Afghanistan

Press, 25 October 1982, Page 12

Afghanistan

Sir,—l read (“The Press," October 21) that according to the Spokesman for a French aid organisation, Soviet forces

in Afghanistan are systematically emptying villages near Kabul, burning crops and slaughtering livestock in order to impose the benefits of communism on reluctant Afghans. Your readers will notice it is not the idle rich, the large landowners, nor the tycoons who have made a million who suffer in these ‘'liberation'’ processes but the owners of small farms and business who wish to retain them and pass them on to their families in due course. They are the target of the communist-directed worldwide class war. The dictators in the Kremlin hate the socalled middle-class individualists more than the out-and-out capitalists. This was the reason for the murder of over ten thousand Polish officers in the Katyn Forest in 1940 after the Soviets annexed that part of Poland.—Yours, etc., H. F. NEWMAN. Blenheim, October 21, 1982.