By Hashmat Baktash and Mark Magnier
KABUL: (MEP) – The Netherlands releases the names of nearly 5,000 Afghans tortured and killed by the then-communist government.
For more than three decades, Yossef Azim’s family wondered what had happened to his grandfather, Shah Wali. The commanding general at Afghanistan’s Bagram air base was dragged from his home in the late 1970s by thugs from the then-communist government, a hood covering his head, while Azim’s mother was threatened with a shotgun placed in her mouth.
Several months later, Wali’s brother-in-law, who had also been seized, was released from prison with hundreds of other detainees. His teeth and nails had been torn out during torture sessions. Freed prisoners recounted seeing Wali, attesting to his bravery and grace under torture, but the family continued to cope for decades with the uncertainty of not knowing what had happened to him.
Recently, Azim was approached by Dutch police with detailed records of his grandfather’s 1979 prison transfers. Though the family still lacks definitive proof of his fate, even knowing this much has been of enormous help.
“There’s a sense of relief for myself,” said Azim, 28, now a San Francisco police officer. “We still don’t know if he’s dead or alive. The way they tortured people it’s unlikely he’s still alive, but we haven’t completely given up hope.”
Nearly 5,000 names of Afghans tortured and killed in 1978 and 1979 by Afghan intelligence officials were released Wednesday by the Netherlands’ national prosecutor’s office as part of a war crimes investigation. About 700 more, including Azim’s grandfather, are on an “unknown” list.
“These lists end the uncertainty of numerous relatives who have been in the dark for decades about the fate of their fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins and other loved ones,” the prosecutor’s office said in a statement. “The Netherlands authorities hope that the list will bring closure to the tormenting uncertainty that thousands of Afghan relatives have lived in for years.”
The lists are available online.
Analysts expressed hope that this would mark the start of a full airing of Afghan war crimes from that and other periods.
“Thousands of people were killed or disappeared by Afghan kings before the 1970s,” said Abdul Wahid Taqat, a Kabul-based military and political analyst. “They should start from that time and continue all the way through the present.”
The lists were collected after Dutch authorities questioned Amanullah Osman, former head of interrogation for the Afghan intelligence agency in the 1970s, starting in 2010 and until his death two years later.
The prosecutor’s office said that Afghan interrogation methods “included beatings, electricity and sleep deprivation. Overpopulation, little to no sanitary provisions or medical care, and violence by the guards were so severe that they amounted to cruel and inhuman treatment.”
Osman, who sought asylum in the Netherlands in 1993, made no secret of his past, informing immigration authorities that his office had tortured people and that he had signed documents involving people bound for execution.
“Naturally, I was responsible for such maltreatment, but that is how it goes in Afghanistan,” he wrote on his immigration statement. “If you don’t go along with it, you can never attain such a high position.”
Not surprisingly, he was denied refugee status. But he remained in legal limbo, neither deported nor granted asylum amid concern that he would be in danger if he returned to Afghanistan, said Wim de Bruin, a spokesman with the Dutch prosecutor’s office. Osman lived with family members in the Netherlands.
It took 17 years to start a case against Osman, De Bruin said, because initially there wasn’t enough evidence for a criminal investigation and his immigration statement wasn’t admissible.
In 2000, a book titled “The Transfer Orders” was published in Afghanistan, detailing Afghan internal security records from the late 1970s and showing prisoner movements between detention centers. Subsequently, Dutch police obtained 27 original transfer orders signed by Osman that pointed to his guilt. These documents, part of the Afghan government’s meticulous killing records at the time, listed detainees as Muslim fundamentalists, intellectuals, students, civil servants, military officials, shopkeepers and rogues.
Dutch police subsequently tracked down several witnesses, including a 93-year-old woman in Hamburg, Germany, with a 154-page list in the Dari language of people executed in 1978 and 1979. It was in chronological and alphabetic order, complete with their fathers’ names, their professions, places of residence and charges against them.
Many families, including the Azims, had been searching for years for information on their loved ones, the prosecutor’s office said. One woman reported hearing that people had been lined up and shot with machine guns and that anyone still alive had been buried with bulldozers behind Pul-e-Charkhi Prison near Kabul.
At Pul-e-Charkhi, also known as the Afghan National Detention Facility, an estimated 27,000 prisoners were executed from April 1978, when the communists took over, to the Soviet invasion in December 1979.
Azim said his family fled to the United States in 1979 and settled in San Francisco. His mother has suffered numerous stress-related medical problems since her father’s disappearance, Azim said.
Although the lists provide some relief, somewhat disconcerting is knowing that there are probably Afghans out there who tortured and possibly killed his grandfather.
“Not only Afghans [who remained at home], but those who fled to America, Germany,” he said. “Having criminals walking around the U.S., there’s no justice. It’s more frustrating than harrowing.”
mark.magnier@latimes.com
Special correspondent Baktash reported from Kabul and Times staff writer Magnier from New Delhi.
