Полная версия
The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East
In the years to come, Gavin and I would remember our journeys out of Kabul in 1980 as a great adventure. We were a hunting party, off for an exciting day in the quest for images. We adopted the elderly Russian-built grain silo outside Kabul as a symbol of the Soviet Union’s gift to the world – it represented, we thought, about a millionth of the Soviet Union’s ‘gifts’. ‘There was an innocence about our world,’ Gavin would recall more than twenty years later. ‘The grain silo was somehow typical. The more crumbling its presence, the more true our images were to their art form.’ Travelling with his crew, I became almost as possessive of their filmed report – as anxious to see them get a scoop a day for the BBC – as Gavin himself. For his part, Gavin wanted to ensure that I sent my reports for The Times safely out of Kabul each day. Our enthusiasm to help each other was not just journalistic camaraderie. Gavin was one of the only television reporters to reach Afghanistan and his dramatic film dispatches were shaping the world’s perception of the Soviet invasion. William Rees-Mogg, the editor of The Times, and my foreign news editor, Ivan Barnes, watched all Gavin’s reports, though they often took forty-eight hours to reach the screen. There were no satellite ‘feeds’ in Kabul and we were forbidden to bring satellite dishes into the country. So Geoff Hale was hand-carrying cans of film out to London, commuting back and forth from Kabul every two days, a 13,500-kilometre round trip at least three times a week. Gavin found that his own editors were reading my reports every day in The Times and eagerly waited for the pictures which they knew he would have – since Gavin had told them we travelled together. And his filmed reports were feeding my own editor’s hunger for news from Afghanistan. We were two parasites, we used to claim, living off each other’s work.
My own copy was reaching The Times in less expensive but almost equally exhausting form. The Intercontinental staff were instructed by the Afghan state security police not to allow journalists to send their reports over the hotel telex. I was thus reduced to sending messages to Ivan Barnes and to my foreign editor, Louis Heren, indicating how I planned to get my dispatch to London. Our New York and Washington bureaus were trying to call me by phone; so was Binyon in Moscow. But in all the weeks I spent in Kabul, I never received a single telephone call from anyone. Instead, I would wake up at four each morning and type up five copies of my story for The Times. I would give one copy to the Reuters news agency, which sent an Indian staffer to Delhi almost every day. I gave another copy to Reuters’ Pakistani staffer who regularly flew to Peshawar and Islamabad. From there, they were asked to punch out my text and – since the paper subscribed to the news agency – send it to London. Another copy went to anyone travelling to the Soviet Union in the hope they would contact Binyon in Moscow. A fourth carbon went to Geoff for his regular flights to Britain.
The fifth was for a much more devious operation, one which – and still today I marvel that it worked – involved the Pakistani conductor of the daily old wooden bus that bumped down from Kabul to Jalalabad and on to Peshawar in Pakistan, where local hotel staff were standing ready to telex my pages to London. I set the scheme up on my third morning in Kabul. I had noticed the Peshawar bus on the highway south of the capital and learned that it left Kabul each morning at 6.30. I liked Ali, the conductor, an immensely cheerful Pathan with a green scarf and a round Afghan hat and a smile of massive pure white teeth who spoke enough English to understand both my humour and my cynicism. ‘Mr Robert, if this hurts the Russians, I will carry your report to the very door of the Intercontinental Hotel in Peshawar. You give me money to pay their operators and when you leave Afghanistan, you will go to Peshawar with me and pay the telex bills. Trust me.’
All my life in the Middle East, people have ordered me to trust them. And almost always I did and they were worthy of that trust. Ali received $50 a day, every day, to take my typed dispatch to Peshawar. The operators received $40 a day to telex it to London. Even in the worst blizzards down the Kabul Gorge, Ali’s ancient bus made it through the snowdrifts and the Russian checkpoints. Sometimes I travelled with him as far as Jalalabad. The Afghan army had been told to stop journalists roaming the country in cars but they never thought to check the bus. So I would sit on the steps with Ali as we puttered and rocked down the Kabul Gorge, feeling the warmth of the countryside as we descended into the Indus valley. I would stay at the Spinghar Hotel in Jalalabad, spend the morning driving into the rural villages in a motorised rickshaw – a cloth-covered cabin mounted on the back of a motorcycle – to investigate the results of the overnight fighting between the Russians and the mujahedin and then pick up Ali’s return bus to Kabul in the afternoon. Ali never lost a single report. Only when I received a telegram from The Times did I realise how well he did his job. ‘MANY THANKS … FILES STOP TUESDAY’S LEAD PAPER
Slowly, Gavin and I enlarged our area of operations. Two hundred kilometres west of Kabul lay the thousand-year-old city of Ghazni, clustering round the giant battlements of a Turkish fort destroyed by the British in the First Afghan War, a settlement on the road to Kandahar which was successively destroyed by Arab invaders in 869 and again by Genghis Khan in 1221. The Soviet army, we were told, had not yet reached Ghazni, so we took the highway south past the big Soviet guns that ringed Kabul and a European face beneath a Cossack-style hat waved us, unsmiling, through the last Russian checkpoint. Gavin and I were working our plastic foliage routine, pulling aside the ghastly purple and blue artificial flowers whenever a Soviet tank obligingly crossed our path so that Mike could run another two or three feet of film. At the tiny, windy village of Saydabad, 70 kilometres down the road, more Russian tanks were dug in beside the highway, their barrels pointing west, dwarfing the poor mud and wattle huts in which the villagers lived. There was a bridge guarded by four soldiers with bayonets fixed and then there was just an empty, unprotected road of ice and drifting snow that stretched down towards the provinces of Paktia and Ghazni.
The old city, when Gavin and his crew and I turned up in Mr Samadali’s Peugeot, looked like a scene from a medieval painting, walled ramparts set against the snow-smothered peaks of the Safid Kuh mountains and pale blue skies that distorted all perspective. Indeed, there were no Russians, just a series of Afghan army lorries that trundled every half-hour or so down from the north to the Ghazni barracks, their red Afghan insignia a doubtful protection against attack by rebel tribesmen, their scruffily dressed drivers peering nervously from the cab. The Afghan army, notionally loyal to its new president and his Soviet allies, theoretically controlled the countryside, although it was clear the moment we entered Ghazni that some form of unofficial ceasefire existed between the local soldiers and the Pathan tribesmen. Afghan troops in sheepskin cloaks and vests – Ghazni is famous for the manufacture of embroidered Pustin coats – were wandering the narrow, mud streets, looking for provisions beneath their turreted, crumbling barracks.
Almost a thousand years ago, Mahmud of Ghazni imposed his rule over most of Afghanistan, devastated north-west India and established an Islamic empire that consolidated Sunni Muslim power over thousands of square miles. Ghazni became one of the great cities of the Persian world whose 400 resident poets included the great Ferdowsi. But the city was now a mockery of its glorious past. Some of the battlements had long ago collapsed and ice had cracked the ancient walls in the sub-zero temperatures. Isolated from the outside world, its inhabitants were suspicious of strangers, a dangerous and understandable obsession that had reached a new intensity now that reports of the Soviet invasion had reached the city.
We had scarcely parked our car when a tall man with a long grey moustache approached us. ‘Are you Russian?’ he asked, and a group of Pathans in blue and white headdress began to gather around the car. We told them we were English and for a minute or so there were a few friendly smiles. Gavin and I were to develop our own special smile for these people, a big, warm smile of delight to hide our dark concern. How good to see you. What a wonderful country. My God, how you must hate those Russians. All of us knew how quickly things could go wrong. It was only a few months since a group of Soviet civilian construction workers and their wives had decided to visit the blue-tiled Masjid Jami mosque in Herat – a place of worship since the time of Zoroaster – only to be seized by a crowd and knifed to death. Several of the Russians were skinned alive. Only the previous day, though I did not know it then, The Times had published a photograph of two blindfolded men in the hands of Afghan rebels. They were high-school teachers detained in the city of Farah, 300 kilometres west of Kandahar, and the man on the right of the picture had already been executed as a communist.
Mr Samadali needed oil for his Peugeot, and from a cluttered, dirty, concrete-floored shop an old man produced a can of motor oil. Horses and carts and donkeys staggering under sacks of grain slithered through the slush and mud and then someone muttered ‘Khar’ and the smiles all faded. Khar means ‘donkey’ and though apparently humorous on first hearing, it is a term of disgust and hatred when used about foreigners. ‘They are calling you “khar”,’ Mr Samadali said desperately. ‘They cannot tell the difference between Englishmen and Russians. They do not want foreigners here. You must go.’ A larger group of Pathans had now arrived and stood in a line along a raised wooden pavement beside the street. There were no guns in their hands, although two had long knives in their belts. A middle-aged man came up to us. ‘Leave here now,’ he said urgently. ‘Don’t stop for anyone. If you are stopped by people on the road, drive through them. You are foreigners and they will think you are Russians and kill you. They will find out who you are afterwards.’ We left Ghazni at speed. Were we really in danger? More than twenty-one years later, I would confront an almost identical group of angry Afghans and, almost at the cost of my life, I would discover just what it meant to incur their fury.
Frightening off strangers was one thing. Fighting a well-equipped modern army would be quite another. On the road north again, we noticed, high on the hillsides and deep in the snow, a series of metal turrets with gun barrels poking from them. The Russians had already taken physical control of the highway even though they did not stand beside the road. Soviet tanks had been parachuted into the mountains north of Kabul and the artillery outside Ghazni had also been dropped from the air. Our plastic foliage twitched aside as we cleared the windscreen for Mike. We were becoming experts. Indeed, it was Gavin’s contention that the Russians would inevitably learn about our stage-prop jungle and assume that all modern movies were produced like this, that a new generation of Soviet film-makers would insist on shooting all future productions through car windows stuffed with artificial purple flowers.
And there was plenty more to film in Afghanistan. Even before we arrived, the Karmal government had attempted to slink back into popular support by freeing Amin’s political prisoners. But when the city prison in Kabul was opened, thousands of men and women arrived to greet their loved ones and began throwing stones at the young Soviet troopers around the walls. No one doubted that the previous regime was detested by the population; the newly installed Karmal officials lost no time in letting us know of their hatred. This, after all, was why we had been given visas to come to Afghanistan. In Peshawar, rebel groups had claimed that the Afghan army would fight the Russian invaders, but the 7th and 8th Afghan Divisions in Kabul, both of which were equipped with Soviet tanks, never fired a shot against Russian armour. Their Soviet advisers had seen to that.
Four days later, however, the government’s propaganda went disastrously wrong. Thousands of Afghans – relatives of inmates, many of them in long cloaks and turbans – gathered this time outside the Polecharkhi prison, a grim fortress of high stone walls, barbed wire, jail blocks and torture cells, to witness the official release of 118 political prisoners. But enraged that so few had been freed, the crowd burst through an Afghan army cordon and broke open the iron gates. We ran into the prison with them, a Russian soldier next to me almost thrown off his feet. He stared, transfixed by the sight as men and women – the latter in the all-covering burqa – began shouting ‘Allahu akbar’, ‘God is Great’,* through the outer compound and began to climb over the steel gates of the main prison blocks. Gavin and I looked at each other in wonderment. This was a religious as much as it was a political protest. On the roof of a barracks, a young Soviet officer, his Kalashnikov rifle pointing at the crowd, began shouting in Russian that there were only eight people left inside the prison. Conor O’Clery of the Irish Times was in the yard in his big Russian greatcoat. He was based in Moscow and spoke good Russian and he turned to me with his usual irredeemable smirk. ‘That guy may claim there are only eight men left,’ he said. ‘I suspect we’re going to find out he’s lying.’
For a moment, the crowd paused as the officer swung his rifle barrel in their direction, then heeded him no more and surged on through the second newly broken gate. Hopelessly outnumbered, the soldier lowered his weapon. Hundreds of other prisoners’ relatives now smashed the windows of the cell blocks with rocks and used steel pipes to break in the doors of the first building. Three prisoners were suddenly led into the winter sunlight by their liberators, middle-aged men in rags, thin and frail and dazed and blinking at the snow and ice-covered walls. A young man came up to me in the prison as crowds began to break in the roof of a second concrete cell block. ‘We want Russians to go,’ he said in English. ‘We want independent Afghanistan, we want families released. My brother and father are here somewhere.’
I squeezed into the cell block with the mob, and there were certainly more than the eight prisoners to which the Russian officer referred. Blankets had been laid on the stone floor by the inmates as their only protection against the extreme cold. There was a musty, stale smell in the tiny, airless cells. Across the compound, other prisoners waved through the bars of windows, screaming at the crowd to release them. One man in baggy peasant trousers bashed open a hatch in the metal roof of a cell and slid inside, shouting to his friends to follow him. I climbed through a window in the end of the same cell block and was confronted by at least twenty men, sitting on the floor amid chains and straw, eyes wide with horror and relief. One held out his hand to me. It was so thin I felt only his bones. His cheeks were sunken and blue, his teeth missing, his open chest covered in scars. And all this while, the Russian soldiers and the Afghan guards stood watching, unable to control the thousands of men and women, aware that any public bloodletting would cause irreparable damage to the Karmal regime. Some of the crowd abused the Russians, and one youth who said he was from Paktia province screamed at me that ‘Russians are bombing and killing in south Afghanistan’.
But the most notable phenomenon about this amazing prison break-in were the Islamic chants from the crowds. Several men shouted for an Islamic revolution, something the Russians had long feared in Afghanistan and in their own Muslim republics. Many of the youths looking for their relatives came from rural areas to the south of Kabul, where tribal rebellion had been growing for at least fourteen months. Altogether, the government had released more than 2,000 political prisoners in the previous three weeks – it was Babrak Karmal’s first act as president – but the decision had the unintended effect of reminding the crowds of how many thousands of political prisoners were not being released, inmates who had long ago been executed under Amin.
Only in the early afternoon did Soviet soldiers form a line inside the main gate of Polecharkhi with rifles lowered, apparently to prevent the hundreds of men and women from leaving. Conor pulled his greatcoat round him, hands in pockets, the very model of a modern KGB major-general, and walked straight up to the nearest officer in the line of troops. ‘Dos vidanya,’ he said in Russian. The officer and another soldier snapped smartly to attention and we walked out of the jail.*
That same day, Babrak Karmal held his first press conference, a dismal affair in which the new Soviet-installed president – the son of a high-ranking Pushtun army officer, a heavily built man with a prominent nose, high cheekbones and greying hair with the manners of a nightclub bouncer – denounced his socialist predecessor as a criminal and insisted that his country was no client kingdom of the Soviet Union. This was a little hard to take when the main door of the Chelstoon Palace – in which this miserable performance was taking place – was guarded by a Soviet soldier with a red star on his hat, when a Russian tracked armoured vehicle stood in the grounds and when a Soviet anti-aircraft gun crew waited in the snow beside their weapons a hundred metres from the building. So when Babrak Karmal told us that ‘the only thing brighter than sunshine is the honest friendship of the Soviet Union’, one could only regard it as a uniquely optimistic, if not Olympian, view of a world that Dr Faustus would have recognised.
Even the Afghan officials clustered beside Karmal, however, must have wished for the presence of some subtle Mephistopheles to soften the rhetoric as the president’s press conference descended into an angry and occasionally abusive shouting match. The questions that the Western journalists put to Karmal were often more interesting than his replies, but highlights of the affair had to include the following statements by Moscow’s new man: that not one Soviet soldier had been killed or wounded since the Russian military ‘intervention’ began; that the size of the ‘very limited Soviet contingent’ sent to Afghanistan had been grossly exaggerated by the ‘imperialist Western press’; that the Soviet Union had supported the ‘brutal regime’ of the late Hafizullah Amin because ‘the Soviet Union would never interfere in the internal affairs of any country’; and, finally, that Soviet troops would leave Afghanistan ‘at the moment that the aggressive policy of the United States – in compliance with the Beijing leadership and the provocation of the reactionary circles of Pakistan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – is eliminated’.
The full flavour of the press conference, however, could only be captured by quoting extracts. Martyn Lewis of ITN, for example, wanted to know about Karmal’s election to the presidency after his predecessor had been overthrown in a coup.
LEWIS: ‘I wonder, could you tell us when and under what circumstances you were elected and – if that election was truly democratic – why is it that Russian troops had to help you to power?’
KARMAL: ‘Mr Representative of British imperialism, the imperialism that three times blatantly invaded Afghanistan, you got a rightful and deserved answer from the people of Afghanistan.’
This exchange was followed by a burst of clapping from Afghan officials and Soviet correspondents. Only after this excursion into three Afghan wars of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did Karmal reply to Lewis, telling him that during the Amin regime ‘an overwhelming majority of the principal members of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan’ had elected him president.* We had, of course, expected no less of Karmal, and his courageous – some might say foolhardy – assertion that ‘a true non-alignment for Afghanistan can be obtained with the material and moral help of the Soviet Union’ accurately reflected Moscow’s point of view.
The new man was once a bitter opponent within the PDP of Nur Mohamed Taraki, the assassinated president whose ‘martyrdom’ Karmal now blamed on the CIA, and Gavin Hewitt experienced first-hand what it was like to be on the receiving end of the new dictator’s anger. For when Gavin commented mildly that ‘there doesn’t seem to be much support for you or the Russians in Afghanistan’, Karmal drew in his breath and bellowed the first response that came into his head. ‘Mr Correspondent of the BBC – the most famous propaganda liar in the world!’ he roared. That was all. The room collapsed in applause from the satraps around Karmal and uncontrollable laughter from journalists. ‘Well,’ I told Gavin, ‘old Babrak can’t be that bad a guy – at least he got you down to a “T”.’ Gavin shot me a sidelong grin. ‘Just wait, Fiskers,’ he muttered. And he was right. Within hours, Karmal’s absurd reply had gone round the world, proving that Moscow’s new man in Kabul was just another factotum with a single message.
But it was a clear sign that our presence in Afghanistan would not be tolerated indefinitely. This was made clear to me some days later when three members of the Khad secret police turned up at the reception desk at the Intercontinental to see me. They all wore leather coats – de rigueur for plain-clothes cops in Soviet satellite countries – and they were not smiling. One of them, a small man with a thin moustache and a whining voice, held out a piece of paper. ‘We have come to see you about this,’ he snapped. I took the paper from him, a telegram bearing the stamp of the Afghan PTT office. And as I read the contents, I swallowed several times, the kind of guilty swallow that criminals make in movies when confronted with evidence of some awesome crime. ‘URGENT, BOB FISK GUEST INTERCONTINENTAL HOTEL KABUL,’ it Said. ‘ANY POSSIBILITY OF GETTING TWO MINUTE UPDATE RE SOVIET MILITARY BUILDUP IN AFGHANISTAN FOR SUNDAY MORNING THIS WEEK? LOVE SUE HICKEY.’ I drew in my breath. ‘Jesus Christ!’ I shouted. How could Sue in the London office of CBC have sent such a telegram? For days, I had been sending tapes to CBC, describing the atmosphere of fear and danger in Afghanistan, and here was Sue sending me an open telegram requesting details of Soviet military deployment in a state run by pro-Moscow communists. It was, I suspected, part of a very old problem. Somewhere between reporters and their offices in faraway London or New York there exists a wall of gentle disbelief, an absolute fascination with the reporter’s dispatch from the war zone but an unconscious conviction that it is all part of some vast Hollywood production, that the tape or the film – though obviously not fraudulent – is really a massive theatrical production, that the Russian army was performing for us, the world’s press, that the Khad – always referred to in news reports as the ‘dreaded’ secret police – was somehow not that dreadful after all, indeed might be present in Afghanistan to give just a little more excitement to our stories.
I looked at the little man from Khad. He was looking at me with a kind of excitement in his face. He was one of the few who could speak passable English. And he had caught his man. The Western spy had been found with incontrovertible proof of his espionage activities, a request for military information about the Soviet army. ‘What does this mean?’ the little man asked softly. Oh yes, indeed. What did this mean? I needed time to think. So I burst into laughter. I put my head back and positively gusted laughter around the lobby of the hotel until even the receptionists turned to find out the cause of the joke. And I noticed one of the cops grinning. He wanted in on the joke, too. I slowly let my laughter subside and shook my head wearily. ‘Look, this lady wants me to report for a radio show called Sunday Morning in Canada,’ I said. ‘There is no “Soviet military buildup” – we all know that because President Karmal told us that only a “very limited Soviet contingent” has come to Afghanistan. This lady obviously doesn’t know that. I have to clear up this ridiculous situation and report the truth. I’m sorry you’ve been bothered with such a silly message – and I can certainly understand why you were worried about it.’ And I laughed again. Even the little cop smiled sheepishly. I offered him back the incriminating telegram. ‘No – you keep it,’ he snapped. And he wagged his finger in my face. ‘We know, you know,’ he said. I’m sorry, I asked, what did he know? But the lads from the Khad had turned their backs and walked away. Thank you, Sue. Weeks later, we dined out on the story – and she paid for the meal.
