Posted on 07/24/2002 9:05:23 PM PDT by swarthyguy
AMIAN, Afghanistan — Hussein Jan, a 51-year-old farmer, tossed a stone into a shallow pit dug on a slope above this town. "They shot us here, 76 people, they killed everyone, and only I survived," he said.
"With me there were 11 people from my village, most of them relatives, and I alone survived," he said. He laughed, tipping his head back, but his face suddenly twisted into a grimace of terrible pain.
In tales like this, the people of the Bamian region have been counting their dead since they returned to this fabled valley seven months ago, after the departure of the Taliban.
The ancient Buddhas carved into the great cliffs on one side of the valley are gone, destroyed by the Taliban in its Islamic fundamentalist fervor. Gone, too, are an estimated 1,400 villagers, killed in waves over the four years of Taliban rule.
The Hazara, the main ethnic group here, say the massacres were part of a sustained campaign by the Taliban to eliminate them. But the scale and circumstances of the killings have not been independently established. As with so much else in Afghanistan in the years of unending violence that followed the Soviet invasion of 1979, it remains uncertain if they ever will be.
A United Nations forensic team examined one mass grave in April, found the remains of 18 bodies and promised to return. They have not yet. William D. Haglund, a forensic anthropologist who took part in the mission, said much more investigation needed to be done before the teams could come back.
The new transitional government in Kabul has set up a human rights commission, but it faces a huge task. The national death toll over the last decade alone probably runs into the hundreds of thousands, and one million are thought to have died during the Soviet occupation of the 1980's.
For now, the families returning to the valley, from hideouts in the mountains or exile in Pakistan, have discovered at least six mass graves. Local leaders are collecting the dead. They say the pattern of killing shows an ethnically motivated campaign against the Hazara, who are distinct for their Asian features and who are Shiite Muslims, while most other Afghans are Sunnis. (The two groups differ over the line of succession from Muhammad and the validity of some Islamic writings.)
Hussein Jan has no doubt of the purpose of the killings. When Taliban forces seized control of the valley in 1998, he and his family fled to the mountains. A few days later, the Taliban announced a pardon for all villagers and said they could return home to bring in the harvest.
"They tricked us," Hussein Jan said. "If we had known they would kill us, we would not have come." Within hours of returning to his fields, he was arrested by Taliban soldiers and was taken to the police station. Eighty men, he said, were detained. "They were all from these villages around here," he said. "Most were farmers and villagers. None of them were fighters."
That afternoon four men, their arms tied, were taken away in the back of a pickup truck. (Hussein Jan learned a few days later that the four had been executed.)
"They insulted us, and said Hazara were unbelievers, that we were not Muslims, that we were Buddhists, that we did not pray," Hussein Jan said.
About 9 p.m. that night, Taliban soldiers marched the other 76 men out. "When they tied our hands and brought us out of the prison, we knew they were going to kill us," Hussein Jan said.
They were taken to a wasteland a quarter mile from the prison and made to squat down in a square shallow pit, he said.
Two Taliban soldiers opened fire. "There was one man who was very strong," Hussein Jan said. "He was a porter. His name was Ganjai. He fell on top of me."
A bullet struck his head and he lost consciousness, he said. At some point, Taliban soldiers examined the pile of bodies by flashlight, and he acted dead. Hours later, when everything was quiet, he struggled out of the pit and headed for the mountains. At a village, two men foraging for food untied his hands. "One of them asked about his father, and I told him his father was dead," Hussein Jan said.
"There was no reason to kill us," he said. "It was just that we were Hazara."
The Hazara, and particularly their main political party, Hesb-e-Wahdat, themselves gained a terrifying reputation in the factional fighting from 1992 to 1995, when thousands of civilians died in Kabul, Mazar-i-Sharif and the Bamian valley. Ethnic Tajiks are still afraid to return to Bamian because of the presence of Wahdat fighters who chased them out in the early 1990's.
Many of the 1,400 civilians killed during Taliban rule died in reprisals as battle lines shifted and Taliban forces fought off repeated Hesb-e-Wahdat attacks, said the party's political representative in Bamian, Jawad (who uses only one name). The party lost only 150 soldiers in the fighting; civilians accused of supporting the Wahdat fared worse.
Every village in the valley lost at least 15 to 20 people, Mr. Jawad said, and in one of the worst incidents, in Yakowlang, a town higher up the valley, 350 people were killed.
The killings were intended to rid the mountainous Hazarajat, the area where Hazara live, of the entire ethnic group, he said.
"It was clear that Mullah Omar ordered the Taliban to clear Hazarajat and kill all the people," Mr. Jawad said. "He once made an infamous statement: that all the Tajiks should go to Tajikistan, the Uzbeks to Uzbekistan and the Hazara to Ghoristan — that is the word for cemetery."
There are other reports of the killings. About 250 community leaders and workers were killed in 16 towns and villages, according to Rasul, an engineer who runs a community-based relief project in the valley.
"Some of them were killed by chance, but some were important community leaders and were killed because of their work," Mr. Rasul said. "The Taliban did not want us to work here."
The 18 bodies found by the United Nations team in April were recovered in Daoudi, not far from Bamian town. Autopsies of three males, all Hazara, showed they had been dead two to three years.
"All had died from gunshot wounds (mostly to the head and back), and one body was found with its hands bound, indicating summary execution," the investigators concluded.
When the investigators left, promising to return, they advised village authorities not to disturb the other grave sites. The villagers are eager to bury the remains properly.
But further examinations must wait.
"In Bamian it is difficult to tell who is killed, died, how they got to where one finds them, and who they are," Mr. Haglund, the forensics expert, wrote in an e-mail message. "A lot more on-the-ground investigation would need to be done before it would be worthwhile to do any more remains recoveries there. In all of Afghanistan, really."
One site is a well in the grounds of a shrine in Gurwan, just outside Bamian town, where at least eight people were shot and dumped by Taliban soldiers several years ago, residents say. They have removed some of the soil and a man's foot and rubber shoe can be seen 30 feet down. The smell of decaying bodies lingers.
Abdullah, a bright 11-year-old from the village, said he heard the shooting and, from a hiding place in a tree, saw the Taliban dragging bodies by the hair to the well. The village children crowd round him; each one has a story of a relative being killed.
"The son of Warqa killed my uncle," piped up freckled 5-year-old, Jan Agha.
"They killed my cousin," said another boy, Ali Muhammad, 6. "They arrested him in his house and killed him in a gully. Parts of his body were lost and we recognized him from his clothes."
As for the 75 people Hussein Jan did not die with, they now lie a few hundred yards away, buried in a line by the women of the village, who alone dared to approach the execution spot under the gaze of the Taliban soldiers.
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