Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (140 page)

Soviet policy, which became increasingly confused as the 1980s progressed, was dictated by its assumption that the Baathist regimes were its most reliable allies in the Middle East; so it armed Baathist Syria, as well as Baathist Iraq, though the two were irreconcilable enemies. The West felt it must lean, if anything, towards Iraq since Iran was identified with international terrorism, and especially with the kidnapping by Shi’ite militias of Western citizens in Beirut. It is true that terrorism in the 1980s took a variety of forms. An Indian terrorist group was probably responsible for the mid-Atlantic destruction of an Air India Boeing, all aboard perishing; and Sikh terrorists assassinated the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs Indira Gandhi, on 31 October 1984. A Tamil terrorist was believed responsible for the murder of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991. During the early 1980s the Russian
KGB
was still training terrorists from various nations in special camps in the Crimea and elsewhere, and the Soviet government itself was guilty of a terrorist act on 1 September 1983 when, quite deliberately and without warning, it shot down a civil airliner, a Boeing 747 of (South) Korean Airways, which had strayed off course into Soviet territory.

Some murderous acts remained mysteries: the Swedish police were unable to discover who killed the country’s Prime Minister, Olaf Palme, on 28 February 1986, the only suspect they produced being acquitted. On the other hand, there was no doubt that the Irish Republican Army was responsible for an attempt to murder the entire British Cabinet on 12 October 1984 in a Brighton hotel during the annual Conservative Party conference, and for a further shot at the Cabinet in January 1991, when home-made mortar bombs were unsuccessfully fired at 10 Downing Street. The IRA got its Semtex explosives from Czechoslovakia, the makers; when Vaclav Havel became the Czech President in 1990 he reported that Semtex records showed the IRA had been supplied by the Communist regime with enough explosives to last one hundred years. But the IRA also received vast quantities of weapons (some of them intercepted and identified) from Gadafy’s Libya, from other
Middle Eastern states and from the
PLO.
Iranian-supported groups were responsible for perhaps the most successful terrorist assault of all, two coordinated suicide-bomb attacks in Beirut on 23 October 1983, which killed 241 American marines and 58 French paratroopers, guarding their embassies. Middle Eastern groups, financed by Iran, Libya or possibly both, also blew up a West Berlin discotheque patronized by American soldiers, on 5 April 1986, and a Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie in Scotland on 21 December 1988, killing its 258 passengers and crew and eleven on the ground.

All these outrages, and many more minor ones, without exception, failed in their political objectives. During the 1980s and still more into the 1990s, the West was less inclined than in the 1970s to have any kind of dealings with terrorist groups; indeed, international policing became highly coordinated, and it became progressively easier to secure the extradition of wanted terrorists. The effect of international and especially state-backed terrorism was, rather, to distort the West’s judgement in dealing with certain Middle Eastern states. In particular, America’s obsession with hostile Iran, which in turn always referred to the United States as ‘the Great Satan’, led it to underestimate the growing threat from Iraq. Rarely in diplomacy can the old adage ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend’ have applied more aptly.

So Iran found itself isolated. As a rule, a non-white nationalist leader who treated Washington as his prime enemy could expect a sympathetic response from the Western intelligentsia. But Khomeini had a unique talent for alienating potential allies. In 1988 the Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie, who had been a minor literary celebrity since he won the Booker Prize for his novel
Midnight’s Children
in 1981, published another controversial work of fiction,
The Satanic Verses.
The title referred to certain verses cut from the Koran by the Prophet Mohammed because he believed they were inspired by Satan. Many found the book obscure; nonetheless it was on the bestseller list in London, disposing of 40,000 hardback copies in three months. But it angered British Muslims, who pronounced it blasphemous. On 14 January 1989, Muslims in Bradford publicly burned copies of the book. It was then drawn to the attention of the Ayatollah himself, and on 14 February he publicly announced: ‘I inform the proud Muslim people of the world that the author of
The Satanic Verses
book, which is against Islam, the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.’
⁴⁷
Muslims were enjoined to carry out this
fatwah
or religious ruling.

There was some argument among Muslim religious authorities as to whether the book was indeed blasphemous, and whether the
Ayatollah was authorized to pass a death-sentence (it was confirmed by his successors when he finally went to eternity, aged eighty-six, on 4 June 1989). But no one was taking any chances. The novel had long since been banned in Pakistan, India and Saudi Arabia. Now, it was taken off display by Britain’s biggest book-chain, W. H. Smith, German, French and Italian publishers scrapped plans to bring out translations, Penguin Books postponed, then dropped, plans to bring out a paperback, and Rushdie himself cancelled an American promotional tour and went into hiding. The world-wide publicity sold the book in prodigious quantities, making Rushdie a multi-millionaire, though also a voluntary prisoner, perhaps for life. The literary and arts intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic – the ‘beautiful people’ in New York and the ‘chattering classes’ in London – joined hands to denounce the Ayatollah, his successors and their regime. The Left in general became almost as hostile to Iran as the White House, a strange conjunction. However, some British Labour MPs with large Pakistani minorities in their constituencies appeared curiously reluctant to stand up for freedom of publication; and the intellectuals lost a lot of enthusiasm for Rushdie’s cause when, abruptly in December 1990, in what may have been a genuine conversion but looked to many like a desperate (and unsuccessful, as it turned out) attempt to get the
fatwah
lifted, he announced his re-conversion to Islam and apologized for any offence caused.

The Khomeini regime could thus inspire fear but it could not make friends in any quarter. The only merit of its isolation was that it ended the Shah’s social engineering. The confiscation of its foreign assets, the eight-year war with Iraq, the virtual cessation for a time of oil production, and the flight of the middle class abroad or into hiding, brought the modern sector of the Iranian economy to a juddering halt, from which it was scarcely beginning to recover even in the early 1990s. The inevitable consequences followed: unemployment, breakdown of health and other basic services, mass epidemics, malnutrition and even starvation. Iran’s horrifying experiences illustrated yet again the law of unintended effect. The Shah’s state road to Utopia led only to Golgotha.

The Islamic revival, the Shah’s fall and the fundamentalist terror contributed directly to the beginning of civil war in Afghanistan in December 1979. Here was another case of social engineering leading to barbarism, though in this case, as so often, the Utopian impulse came from the Communist camp. The episode was important because of its eventual colossal impact on the entire Soviet empire. The British had fought three Afghan Wars (1838–42, 1878–80 and 1919), all well-meaning in a sense; none served to
establish stability in this unruly country or ‘solve’ the Afghan ‘problem’. Undeterred by this experience, the Soviet Union, from a mixture of fear, greed and good intentions, plunged into the Afghan maze and lost itself there. Up to 1979, the Soviet government had aimed for the long term. It supported the non-Marxist Prince Mohammed Daud when he set up a constitutional monarchy in 1953; and again twenty years later when he threw out the King and made himself President. In the 1950s it gave a little money; in the 1960s it built roads from the north (ultimately to be used by its troops); in the 1970s it concentrated on building up a united Marxist party. This last object was achieved, so it thought, in 1977 when it brought together in the People’s Democratic Party three revolutionary factions led by Babrak Karmal, Mur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin. By 1978 it was considered time for the social engineering to begin, and in April a Soviet-sanctioned
putsch
overthrew Daud.
⁴⁸

But the experience of the twentieth century shows emphatically that Utopianism is never far from gangsterism. The Soviet leaders could start revolution in Afghanistan; they could not control it. The trio now in power were not unlike the saturnine ideologues who launched the terror in Cambodia. Amin, the most forceful of them, was a maths teacher, who turned eagerly from the abstractions of numbers to quantitative bloodletting. His first act was to have thirty members of Daud’s family shot before his eyes; then members of the government; then Daud himself.
⁴⁹
According to Amnesty International, 12,000 prisoners were held without trial; many were tortured. Pushing through the Marxist-Leninist ‘plan’, as in Cambodia, involved the destruction of entire villages. According to one report of eye-witness accounts:

While the soldiers started pulling down and burning the houses, thirteen children were rounded up and stood in line in front of their parents. Some of the soldiers then poked out the children’s eyes with steel rods. The mutilated children were then slowly strangled to death. Next it was the parents’ turn … The surrounding fields were bulldozed, all trees and shrubs uprooted, and the entire site reduced to an ash-strewn scar.
⁵⁰

Though Karmal later accused Amin of being a ‘bloodthirsty hangman’ and ‘liquidating collectively’, the evidence shows he was equally guilty of such atrocities until March 1979, when Amin made himself sole dictator and packed Karmal off to Prague as ‘ambassador’. He intensified the terror, primarily because the new Khomeini regime was now giving aid to Muslim insurgents within Afghanistan. Indeed he seems to have nursed the idea of stamping out Islam entirely. Violence increased throughout 1979. The
American Ambassador, an insurgency expert, was murdered, probably by the Russians. On 12 August, thirty Russian advisers were skinned alive near the Muslim shrine of Kandahar. General Alexei Yepishev, the senior party official within the Red Army, who had handled the political side of the 1968 Czech invasion, went to Kabul, and on his return Taraki, regarded as the most ‘reliable’ of the trio, was ordered to remove Amin. But in the course of a lively discussion at the Soviet Embassy, it was Taraki who was shot, and Moscow was obliged to send Amin a telegram (17 September 1979) congratulating him on surviving a ‘counter-revolutionary plot’. The next week, at Amin’s request, three Soviet battalions moved into the country and, on 17 December, paratroops. Unknown to Amin they had Karmal in their baggage and on Christmas Day Soviet Russia began a full-scale invasion, using two of its seven airborne divisions. These were the 4th and 105th, all ‘Greater Russians’ (i.e., white Europeans). The main body of the 80,000-strong expeditionary force came down the new roads, built for this very purpose. Amin was murdered two days later, together with his wife, seven children, a nephew and twenty to thirty of his staff.
⁵¹
The Soviet general in charge of the
putsch
, Viktor Papertin, committed suicide. Karmal set up a new government, but the new year revealed him as nothing more than a Soviet puppet facing a general uprising.
⁵²

The initial Soviet army of 80,000 men gradually rose to 120,000, and occasionally was much higher. The war lasted a decade, and at no point were the Russians and their allies able to control much more than the main towns and strategic roads. At the time and since, the Soviet venture into Afghanistan was compared to American involvement in Vietnam, a miscalculation which turned into a disaster and shocked national self-confidence. But the parallels should not be drawn too closely. For one thing, Soviet generals fought the war with a ruthlessness which the Americans rarely showed in any part of Indo-China. They used tanks, gunships, bombing, napalm, chemical warfare and the systematic destruction of what they termed ‘bandit villages’. The war inflicted horrific damage on Afghanistan and created social and even political upheaval in all the neighbouring countries. Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were slaughtered (one estimate puts the death toll at one million). During the fighting the Red Army lost 16,000 killed and 30,000 wounded. Vast numbers of Afghans fled the country. Out of a population estimated by the UN in 1985 at 18,136,000, it was calculated that, by the time the fighting slackened after a decade of savagery, about 6 million, or nearly a third, were refugees, chiefly in Pakistan but also in Iran. It is a dismal fact that, during the 1970s
and 1980s, the policies followed by Russia and its Cuban, Ethiopian and Indo-Chinese satellites added around 12–15 million to the world total of displaced persons: not unworthy of comparison with the horrific statistical achievements of Stalin or Hitler.

As the Soviet leaders gradually discovered, moreover, the entire military operation they had launched was futile. The
mujabeddin
, as the nationalist rebels were called, could not be finally defeated, or even contained, by non-Afghan forces. Indeed, the man the Soviets finally installed as dictator-President in 1987, Dr Najibullah, did better without Soviet direct assistance than with it. The cost of the war to the already strained and declining Soviet economy was unbearable, and it undoubtedly played a major role in bringing about the fundamental changes in Moscow’s thinking which began in the mid-1980s. On 8 February 1988, the new Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, announced to an initially sceptical world that Soviet troops would pull out of Afghanistan completely. The actual withdrawal started on 15 May and was completed by 15 February 1989.