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It has been 40 years since Friday, December 27, 2019, that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan began. Four decades later, it's still the same question: why?
The young man in the tarnished and cracked photo on the chimney of this small apartment in the northern suburbs of Paris looks piercing, but cold and sad. More than a family portrait, the image strangely resembles an age-old art photo.
Wounded in the face by the indelicacy of his walk, the man in the picture of three quarters with a diamond face proudly carries on his shoulders diagonally belt belts. And in his hands, an old rifle turned towards the objective, that of the camera.
" Who is it?" We ask Sima, the hostess. " One Afghan among the hundreds of thousands who lost their lives as a result of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, " she said with resentment and spite. Did she know him? " No ", replies our interlocutor. And after a few seconds of silence, she turns to the photo, looks at it insistently and adds: " It was my father. "
Our silent amazement encouraged him to speak. " He died somewhere in the mountains of northern Afghanistan in the winter of 1979-80, before I was born. This photo was taken a few weeks before, at the beginning of his engagement in the resistance. His name was Karim, he was 22 years old. About him, that's about all I know. "
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If Sima does not know more, it is because the family clan has been decimated by the successive wars which, since that night of invasion of December 27, 1979, have seized Afghanistan. Those who knew a little about it perished as they traveled, from village to village, to die out before it reached, in their eyes, the age to be able to hear " these horrors ".
But these " horrors " which the family wanted to spare him still accompany Sima today. The loss of the mother, uncle and children from the bombing; hunger, exile, loneliness ... And she knows a lot about " the history of her people ", without knowing enough about that of her father.
When on Thursday December 27, 1979, nearly 400 military transport planes pour over the Afghan capital, in just five hours, 20,000 soldiers equipped with their combat equipment, Karim " does not yet know anything about weapons and apparently plays pretty good, rubâb ", a musical instrument from the lute family.
At the same time, two long military convoys from Turkmenistan and Tajikistan, then two from the Soviet socialist republics, advanced with 45,000 men to Herat in the west and Mazâr-e Charîf in the north of the country.
This intervention by the Red Army had already been preparing for several months. The American intelligence services had noted movements of troops and movement of equipment at military bases near Dushanbe and Merv, in the south of the USSR.
Three days before the invasion, several thousand paratroopers and members of the Soviet special forces were already dispatched to Afghanistan and placed at the main airports and around vital installations to secure the massive arrival of troops.
The first mission entrusted to the intervention forces is accomplished the same evening of December 27. Spetsnazs , KGB special forces supported by army paratroopers, seize the presidential palace, Dar-ol-Aman, and kill the communist president of Afghanistan, Hafizullah Amin.
Just over three months before his assassination, Amin had overthrown and suffocated his predecessor, Nour Mahammad Taraki, the first president of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, protected from the Soviets. This coup, implemented within the Afghan Communist Party without Moscow's approval, had greatly upset the Soviet leaders.
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Hafizullah Amin, a radical figure in the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), considered that the reforms undertaken by Taraki were not going fast enough.
He was unaware that the Soviet "big brother", witness to the resistance of the Afghan population to the social and economic reforms already implemented, feared a larger and more decisive mobilization of Islamic fighters and did not want to rush things.
What mattered for the Soviet Union immediately was not to accelerate the transformation of the country, but not to lose in the face of the Islamists who already enjoyed the support of the United States, Pakistan and China .
In addition, the internal conflict which tore the Afghan Communist Party between the two currents, Khalq (the people), represented mainly by the Pashtuns, and Parcham (the flag), embodied more by the Tajiks, worried the brother party in Moscow.
It is therefore partly to put an end to the disorder, and above all, as Leonid Brezhnev, president of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR said, so as not to lose Afghanistan, that Moscow decides to send its troops there. Soviet leaders believe that the failure of the communist experience in Afghanistan could have far-reaching consequences for the Muslim republics in the south of the Union, which are seen as weak links.
The cold war was at the height of its show of force, and the Islamic fever of the Iranian revolution of 1979 seemed to take hostage the most alert minds, even in the West.
On the evening of December 27, and barely two hours after the liquidation of Hafizullah Amin, the Soviets took over Babrak Karmal, the other strong man of the Afghan Communist Party, who presented his government two days later.
The Soviet Union does not seem to be worried about strong condemnations from Western, Arab and United Nations countries, as well as strong retaliatory measures such as the embargo on high-tech equipment and agri-food products, or the boycott of Moscow Olympics.
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The USSR is continuing the deployment of forces, reaching around mid-January 90,000 men in large cities and on hotspots to control the main lines of communication.
In Kabul and other urban areas, the population is under close surveillance. Intellectuals, journalists, artists and all those who are not considered favorable to this intervention are threatened, arrested, tortured and imprisoned.
Kacem Fazeli, former legal counsel to the government of Hamid Karzai, then his country's ambassador to Prague and to Unesco, still remembers the days when fear in the stomach and anger stifled in the throat, he went to Kabul University.
Professor and director of the criminal law department, he witnesses every day " the increasing presence of Soviet soldiers on the way to and around the university ".
One day, very upset and distressed by this " occupation show ", he shared this feeling with one of his colleagues, and together they tried to create a resistance movement within the law school and beyond. within the university. A few days later, the armed men arrive at his house, arrest him and take him to the political police interrogation center to tell him to shut up and submit.
“ The next day, he says, every day in the corridors of the university, a young man, probably a student, different from that of the previous days, comes to threaten me and say that all my acts are being watched. . "
The pressure increases every day, making it difficult to continue working, and even to live. Kacem takes the path of exile, " passing through the mountains and the valleys " to take refuge in France.
Like him and like Sima, during the ten years of Soviet occupation, at least 5 million Afghans were forced to leave the country. Three million more are internally displaced. In the 1980s, half of the world's refugees were Afghan citizens.
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On the military level, the Red Army has control of the sky. But on the ground, it controls only the major urban centers and the major communication routes. From 1986, the mujahideen who controlled four fifths of the country received from the United States the Stinger anti-aircraft missiles endangering Soviet aircraft. This significantly changed the outcome of the war.
Mikhail Gorbachev, then secretary general of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, began by stopping the major operations of the army from January 1987, before considering its total withdrawal.
To do this, he recalled, in November 1986, Babrak Karmal in Moscow, leaving his place to Mohammad Chamkani, who was replaced 10 months later by Mohammad Najibullah. The new president is responsible for initiating negotiations with the mujahideen to prepare the conditions for Soviet withdrawal.
This withdrawal ended on February 15, 1989 at 11:30 am, when General Boris Gromov, Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, crossed the "friendship bridge" at Hairatan, on the border between the two countries.
The leaders of the Soviet Union did not realize the impossibility of winning this war until almost a decade after having started it. The indignation of the population, during the arrival of coffins of soldiers killed, the repatriation of the wounded, the unsustainable financial effort to continue the conflict, and above all the awareness of its uselessness, forced the Soviet power to withdraw from this quagmire.
“ The Central Committee was inundated with letters asking for an end to the war. They were written by the mothers, wives and sisters of the soldiers […] The officers declared themselves incapable of explaining to their subordinates why we were fighting, what we were doing there and what we wanted to obtain ”, admitted in 2003 former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev.
The USSR, by deciding to launch this invasion, also swung its soldiers " in molten lava ", wrote later the colonel of the paratroopers, Vladimir Savitskiy.
In an interview with Le Nouvel Observateur , Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser (1977-1981), said: " The day the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter " to tell him : " We now have the opportunity to give the USSR its Vietnam War. "
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During the 110 months of war, the Soviet Union deployed a total of 620,000 troops to Afghanistan. According to official Russian figures, at least 15,400 soldiers have been killed and 50,000 injured.
The number of killed has reached 26,000 men, according to the History Office of the Russian General Staff, if one includes soldiers who died from accidents or illnesses. The CIA estimates that taking into account all those killed in combat, accidents, illness or suicide, the number would reach 50,000.
The Red Army also lost 800 planes and helicopters and 1,500 tanks, the rusted carcasses of which are still scattered almost everywhere on Afghan territory, recalling the stupidity of this war.
By her human misfortune, her political bankruptcy, her military failure and her financial cost of more than 30 billion dollars for Moscow, she has in the words of the Russian political scientist Alexei Bogatourov, " torpedoed the unity of Soviet society " and contributed to the collapse of the USSR. The Congress of People's Deputies of the USSR in 1989 called the Afghan incursion "a disastrous adventure ".
But the disaster has especially hit Afghanistan. The Soviets left him as a legacy the hydra of war which, 30 years after their departure, kills people, decimates hopes, devastates the territory and still rejects the population on the paths of exile.
Communist power, which resisted for three more years after the Soviet withdrawal, collapsed on April 16, 1992 under the blows of a coalition made up of several groups of resistants, who were quick to sack the capital and to engage in a fratricidal war.
During the Soviet War, 20,000 government soldiers and about 90,000 Afghan mujahideen lost their lives. The war also left 75,000 wounded in the ranks of the combatants.
But it was the civilian casualties that were particularly disastrous: estimates range from 562,000 to 2 million people killed in the war during this period.
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The vagueness of the figure and the large gap between the estimates is an affront to history and to each of these lives extinguished violently in indifference and silence. They are not even listed, only estimated. Without a name, without a face, perhaps without a grave.
The photo placed on Sima's chimney, 40 years after it was taken, reminds her every day in pain of what this terrible war was. What leave her with her many questions, all summarized in one word: why?
Sima is convinced that hundreds of thousands of other photos, some tarnished and cracked, others bright and radiant, evoke the same truth to those who keep them, to those who look at them. And all - children, wives, mothers, fathers - ask the same questions with the same word: why?
In the past decade, conflicts in Afghanistan have claimed more than 100,000 civilian lives, including those killed and injured. Figures announced Thursday by the head of the UN mission in the country, which establishes a very precise count.
Afghanistan is in the grip of violence perpetrated by several armed groups, including the Taliban, which are in talks with the United States for the withdrawal of their soldiers installed since 2001. Since the Soviet invasion, the country has known only wars.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in December 1979, they really set off an absolutely terrifying mechanism that continues. To have intervened in many countries at war for a long time, we know that war has its own logic and that getting out of war is very complicated. We were in a country that was developing slowly but surely. We were in a country whose regime was a parliamentary monarchy. The king was overthrown by his cousin and by the two Afghan communist parties, who ultimately lost ground since they were ultra-minority in the country. There was a kind of joke all over the countryside, in the cities, and the Soviet Union came to their aid, because the regime was going to fall. And there, we entered a never ending war process. Today, after the Soviets, it's the Americans
Alain Boinet, initiator of Caravans of Hope to help victims of the conflict 40 years ago, and founder of the NGO Solidarités International 12/27/2019 - by Jelena Tomic Play