Two Afternoons in the Kabul Stadium Read online

  1979 with another stamp.

  The colour red became ubiquitous. Kabul reportedly ran out of paint before the first new Jeshyn as the communists had the doors and windows of public buildings done out in red, required householders and shopholders to do the same, and even had students repaint their desks and chairs. Red cloth was similarly in demand for bunting and banners for the communists’ rallies as well as permanent displays. A red banner with white text displayed outside the terminal at Kabul’s airport cast the Saur Revolution as the modern counterpart to Lenin’s October Revolution of 1917, which other countries should emulate. ‘Welcome to the Land of the New Model Revolution,’ it proclaimed. A similar banner festooned the border at Torkham at the foot of the Khyber Pass.

  A new national flag—all red, apart from a seal in its top left corner that had ‘Khalq’ written in gold at its centre—epitomised this visual revolution. But rather than overtly admit this red was communist, the Khalqis explained it as an expression of the Afghan people’s unity, harmony and victory over oppression and colonialism. When the Khalqis unveiled this flag in October 1978, Taraki presided over a day-long ceremony in Kabul featuring red banners and bunting, the release of pigeons with red ribbons around their throats, and young women dressed in red. A celebratory march involved 150,000 people—some there voluntarily, others because the government ordered them to attend, and others who feared what might happen if they did not. In Kandahar, a crowd led by clerics tore down the red flag, which they interpreted as a sign that Afghanistan had become a Soviet satellite, and raised a green Islamic one.

  A growing number of political exiles in Peshawar, including traditional religious leaders Sebghatullah Mojadiddi, Sayyid Ahmad Gailani and Mohammad Nabi Mohammadi, competed to lead the opposition against the Khalqis. While the communists branded them ‘basmachi’ or bandits, westerners described them as rebels, guerrillas, militants or insurgents. ‘Mujahideen’—an Arabic word meaning ‘those engaged in jihad’, literally a term for ‘struggle’—initially came into international currency in relation to a relatively secular group involved in the 1979 Iranian revolution. The usual translation of ‘mujahideen’ in relation to Afghanistan was ‘Islamic fighters’ or ‘holy warriors’. Nick Downie, a British cameraman who worked in Afghanistan in 1979, reported that many were principally interested in plunder.

  Raymond Depardon, a founder of the French photographic agency Gamma who had just moved to Magnum, was first to record the conflict. Having been in Beirut photographing the war there, Depardon travelled to Peshawar. Then, for fifteen days in November 1978, he went into Nuristan and Badakhshan, two of the border provinces with Pakistan where the insurrection was greatest. His guide was Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was born in the Panjshir Valley and studied in Kabul, but did not complete his engineering degree because of his Islamist activism. After participating in, if not leading, the Islamist insurrection in the Panjshir in 1975, Massoud joined the Jamiat-e Islami, one of the most prominent of the new rebel groups. Largely comprised of Tajiks, this Society of Islam was led by Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former professor in the Sharia Faculty of Kabul University.

  As would generally remain the case, Depardon saw no fighting and, travelling on foot, did not go far. But Depardon took pictures of the ruins of houses bombed by government forces. He demonstrated Jamiat’s success by photographing the many government soldiers its fighters took prisoner. He conveyed the faith of these fighters by showing them kneeling at prayer with their guns on their backs or immediately in front of them. This photograph—the start of a new genre—identified the fighters’ cause as religious and implicitly celebrated Islamic observance, which usually aroused fear and suspicion in the West.

  The men’s appearance was varied. Many were bearded, some including Massoud, were moustachioed and other were clean-shaven. Most wore the local pakul hat with its distinctive rolled up edge, but Massoud often went bareheaded. Some were armed with the Lee Enfield .303, the British army’s standard rifle from 1895 until 1957, which had great accuracy and range. Others had Soviet semi-automatic Kalashnikovs, which combined the portability of machine pistols with the firepower of machine-guns.

  Most of the country remained more or less at peace, allowing Viktor Sarianidi to embark on a new excavation in the autumn of 1978. Its site was a mound outside the northern city of Sherbeghan which locals called, significantly, Tillya Tepe, Hill of Gold. While Sarianidi and his Soviet-Afghan team were threatened one day by a group of armed tribesmen on horseback, the archaeologists otherwise worked undisturbed. When they stopped in February 1979, with their funds exhausted and the spring rains about to start, they had excavated six graves containing skulls and bones and an astonishing array of artefacts. ‘Nowhere in antiquity have so many different objects from so many different cultures—Chinese mirrors, Roman coins, daggers from Siberia—been found together,’ Sarianidi observed. The local Bactrian art, primarily made of gold, dating to the first century CE, was a revelation.

  The most famous archaeological discovery in Afghanistan had been another mound at Begram, north of Kabul. There, in the late 1930s, French archaeologists Joseph and Ria Hackin and Afghan archaeologist Ahmad Ali Khan Khozad discovered two storerooms crammed with objects including more than one thousand ivories carved in the style of southern India used to decorate furniture and now also generally dated to the first century. While initially identified as a royal hoard, at least some of the pieces were luxury trade goods. Sarianidi’s discoveries at Tillya Tepe in 1978—immediately likened by the international press to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and identified as ‘one of the finds of the century’—was even more remarkable. Before leaving Afghanistan, Sarianidi deposited 21,618 artefacts in the National Museum in Darulaman on the outskirts of Kabul.

  Maoists showed that they were still a significant force when they kidnapped the American ambassador and took him to the Kabul Hotel, where he was killed in a shoot-out as police attempted his rescue. As a precautionary measure, the Taraki government ordered the removal of the National Museum’s collection from Darulaman to the centre of the city where it went into storage. Following a rebel assault on Asabadad, the capital of the border province of Kunar, government soldiers executed many unarmed men and boys in the village of Kerala and buried them in a mass grave.

  The biggest uprising was in Herat where townspeople seized control in March 1979, tore down the red flag and destroyed portraits of Taraki. Rather than suppress this revolt, soldiers joined the rebels who were soon exaggerating both their own barbarism and the communists’ response. While the rebels killed a few of the governent’s Soviet advisers, they boasted of slaughtering up to a hundred, along with many of the advisers’ wives and children and putting the Soviets’ heads on poles. They maintained that Soviet planes carpet-bombed the city, killing at least 5000 if not 20,000 or 30,000. In fact, all the planes had been flown by Afghans, whose attacks on strategic sites allowed a small government force to retake the city within a few days. The number killed remains a matter of speculation.

  Taraki repeatedly asked the Kremlin to support his government not just with weapons and advisers but also with troops. Each time, the Soviets declined because of the economic, military and political risks and costs. Meanwhile, the Carter administration in Washington began providing the rebels with ‘non-lethal’, ‘non-military’ covert aid from July 1979. This support has been identified as a ‘Bear Trap’—an American strategy to lure the Soviets into sending their troops so Afghanistan would become Moscow’s Vietnam. But American records indicate that Washington’s goal was to stop Moscow taking military action in Afghanistan. Since Washington provided only $500,000, its aid was largely inconsequential.

  More foreigners left. They included the biggest buyer of Afghan rugs, Richard Parsons of British company Oriental Carpet Manufacturers. When new strictures on foreigners travelling outside Kabul forced him to abandon a tour of western Afghanistan in the summer of 1979, Parsons moved to Peshawar. Other foreigners opted to stay away. Wh
en Alighiero Boetti visited Kabul that November, he attended a farewell party for Lela Meinhardt, an American textile and jewellery dealer who had decided to abandon her regular visits. After that, Boetti stopped visiting too. And although Viktor Sarianidi had intended to resume his excavations at Tillya Tepe, where he knew there were two more graves, he could not, and both graves were looted.

  Several French photographers followed Raymond Depardon in entering Afghanistan covertly from Pakistan to record the fighting. Their visits were a mark of the longstanding French interest in Afghanistan and the disproportionate significance of French photojournalists. The most successful was Arnaud de Wildenberg of the Sipa agency, who, while in Nuristan in March 1979, recorded the first government helicopter downed by the rebels. De Wildenberg’s photograph of a large group of mujahideen standing on the helicopter—some raising their Lee Enfields, a couple holding Kalashnikovs—conveyed both their triumph and their limited weaponry.

  Michel Setboun followed, escorted by members of the Party of Islam, Hezb-e Islami, a predominantly Pashtun group led by senior cleric Yhunus Khalis, who took him to the border province of Paktia in the Pashtun south. Setboun recorded how the fighters there, unlike in Badakhshan and Nuristan, were generally turbaned. He photographed them on tanks and armoured personnel carriers which they had disabled or destroyed. He showed their dead and their burial, including a rare shot of a woman. Photographing in colour, he documented one of the first rebel flags, its text and symbols in Islamic green on a white background.

  The weekly colour supplement of Milan’s Corriere della Sera, one of Italy’s foremost newspapers, was first to make the conflict a cover story after its newly appointed special correspondent Ettore Mo visited the north-eastern province of Kunar with photographer Giuseppe Colombo. Their ten-page feature that July was headed ‘All the Men of Allah’—a mode of title much followed, again casting the rebels’ cause as religious. The feature broke new ground by including several photographs of ordinary Afghan refugees, who by the end of the year probably numbered more than 200,000. Its focus was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Pashtun leader of another Hezb-e Islami, whom Colombo photograped in his usual karakul hat—the preferred headgear of Kabul’s modernisers from the 1950s, led by Mohammad Daoud. Mo identified Hekmatyar hyperbolically as leader of ninety per cent of the rebels in Afghanistan.

  Steve McCurry, a twenty-nine-year-old photographer from Philadelphia who had been freelancing in India, also visited Nuristan that May and then Kunar in August. He photographed rebels laying landmines, revealing how quick they were to do so, and an alleged government collaborator standing impassively as two rebels posed with Kalashnikovs aimed at him, suggesting his imminent execution. But McCurry initially found no market. The New York Times, which was at the forefront of reporting the conflict, preferred images provided by the rebels. ‘The men who drift into this city…to bring news of their struggle come with photographs,’ Michael Kaufman reported for the Times from Peshawar in August 1979 in one of the first articles illustrated by these ‘snapshots’. They suggested the rebels’ success against much better armed government forces by showing fragments of a warplane on the ground and tanks and armored personnel carriers ‘apparently immoblised by tribal riflemen’. The rebels’ performance for the camera was obvious. Almost every picture featured ‘smiling men in turbans brandishing weapons’.

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  Afghanistan’s rule changed again in September 1979, when Hafizullah Amin, who had become prime minister six months before, had Nur Mohammad Taraki murdered. With western interest scant, Michel Setboun was exceptional in arriving in time to record workmen removing Taraki’s portrait from public display and replacing it with Amin’s portrait. While Amin appeared in jacket, shirt and tie, he sought to broaden his appeal by also being photographed in traditional Pashtun clothes and announcing he would fund the painting of mosques. Like Taraki, he sought Soviet military assistance—above all, a special batallion to defend his residence. But he was in immediate jeopardy because his murder of Taraki had outraged the Kremlin. It suspected that Amin might ally with the United States, even as President Carter decided to increase aid to the rebels and asked Saudi Arabia to provide matching funding.

  The Soviets were intent on maintaining a friendly government in Kabul. ‘Under no circumstances may we lose Afghanistan,’ Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko declared at a meeting of the Politburo during the Herat uprising. When the Kremlin decided to act that December, the extent of the insurrection was a factor but Amin’s rule and the chaotic state of the Afghan army concerned it more. After trying unsuccessfully to have Amin shot by snipers, the Kremlin sought to poison him. Then it covertly flew Babrak Karmal and Anahita Ratibzad to the Bagram air base outside Kabul, hoping they might lead a coup with limited Soviet military support. Finally, it sent its troops to kill Amin while advising him that they were coming to protect him.

  Soviet troops began entering Afghanistan on 24 December 1979—some travelling overland along the Salang Highway, others flying to Bagram and Kabul. On the night of 27 December 1979, a combination of special forces and regular soldiers including the Soviets’ Muslim Battalion assaulted the heavily fortified Taj Bek Palace where Amin was staying. Special forces also attacked military installations and government offices. They took the palace in under an hour, but about three hundred Afghan soldiers and seventy-three Soviets died, along with Amin. Once again, the Afghan press stayed away. And no western journalists were in Kabul to document what had occurred.

  CHAPTER 14

  Scoop

  Dozens of western photographers and cameramen were soon trying to reach Afghanistan—not because of the killing of another president or because of the greater loss of life but because Soviet troops were there. Many photographers and cameramen tried to get to Kabul. Others entered eastern Afghanistan from Peshawar with the mujahideen, as the communists’ opponents were soon generally known, partly because western officials actively discouraged journalists from using ‘rebels’ or ‘insurgents’ as lacking sufficient legitimacy. A few reporters made their way into western Afghanistan from Iran. Some mujahideen took their own photographs, as did the new Afghan government and the Soviets. The result was not only a war of images between the opposing sides but also intense competition between western photographers as western newspapers and magazines featured Afghanistan on an unprecedented scale.

  Steve McCurry, whose photographs had begun to be published by the New York Times at the start of December, was a big beneficiary. On 27 December, the Times illustrated a front-page story about the airlift of Soviet troops to Kabul with one of McCurry’s photographs of a government helicopter that the mujahideen had shot down in Kunar. Two days later, the Times illustrated another front-page story with a photograph of government soldiers who had defected to the mujahideen. Before long, many other American and European newspapers and magazines were using McCurry’s images, generally without acknowledging they were four if not seven months old. NBC television also interviewed McCurry when he briefly visited New York. American Photographer arranged to carry a portfolio of his Afghan work. And Time commissioned him to return to Afghanistan: his first major assignment.

  François Lochon of Gamma was the first western photographer into Kabul. Because there were no direct flights from Paris, he flew to Frankfurt, then took the first flight to Kabul after its airport opened to civilian aircraft. When Lochon arrived on the morning of 30 December, he made no attempt to hide his profession. Officials still gave him a visa, their longstanding practice for foreigners. Lochon’s first destination was the Intercontinental Hotel, where he took a room in case he had to stay the night. But he hoped to get his work done and leave that day to ensure that he was the first photographer with images of the new Afghanistan to reach the West.

  Lochon began by returning to the airport to record the vast Soviet military presence there. First, he worked in colour, then black and white. He hid the films in his boots in case of arrest. Then he sought to acquire images already taken�
�standard practice for a photojournalist on the verge of a scoop—so he could control their use. Having spent several weeks in Kabul earlier in the year, Lochon had some idea whom to ask. While one Frenchman would not sell to the ‘capitalist’ press, another did, including a compelling image of three Soviet soldiers in a tank, echoing photographs from Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Then, Lochon pursued such imagery himself before boarding an afternoon flight to Delhi and returning via Frankfurt to Paris where Gamma began selling his images.

  Pascal Manoukian, another French photographer, began much closer in the Pakistani city of Quetta, 700 kilometres from Kabul, not 7000. Manoukian was there with Patrice Franceschi of Paris Match to accompany mujahideen into southern Afghanistan. Instead, Manoukian and Franceschi set out for Kabul, but their proximity worked against them as they lost a day waiting for a flight to Islamabad and had to wait again for a bus to Peshawar, before proceeding by car across the Khyber Pass. After securing visas in Torkham, they arrived in Kabul late on 30 December. At dawn the following morning, Manoukian was photographing Soviet soldiers with a camera hidden in his anorak, little realising that Lochon was back in Europe, about to appear on television to discuss what he had witnessed.

  Other photographers and television crews flew from Delhi on an Ariana flight on the thirtieth, only to find that the communists had decided to exclude the western press. As a result, nearly all the media simply got as far as the airport terminal, then returned to Delhi on the same plane, though their visit was not a complete waste. Photographers and cameramen recorded what they could of the Soviet forces at the airport. From New Year’s Eve, their images began appearing in the international press.