Abu Zarrar
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With Afghanistan again facing a political crisis, Mohammed Najibullah’s tarnished memory is being rehabilitated by some. But the crimes of the last Soviet-supported president, who was killed by the Taliban, are hardly forgotten.
On the second day of Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic festival commemorating the end of Ramadan, Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s national security advisor and would-be president, visited an inconspicuous burial site in the southeastern province of Paktia and dug up quite a stir.
The grave belonged to Mohammed Najibullah, Afghanistan’s last communist president, brutally murdered when the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. Mohib is the first post-Taliban senior government official to ever pay his respects there. The controversial visit had several objectives for Mohib: to court Afghans, especially many nationalist Pashtuns, who recall Najibullah as a charismatic Afghan patriot who launched a national reconciliation process, and also as a reminder of the enduring brutality of the Taliban, who again today stand poised to share power, if not take it outright, as Kabul, Washington, and the Taliban grope their way toward the conclusion of an agonizing peace process.
But many Afghans, especially those who fought on the side of the mujahideen rebels in the 1980s, found Mohib’s actions provocative, even offensive. Mahmoud Saikal, a former Afghan envoy to the United Nations, criticized Mohib for visiting the grave of “a murderer of the people.” Others recoiled at Najibullah’s bloody record as head of the Soviet-backed secret police. “It’s a shame that he visited the grave of this murderer. Najibullah killed and tortured thousands of innocent people,” said Modaser Islami, a Kabul-based activist focusing on Islamic issues.
Najibullah, without a doubt one of modern Afghanistan’s most controversial figures, is at the center of a battle for Afghanistan’s historical memory.
The young Najibullah, then a medical student in Kabul, joined the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a faction of which launched the bloody coup in April 1978 against the nascent Republic of Afghanistan’s first president, Mohammed Daoud Khan. Daoud Khan was killed alongside his children, grandchildren, and wife in a manner grimly similar to how the Afghan communists’ ideological forebears, the Bolsheviks, disposed of the Russian royal family six decades earlier.
The coup propelled Afghanistan into a spiral of war and conflict from which it still suffers. According to many of Najibullah’s contemporaries, historians, and analysts, including the Soviet Union’s own ex-archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, “Comrade Najib” was a brutal man wholly dedicated to supporting his party’s ideological goals. That ranged from the mundane—dropping the “-ullah” (God) suffix of his name in a deeply conservative, Islamic country—to taking personal relish in torturing and killing prisoners while head of the secret police at the height of the Soviet-Afghan War.
Abdul Latif, a former mujahid and victim of the secret police, recently detailed in a book how Najibullah’s subordinates tortured him with electrocutions, red hot skewers, and mock executions. According to the United Nations, Najibullah’s secret police also used sexual violence against both men and women, raping victims with bottles or bullets or, as Latif described, by sexually assaulting female prisoners in front of men.
That’s the man that the Soviets installed in 1986 as president with the hopes of reinvigorating what seemed a doomed communist project in Kabul. But with the inevitable Soviet withdrawal already on the horizon, Najibullah’s tone shifted. Sharp, savvy, and charismatic, a gifted orator in both Pashto and Dari, he started to shed his Soviet skin and portray himself as a nationalist. He talked of unity, and launched a program of national reconciliation with the mujahideen rebels he’d spent years battling and brutalizing.
Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/hamdullah-mohib-mohammed-najibullah-afghanistan/
On the second day of Eid al-Fitr, the Islamic festival commemorating the end of Ramadan, Hamdullah Mohib, Afghanistan’s national security advisor and would-be president, visited an inconspicuous burial site in the southeastern province of Paktia and dug up quite a stir.
The grave belonged to Mohammed Najibullah, Afghanistan’s last communist president, brutally murdered when the Taliban took over Kabul in 1996. Mohib is the first post-Taliban senior government official to ever pay his respects there. The controversial visit had several objectives for Mohib: to court Afghans, especially many nationalist Pashtuns, who recall Najibullah as a charismatic Afghan patriot who launched a national reconciliation process, and also as a reminder of the enduring brutality of the Taliban, who again today stand poised to share power, if not take it outright, as Kabul, Washington, and the Taliban grope their way toward the conclusion of an agonizing peace process.
But many Afghans, especially those who fought on the side of the mujahideen rebels in the 1980s, found Mohib’s actions provocative, even offensive. Mahmoud Saikal, a former Afghan envoy to the United Nations, criticized Mohib for visiting the grave of “a murderer of the people.” Others recoiled at Najibullah’s bloody record as head of the Soviet-backed secret police. “It’s a shame that he visited the grave of this murderer. Najibullah killed and tortured thousands of innocent people,” said Modaser Islami, a Kabul-based activist focusing on Islamic issues.
Najibullah, without a doubt one of modern Afghanistan’s most controversial figures, is at the center of a battle for Afghanistan’s historical memory.
The young Najibullah, then a medical student in Kabul, joined the communist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a faction of which launched the bloody coup in April 1978 against the nascent Republic of Afghanistan’s first president, Mohammed Daoud Khan. Daoud Khan was killed alongside his children, grandchildren, and wife in a manner grimly similar to how the Afghan communists’ ideological forebears, the Bolsheviks, disposed of the Russian royal family six decades earlier.
The coup propelled Afghanistan into a spiral of war and conflict from which it still suffers. According to many of Najibullah’s contemporaries, historians, and analysts, including the Soviet Union’s own ex-archivist Vasili Mitrokhin, “Comrade Najib” was a brutal man wholly dedicated to supporting his party’s ideological goals. That ranged from the mundane—dropping the “-ullah” (God) suffix of his name in a deeply conservative, Islamic country—to taking personal relish in torturing and killing prisoners while head of the secret police at the height of the Soviet-Afghan War.
Abdul Latif, a former mujahid and victim of the secret police, recently detailed in a book how Najibullah’s subordinates tortured him with electrocutions, red hot skewers, and mock executions. According to the United Nations, Najibullah’s secret police also used sexual violence against both men and women, raping victims with bottles or bullets or, as Latif described, by sexually assaulting female prisoners in front of men.
That’s the man that the Soviets installed in 1986 as president with the hopes of reinvigorating what seemed a doomed communist project in Kabul. But with the inevitable Soviet withdrawal already on the horizon, Najibullah’s tone shifted. Sharp, savvy, and charismatic, a gifted orator in both Pashto and Dari, he started to shed his Soviet skin and portray himself as a nationalist. He talked of unity, and launched a program of national reconciliation with the mujahideen rebels he’d spent years battling and brutalizing.
Source: https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/01/hamdullah-mohib-mohammed-najibullah-afghanistan/
