Afghan video
The soundtrack consists of a mournful Afghan flute playing the
Carpenters' Yesterday Once More and the Beatles' Yesterday.
But this is no sentimental Hollywood love story. This
is the most disturbing, the most graphic, the most stomach-churning war film
I have ever seen.
We sit down to watch the video in a house on the west
side of Peshawar. This is a vast densely populated slum district that stretchess
from the city center out to the shanty towns on the approach road to the Khyber
Pass.
It is the Afgan side of the city, home to over a million
refugees who have flooded into the city in wave afer waveof migration as to
escape starvation, opppression and war.
This evening I'm with a group of young Afghhans. All of
their fathers and uncles are veterans of the war against the Soviet Union.
Hassan, my translator is an activist with the Afghan Revolutionary
Labour Organisation.
His father still lives in Afghanistan, in the besieged
city of Mazara e Sharif, where he is an underground organiser for the left wing
party.
Hassan himself and other young left wing activists regularly
travel back and forward between Pakistan and Afghanistan, by horseback over
secret mountain paths.
But this evening, they want to show me some amateur movies
filmed secretly inside Afghanistan. The videos include footage from the guerilla
war aginst the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the bloodletting in Kabul in the mid
1990s between various factions of the mujaheedin and life today under the Taliban.
One shocking scene shows a Taliban public execution, close
up and in full technicolor.
A man is tied to the ground face upwards. The man has
been accussed of murder. Under Tliban supervision, the burca-clad widow exacts
her revenge.
She slits the throat of the condemned man, then proceeds
to hack off his head.
These youth are all anti-Taliban. "The Taliban are monsters
cretaed by America and Pakistan because it suited them," explains Hassan, "Now
it suits them to create a new monster."
The Northern Alliance are now being portrayed in the Western
media as heroic freedom fighters, the goodies in the white turbans against the
baddies in the black turbans.
Western journalists, including John Simpson of the BBC
report daily from behind Nothern Alliance lines.
But as these home made movies reveal, the warlords who
lead the various factions of the Northern Aliance are genocidal murderers, ethnic
cleansers who turned the streets of Kabul crimson with the blood of rival nationalities.
One scene shows the uncovering of a mass grave where the
bodies of 100 dead Hazaras have been dumped,, slaughted by Ahmed Shah Masood,
the Norther Alliane commander who was assassinated in September.
The films show distraught relatives hugging the mmutilated
corpses of children and old people massacred in Kabul by Mahsood's forces. There
are close ups of body parts and bloodstained pavements.
Opponent are shown swinging from lamposts with silent
crowds thronging the streets to watch.
Much of this footage was shot by Haazara fighters of the
Hibz-e- Whadat orgnaisation, now one of the Northern Alliance groups.
"This organisation also carried out identical atrocities.They
massaccred Tajiks and Pashtoons," explains Hassan. "Today they are united for
convenience. But ethnic cleansing is their speciaity."
Watching these videos, its easy to imagine that barbarism
is deepy embedded in Afgan culture and society.
But before the wars started in the late 1970s Afghanistan
was a highly civilised country. The cities were centres of culture and education.
The young people I'm with tonight are intelligent, friendlyy
and polite - and have known nothing but oppression and war.
Hassan himself has wtnessed public amputations back home. He
and his friends detest the Taliban and everything it stands for.
They also bitterly oppose the blitzreig against their
homeland by America.
"The Americans created the Taliban . because they thought
ths would bring stability to Afghanistan.
"Now they are supporting the Northern Alliance. Theey
are trying to replace one breed of monster with another."