Ignoring 130,000 dead Afghans

Press, 27 September 1983, Page 16

Ignoring 130,000 dead Afghans

From ‘The Economist’, London

Every week in Afghanistan there are probably as many victims of Russian-wielded or Russiansupplied arms as there were in the South Korean airliner shot down on September 1. In a single skirmish in the city of Herat last month — news of which reached the outside world only recently — some 250 Afghan guerrillas and 50 Russian soldiers are said to have been killed. The week before at least 100 people died in a street-fight in Kabul.

Russian retaliation usually strikes at the civilian villagers who shelter the elusive guerrillas.

Incidents like the mowing down last month of 50 Afghans in a teashop by a Soviet gunner, after somebody had taken a shot at his tank, are common.

Altogether, perhaps 130,000 Afghans — two thirds of them civilian — have died since Russia invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve, 1979. Some 4 million Afghans, a quarter of the population, have been forced into drab tent cities in exile.

Yet ordinary Afghans are wondering whether the West already regards their country as the 16th Soviet Socialist Republic. Last month President Reagan

authorised a five-year $lO-billion-worth grain agreement with Russia, burying Prsident Carter’s post-Afghanistan embargo at the bottom of the silo.

American, Saudi and Chinese arms have been trickling across Pakistan’s border to the guerrillas in quantities too small to bother the Russians much. The guerrilla leaders were granted only ear-at-the-keyhole status in the recent United Nations-sponsored negotiations for a settlement.

Russia is even beginning to win acquiescence for its occupation from Third-World delegates on bodies like the World Council of Churches, which recently voted against a demand for an immedi-

ate withdrawal of Russian forces from Afghanistan.

The reasons why Afghanistan elicits a yawn in the W’est and in so many Third-World countries are not hard to understand. The Russians kicked most journalists out of the country a month after their invasion. Apart from film of the guerrillas smuggled out by the occasional footsore television team, there is little reporting of the war.

The 55 American advisers in El Salvador rate much greater attention than the 105,000 Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, largely because the bloodshed in Central America is served up to American

television viewers with their breakfast cornflakes. Besides, there is no Moscow-end to the Afghan story, as there has been a Washington-end to El Salvador and to Vietnam. Afghanistan. three and a half years on, is still of minor concern to a Russian public that is told that a few Soviet soldiers (5000 so far) have been killed helping a friendly neighbour to suppress C.1.A.-spon-sored bandits.

Remember, by contrast, how three and a half years after the United States went into Vietnam in a big way in 1964. American campuses were in turmoil across the country and President Johnson was criticised the world over.

The benefits, for Russia, of staying in Afghanistan still seem to outweigh the disadvantages. Last November the Soviet leader, Mr Yuri Andropov, hinted to Pakistan’s President Zia ul-Haq that Russia was ready to withdraw. The protracted talks that followed ended in June because Russia refused to pull out unless it was granted a right to re-intervene if its interests in Afghanistan were threatened. The talks were probably a sop to impressionable Third-World countries. The Russians seem likely to leave only as part of a wider, and for the moment still improbable, deal with China. Western countries could be doing more to assist the only Third-World country grabbed by a super-Power since the Second World War. President Reagan has clearly decided that his support in America’s drought-struck farm states rules out the only civilian sanction that hurts a grain embargo.

But the $2O million a year that America spends on the 100,000-plus guerrillas in Afghanistan could be increased; in particular, the Afghans should be sent more of the Sam-7 shoulder-fired rocket launchers needed to swat Russian helicopter gunships and more cameras to record their battles on the television screens of the forgetful West. Copyright — ‘The Economist.’