| SUNDAY REPORT THE TORTURERS LARRY SCHWARTZ with timelines compiled by THERESA AMBROSE, SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVE I’m not what they say I am: general For a short while there is no response to the doorbell. Then a solidly built man in a white cotton outfit appears at the entrance to his brick-veneer house in south-eastern suburbia. The general is home. Nida Mohammed Kakar has a photograph of himself in military attire on display in the living room. It shares pride of place with a black-and-white portrait of his father, who was police commissioner in the southern Afghan city of Khandahar when Mr Kakar was a boy. Mr Kakar has his young daughter serve us a sweet fruit juice. He shows us photographs, clippings and documents. He even has a copy from Hansard of discussion from the mid-1990s with comment by the then leader of the opposition in the Senate that an ABC-TV documentary at the time suggested he “was not a fit and proper person to enter Australia”. The general was referred to then as Mr Nida, the likely “third person” in the program on alleged Afghan perpetrators of human rights abuses now living in Australia. Mr Kakar has been dogged by intermittent speculation over his role in the Najibullah communist regime, renewed with the disclosure that a group calling itself the Afghan-Australian Anti-War-Criminal Committee is compiling files on more than 60 Afghan migrants in the hope of presenting documentation to a future tribunal on abuses in Afghanistan during Soviet occupation and communist rule. Mr Kakar believes he is among the 25 Melbourne men and three women under scrutiny. He insists he is innocent and wants to clear his name. Just over a decade ago, Mr Kakar was an official in a thoroughly unattractive regime. He was secretary of the powerful 20-member supreme national defence council in Kabul, headed by Dr Najibullah and said to be responsible for all major economic, military and social decisions. A father of eight, with 20 grandchildren, he has found himself tainted by allegations of complicity in the terror of the times, he says, causing “big damage to me and to my family and to the community”. In more than a decade in Melbourne, he has sold shoes in the Victoria Market and works for various government departments as interpreter for languages, including Dari and Pashtu. As if to prove his acceptance in the post-communist era, he mentions recent travels without incident to Afghanistan. He says he enjoys the confidence of the local Afghan community and is welcome at functions. It was at one of these in the mid-1990s that he looked up from revelries at a TV set and recognised his own profile in deliberately distorted image designed to obscure his face. “They didn’t mention the name,” he said. “But the photo was mine.” He had wondered why a photographer had been so interested in him while he worked at Victoria Market. “I watched my face and the other people. They didn’t say (anything). I said, `This looks like me’.” Mr Kakar, 57, said he was the object of accusations on ABC-TV by an unnamed former Australian intelligence officer, with claims including that he had been running a terrorist bombing campaign in Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan. He strongly denies the allegations and says he is “a victim of wrong information”. Though unidentified, he recognised himself as the man cited along with Abdul Qader Miakhel, the former deputy head of the communist regime secret police, KHAD, who is living outside Sydney, and Dr Najibullah’s vice-president, Abdul Hammid Mohtat, who left Australia immediately after the screenings in 1994 without a re-entry visa and was last sighted in Kiev. Mr Kakar says similar allegations were aired against him on Radio Moscow after his defection in 1989. And he believes the unidentified former ASIS spy based in New Dehli, who claimed he had in 1989 recruited a high-ranking KGB officer from a Middle-Eastern country that engaged in widespread atrocities, was himself a member of the KGB. The Afghan-Australian Anti-War-Criminal Committee declines to name people on its list or release details from its files. “Yes they have made this list,” Mr Kakar said, attributing his likely inclusion to ideological differences. Mr Kakar said he had worked in an administrative rather than military capacity while serving as secretary of the council headed by Dr Najibullah. “I wasn’t a member of the Communist Party,” he said. “I wasn’t a member of the council. I was just a secretary.” He said his work involved preparing documentation, taking the minutes during meetings at the national palace in Kabul and preparing copies of drafts of the decrees of the council for distribution to its members. What of the bombing allegation? “I’ve never been involved in refugee camps,” he said. “How is this possible? … I wasn’t in the section working in this kind of job.” Born in Khandahar, in the south, he said he had gained a degree in engineering at a military establishment in Virginia, in the US, and previously worked in this capacity, not in a military role, he says. “In the past 10 years of my job, I wasn’t in the military,” he said. Mr Kakar said he had only been promoted from colonel in his last month in Afghanistan. He had obtained permission to leave for India by pretending that he had to visit a daughter there who was ill. “I believe that the rank was given because they were trying to convince me to return again to Afghanistan,” he said. He said he had chosen to leave because he “wasn’t happy with the government”. Mr Kakar said there should be a proper tribunal to examine human rights abuses but not one swayed by personal enmity. Would he appear if called before such a tribunal? “Why not?” he asks. “I’m challenging you to find one person who can prove one thing against me.” Told that some Afghans spoken to might consider his high-ranking role a form of collaboration with the Soviet forces in Afghanistan, he said: “Working for the government is one thing, and cooperation with the Soviet Union is a different thing.” At the time of his defection to India in March 1989, he reportedly said at a news conference in New Dehli that the Afghan government had begun to suspect his loyalty and was spying on him. He said then that his life was at risk. He said he had cooperated with tribal leaders and passed on vital military information. Mr Kakar told The Sunday Age he had secretly assisted the mujahideen rebels, “giving some money, some other help”. “I want to say to you as (a) journalist, as a media person, you shouldn’t damage people,” Mr Kakar said. “If you have anything proven, you must release this to the people. Otherwise it is not suitable (to) accuse people without reason.” The brutal years March 9, 1982: The Reagan Administration says Soviet forces have killed at least 3000 people with poison gas and other chemical weapons. November 1982: Soviet troops loot the corpses of hundreds of Afghans killed in Afghanistan after an explosion when a truck in a Soviet Army convoy smashes into a fuel tanker in the Salang Pass tunnel north of Kabul. April 16, 1983: Afghan rebel sources say that Soviet planes supporting a large ground offensive in west Afghanistan province of Herat, have struck 35 villages west of Herat, killing as many as 1500 civilians. October 20, 1983: A former Afghan diplomat, Habibullah Karzai, asserts that Soviet troops have massacred 126 villagers in south-eastern Afghanistan near Kandahar, women and children having been bayoneted. March 1984: Hundreds of civilians are killed in the village of Zirvq in 15 days of bombing. August 8, 1984: War planes bomb villages in northern Afghanistan, killing up to 300 civilians. March 1, 1985: A report prepared for the United Nations Commission on Human Rights accuses the Soviet Union of massacring civilians and executing guerrillas in Afghanistan. September 10, 1985: Amnesty International’s annual report on human rights worldwide says that, in the fighting in Afghanistan between Soviet-backed government troops and Afghan rebels, there have been reported human rights violations on both sides. February 27, 1986: Soviet troops in Afghanistan kill about 35,000 civilians in a campaign of “systematic brutality” that includes planting explosives in children’s toys, a report prepared for the UN Human Rights Commission says. March 1986: 350 men, women and children are killed in four villages in the Qarah Bagh district of Ghazni Province. July 8 1988: A car packed with explosives blows up near a cinema in the eastern city of Jalalabad, killing 31 people and badly injuring 33 others. July 11, 1988: Afghan rebel forces kill and wound 150 civilians in a wave of violence around the capital of Kabul and in at least seven outlying provinces. February 1989: The Soviet Union formally ends nearly a decade of military intervention in Afghanistan. The war has killed more than 1.24 million Afghans and nearly 15,000 Soviet soldiers. — Compiled by Theresa Ambrose Source: The New York Times Archive April 27, 1978 President Mohammed Daoud is killed in a coup when the army takes over Afghanistan. December 6, 1978 The USSR signs a 20-year pact with Afghanistan. December 24, 1979 President Hafizullah Amin is killed in a coup. Soviet Union troops invade Afghanistan and place Babrak Karmal, above, at the head of government. The ‘Saur’ revolution and the Soviet presence lead to civil war with rebels fighting against Soviet-supported government forces. January 8, 1980 The Soviet Union vetoes a United Nations call for the withdrawal of its troops. December 1987 Najibullah elected as President of the State. May 1988 Soviet begins withdrawing from Afghanistan. February 2, 1989 Last of the Red Army convoy leaves Kabul. Rebels continue the fighting. September 1991 The United States and Soviet Union agree to stop arms supplies. April 16, 1992 Najibullah forced to resign from his own ruling party. June 28, 1992 Burhanuddin Rabbani offered the presidency. 1994 The militant Islamic movement, Taliban, take possession of Kandahar. May 13, 1996 Former Prime Minister Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and President Rabbani form an alliance against the Taliban. September 26, 1996 Taliban forces capture Kabul and set up an interim government under Rabbani. Former President Najibullah and his brother are executed. Afghanistan declared a complete Islamic state under Sharia law. October 1996 The anti-Taliban forces form the Supreme Council for the Defence of Afghanistan and fighting continues. December 27, 1996 New Taliban offensive launched. Taliban seize Charkiar. October 1997 Taliban decide to change the country’s name to the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. August 20, 1998 US launches missile attacks at Khowst, the site of alleged terrorist bases. Two US embassies had been bombed earlier this month in East Africa. September 1998 Taliban capture Bamian. October 1999 The US asks the United Nations Security Council to impose strict sanctions on Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers until they turn over Islamic extremist Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden has been charged with plotting the bombings of US embassies. December 1999 The Iran-Afghanistan border reopens after being closed for more than a year because of political tensions. — Compiled by Theresa Ambrose The Sunday Age,13-Aug-2000 |
Larry Schwartz Writer 