmad Shah Masoud, to advise on the huge task of restoring the life of the valley and enabling its former inhabitants to return. The Communist regime in Kabul had been forced to withdraw the last of its outposts from the valley in May, 1988. In addition to immediate help for the return­ing refugees to rebuild their homes, the mission calls for urgent assistance to restore the val­ley's devastated agriculture. The fighting has left the once most productive areas, where two crops a year were normal, “almost sterile.” Prime farmland has been reduced to a "dere­lict, crated landscape” by the digging of deep pits to shelter tanks and guns. Below the Paryan gorge the fields are littered with the wrecks of more than 2,000 Soviet and Kabul-regime tanks, personnel carriers and other military vehicles. Most of the area's vital irrigation channels have been destroyed or badly damaged by bombing and shell-fire, the mission’s report says. In the Womarz sub-district, for example, only three canals are still working and 50 need repair. Twenty-two other major canals need to be rebuilt and rehabilitated as a matter of urgency. Little remains of the formerly abundant fruit trees and vines in the lower part of the valley. These, together with the standing timber which provided local people with building materials, were felled or burned by the Soviet and regime forces or have died through lack of irrigation. The aid mission estimate that 90 per cent of the valley's cattle, sheep and goats, which provided an important part of the people's live­lihood, have been destroyed. The report stresses that recovery will be hindered by the vast number of mines planted by the Communist forces. Around the small town of Basarak alone, 7,000 trip mines and 160 pressure mines had already been defused at the cost of several lives, but thousands re­main as a deadly threat to returning villagers trying to cultivate their land and graze their flocks. The expertise needed to deal with the dif­ferent types of mine is not generally available in Afghanistan, however, and outside help will be needed. During one two-month period last summer 16 people were killed in areas thought to be free of mines, and for every death there are two people injured by exploding mines. In some areas Soviet helicopter-borne troops have left wave mines, an especially delicate and destructive type which is difficult to defuse. The mine’s batteries remain active for more than a year. The aid mission says it is deeply impressed by those refugees who have already returned to the valley and are working with the barest minimum to recreate their homes and their land. The resistance movement in the Panjshir has set up a Reconstruction Committee which has already started work, and the mission's report calls for a generous response to its appeal for aid. In June, 1988, the United Nations appealed to the international comunity for an initial one billion dollars for a reconstruction and resettle­ment programme for the Afghan refugees, to be administered directly by UN agencies and not through the Soviet-imposed regime in Kabul. An estimated five million Afghans are living as refugees in Pakistan and Iran and a further two million have been displaced from their homes as "internal refugees” within Afghani­stan. ''DELIGHT IN ARMED STRENGTH" “In my opinion our war in Afghanistan .. . represents the apotheosis of the negative as­pects of the foreign policy in Brezhnev’s time in which an incorrect assessment of another country’s internal situation — in this instance the April, 1978, coup in Afghanistan — was combined with delight in armed strength and its use.“ So said journalist Stanislav Kondra­­shov in a Soviet television broadcast on Fe­bruary 5. JANUARY-FEBRUARY, 1989 MINE-CLEARING TO BE TAUGHT The media in Islamabad have reported that "a limited number” of Afghan refugees in Pakistan will soon be trained in mineclearing to enable them to return to their homeland safely. When trained, these men will instruct other refugees. In the past nine years the Soviet armed forces have laid, or dropped from the air, up to five million anti-personnel mines throughout the Afghan countryside. The United Nations Co-ordinator for Humani­tarian and Economic Assistance Programmes relating to Afghanistan has said that "the problem of mine clearance will require a major co-ordinated international effort and an Im­mediate mobilisation of resources by the donor community." (The front-page article in our July-August, 1988, issue studies in depth the problem of the "vast unmapped minefields.”) KABUL CHILDREN AT RISK Tens of thousands of Kabul’s poorest child­ren, pregnant women and nursing mothers are in danger of being killed by malnutrition, disease and cold. They are the most vulner­able sector of the city’s population, which in the past nine years has doubled to 2,200,000 with the influx of about a million “internal refugees.” Almost all these newcomers — former residents of villages and towns made un­inhabitable by Soviet bombing, shelling and minelaying — have no jobs and no proper housing. Malnutrition is widespread, especial­ly among the children; it affected, for exam­ple, about 80 per cent of the youngsters recently admitted to the Indira Gandhi Hospital in Kabul. EXPELLED BY SWISS A Soviet diplomat has been expelled from Switzerland for industrial espionage. Announc­ing this on February 3, the Swiss Foreign Ministry did not name the man but said that he had tried to obtain Western technology. TERRORIST LEADER ARRESTED José Antonio Urrutikoetxea (alias Josu Ter­­nera), reportedly the number-two in the leader­ship of ETA, the Spanish Basque secessionist group, was arrested by the French police's antiterrorist squad in Bayonne, France, on January 11. The French police also recently detained several alleged ETA militants, including a Soviet-born Basque, Sergio Yegorov Arantzeka. Spain's Justice inister, Enrique Mugica, has said that the police operations demonstrated "the dynamism of international co-operation against terorism, particularly that between France and Spain.” ETA has killed more Van 600 people in 21 years of terrorist activity in Spain and, accord­ing to West European Press reports, has had clandestine support from Libya during part of that time. AN OPPORTUNITY FOR YOUR FRIENDS: IF YOU HAVE friends who you think would be interested in THE GUARDIAN OF LIBERTY (Nemzetőr) we will glodly send specimen copies free of charge. All you need do is to fill m nomes addresses below and send them to us. We will do the rest. Please send specimen copies of THE GUARDIAN OF LIBERTY (Nemzetőr) to the following : 1___ t ... 1 ...4. ... 3

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