JPRS ID: 10060 NEAR EAST/NORTH AFRICA REPORT

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• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP82-00850R000400060037-1
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• Document Creation Date: November 1, 2016
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• Content Type: REPORTS

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_ JPRS L/10060
21 October 1981
Near East North Africa Re ort
p
(FOUO 37/81)
Fg~$ FOREIGN BROADCAST INFORMATION SERVICE
- FOR OFFICIAL USE ONLY
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NOTE
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JPRS L/10060
21 Oc~ober 1981
NEAR EAST/NORTN AFRICA REPORT
( FOUO 3 7; 81)
- CONTENTS ~
AFGHANISTAN
Human Rights Correspondenta Viait Radio Free Kabul
(Bernard-Henri Levy; LE NOU~IEL OSSERVATELIR, 12 Sep 81) 1
~ Correspondent Describes Developmenta in Hostilities
(Carlo Rossella; PANORAMA, 5 Oct 81) 9
- IRAN
r
Iranisii Journalist Describes Prison Ordeal
(Siyavush Bashiri Intervi~w; L'EXPRESS~ 2 Oct 81) 19
Paris Magazine Interviews Bani-Sadr
(Abolhasan Bani-Sadr Interview; AL-WATAN AL-ARABI,
2-8 Oct 81) 25
_ TUNISIA
- New Law Promotes More Viable, Decentralized Export Industries
(MARCHES TROPICAUX ET MEDITE1tRANEENS, 4 Sep 81) 27
_ a_ [III - NE ~r A- 121 FOUO]
e^An ~r, r~~~ ? r~n ~i?111 1/
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AFGHANISTAN
HUMAN RIGHTS CORRESPONDENTS VISIT RADIO FREE KABUL
Paris LE NOWEI. OBSERVATEUR in French 12 Sep $1 pp 35-37
[Report by Bernard-Henri Levy: "This ia Radic: ~ree Kabul"]
[Text] On his return from Afghanistan--wherp, wi~:h Marek Halter and
Renzo Rossellini, he went to deliver to the Afghaii resiatance fighters
the three radio broadcasting stations purchased with funds collected
. by the Human Rights Com~ittee--Bernard-Henri Levy lets ua take a look
at his notebook. Here we will see that he did not try to adorn the ~
truth: yes, Afghan resistance ia going through a particularly delicate
phase; yes, it appears confused, torn, 3ivided into rival, hoatile,
and fratricidal clans among whom it is difficult fox a Westerner to
_ get his bearings. That is the way things are--but that is no reason
_ to stop aupporting ite fightere.
First Day
"PEOple in France often asic: What are the Afghans waiting for before they '
- unify their resistance?"
"Tell the French that they can juat keep on waiting; the Afghans will never
unite."
"Because it is too early?"
"Because it makes no sense."
"But what about your clans, your tribes, your cotuitlees divisions?"
"That is our strength. Our soul. Those are the ouly things in this world for
which we are ready t~ die."
"Much more so than for the Afghan nation?"
"There is no Afghan nation. Apart from Babrak Karmal, nobody here is ready to
defend the Afghan nation."
"Yes, the party leaders, you heard them ~uet like you heard us."
- ~ ~
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"Those garties mean nothing. They~ represent nothing. I hope you realized
that; they are organizations of exiles, of profiteers, of psrasites, compared to
the true Mujahedin who had remained in the interior."
The man who talked this way, I want to make it perfectly clear, doea not look
- like a leader of a band, obtuse, and fanatical. With his smooth face, his emaciated
cheeks, his dark and unusually long hair, he makes us rather think of an Afghan
double of our own Antonin Artaud. He crn �a from a family of traditional "literati";
r.e concentrated on Pereian studies rather than the discivlines of Western culture
- and he was one of the most-heard journalists of the press in Rabul. Today, 20
months after his escape, he is a member of those young valley fighters who, when
they are not out in the field, to fight among their own people, wander off to
- Peshawar, with unger in their hearts and with nothing in i.neir pocketbooks, to seek
the weapons their men need.
His name? It matters little. For the purpose of our story here, we will call
_ him Amin. It suffices to note that he is one of zhose very rare persons whom we
met just a f ew hours after we got off the plane ia Pak.istan, that is, Marek Halter,
Renzo Rossellini, and I, myself, with three radio transmittere, destined for t.he
resistancs, in our baggage. But here he was, with us, at the headquarters of a
party wliich he despises with all his heart, tolerating tl^.e insolence with which the
faction sentinel, who tries to search him, making for himself and us a difficult
pa~sageway through the crowd of ragtag warriors who press around the fence; ae we
got off the airplane, he told us with every aplomb o� a Parisian intellectual: "We
_ have promised the men and women of France, who contributed their gifte toward the
purchase of these three radio sets, to hand them over to an organi2ation that is
representative of the entire Afghan resistance."
Second Day
But where, the de~;il, is that "representative organization" whose appearance
we have once again been waiting for, all day long, from one command post to the
next?
This is probably not the Revolutionary Islamic Movement of Mohamed Nabi Mohamedi,
which was bubbling over as we arrived there, where thP big event of the moment
seemed to be the effort to expose the "agents" of Hezbi Islami (The Party of Islam)
who were able to infiltrate last night with the group of fightere who had returned
from the province of Kunduz.
Nor was it Hezbi Islami either, of course, that is, the super-religious and
notoriouslyfanatical organization where a young revolutionary cadre," bothered by
one of our questions, pointed an accusing finger"at us, imitating, without knowing
_ it, the photo of the ayatollah hanging over hie head, to tell us in a menacing
tone: "Israel is not a country; we do not want aid from Israel; those people are
Zionist agents."
_ After that we might perhaps have been touching bases with the liberal and
democratic National Liberation Front of S. Mud~adedi, if we had not discovered--as
~ur host just wanted to show us a map of the country--that the borders of Afghanistan,
_ in his mind, stopped at the borders of the Fashtoon tribes, superbly ignoring the
entire northern half.
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Finally we arrived at the National Front run by the sympathetic Sayed Ahmed
Gailani, accompanied of courae always by Amin; we got there at the mumant when the
mastez of the house, an authentic "descendant of the Prophet," was saying his last
prayer of the day; here we above all witnessed the following extraordinary scene:
the holy man suddenly turned toward the commander and suggested to him that he
entrust him with tre 100 Kalashnikove which he would soon receive from a"distant
emirate," adding in a ha'f-whiaper, when he saw that the other fellow was getting
his hackles up: "I know that you are not one of us. �$ut I also know that you are a
good Muslim. I only ask a aermon on the Koran in return. And I want you to go
everywhere throughout the mountains to announce to your warriors that they should
fight for Sayed Ahmed Gailani, the descendant of the Prophet."
This scene of courae is not lacking in character. It tells os a lot about the
strange relationships between these parties in exile and the resistance figHters
who are autonomous and heroic and who have remained out in the countryside. But
the fact is that, fox the moment, it hardly speaks for "unity," for a"serious
effort," for the kind of ideological "coherence" which we had expected in our
candor. Af ter returning empty-handed and perhaps somewhat discouraged from this
brief adventure in the London of Free Af ghanistan, we began to ask ourseSves
whether we should not yesterday already have listened more to the lessons given ue
by Major Amin.
Third Day
"Now, pay attention: You have the town of Mazar-I-Sharif opposite, Sheberghan
on your right, and if you look caxefully, you can aee the Russian border 50 kilo-
meters to the rear. You must not forget to climb as high ae possible. You think
of the depth of the field. If you can, you avoid vertical linee. We will be
waiting for you at 95 kilohertz. From that you can calculate the length of your
antenna. And, I remind you, you have 15 minuteg to bro~dcast."
No, ~chis is not the first broadcast from Radio Free Kabul. We did not have
the time, during the night, to tranaport all of our equipment to Mazar-I-Sharif,
along the Soviet border. This happeaed in the tribal zone, this no-man's land
between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which is forbidden to foreignera but also to
policemen. Here, among these rocks and ~agged crags, protected against indiscreet
looks and ears, Renzo Roesellini d~cided to etage the first dry-run, on a real-life
scale, of a broadcast together with the eight Afghan technicians.
- But this is also the place where Marek and I suddenly met those famous tech-
nicians who had been hidden from us for the past 2 days. With Akbar, the "b~ss,"
an electronics engineer trained in the United States; w~ith Attak, his deputp, a
simple electrician, who sententiously keeps repeating that "those apparatuses, like
this oze, are worth 1,000 Kalashnikovs"; with Sadek, the former announcer of the
- government radio in Kabul who, right now, on the slopes of the ravine, in a very
strong but civil manner asked us whether we were friends of "Monsieur Leon Zitrone";
with Tamin, Ali, Aziz, Kader. and finally Abdullah, who had never seen a radio
~ transmitter in their life anrl for whom, today, after 8 days of intensive training
which preceded our arrival, frequency modulation no longer holds the slightest
secret.
~
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None of us, I believe, were really given over to the fetishism of ~echnology.
But it is here, on these arid rocks, facing those eight men, thati we lear.led, as we
went along, that all of them--what a miracle:--belonged to different tribes, regiona,
and parties, it is only here that we finally understood: first of all that the air
of Peshawar certainly was not good for us; second, that resistance unity, if it is
built someday, will come about only out in the field; third, tt?at the only way to
_ return to the Afghans what belongs to the Afghans perhaps after all is to go to
- Afghanistan.
Fourth Day
- You can really f ind everything at Dara, that vil7age which is so unique in the
_ world, where artisans sell, make, and forge all the weapons of the world, both
possible and imaginable.
_ A venerable merchant, for example, who came on foot from Kabul, to fix the
submachine gun which, he said, a Ruasian soldier on leave had given him.
A younger fightingman, wearing a superb multicolored turban, who had come down
f rom the mountain to obtain more ammunition for the leather cartridge belt acrose
- his chest.
A young man with steady eyes and a fuzzy red beard which had turned henna, who
- came to protest "to Abdallah Makbar and Sons" to the effect that, on the Chinese
rifle, of which they had made a perfect copy for him, they forgot to show, in
addition to his name, the original Chinese ideographs.
And then, in the midst of all this, in a far-west uproar and a cheap setting,
we found three somewhat dishevelled intellectuals who were hotly debating the
= question of whether it is "ethical" or not to finance the purchase of weapons
which, the day after, would be issued to the three technicians who agreed to lead
us here.
Fif th Day
Amin appeared that morning and, in a somewhat threatical manner, introduced us
to Abdul, the top sharpshooter of his friends whom, he told us, he was giving the
job of protecting us.
Abdul, the ~harpshooter, who was fascinated by ths very strong glasses wnrn by
one of us, managed to Cake a look c`..tc~~~h them and, transfigured, he shouted: "By
Allah, the Merciful, I can see now;"
Once again we looked just about ztciculous, with our huge cnaaubles, our
bulging pants, and our t~urbaiis on ot~r ~~.eids, resembling those "Pashtoon notables
sitting in the back af a Toyota."
This Toyota took us on the road to the north, to those famous, terrible, and
redoubtable police stations whera the good Pakistani cops watched us as we passed
by, looking a bit dull.
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Finally we croased Bajawar, the last tribal agency before the law of the
jungle, which we were told was inf ested by the tocal HQZbi ~nd where we were able
to make our la+~t purchases, in the bazaar, encountering onlq friendly
looks.
Was this our great departure or was it just a grand illusion?
- One thing is sure: a trip through Afghanistau also has ite funny aide.
And, as far as I am concerned, in any case, it is only now--as evening tad finally
come, with "polao" and mutton, established in the "gueat house" next to the big
- stone farmhouse where we found refuge, that I began to real~ize that, in just a few
hours, we would be secretly crossing the border of a country at war with our "1,000
_ Kalashnikovs," as our elec~rician Attak put it.
Sixth Day -
T~is time, things were getting complicated. For 4 hours we had been bouncing
along difficult goat ~rails that took us up to the border crestline. Then we went
down the other slope along somewhat wider trails, lined with evergreen t:ees which
were becoming increasingly numerous ae we approached the valley down the hill.
_ After crossing the Khunar, on a wooden raft mounted on inflaCed goat skins and
pulled by a rope stretched between the two banks. We had at last taken the "grand
road" of D~alalabad, that track which is atrewn with stones, bringing us to the
edge of the Pech valley, where the vegetation suddenly turned green. Nevertheless,
I would say, that tk~ings were getting complicated becauae one must agree that the
country in which we were and in which we had been walking about for several haurs
looks like anything but Afghanistan.
Here is what I mean: It looks like anything but Afghanistan, the way it had
been described to us and the way we had been expecting to find it. What we found,
_ in effect, was a country that was amazingly calm, peaceful, and tr8nquil. We saw
- long stretches of desolate countryside, totally silent, where even the people
looked as if they were made of stone. ~here were lesa bomb craters, for example,
or recket debris than abandoned f ields or vast, deserted farm houses with the doors
swinging in the wind. Instead, above all, there wae that ceaseless, tumultuouR,
and almost feverish shuttling of inen whom, last winter already, the 3ournalists
~ discovered on their way through, a rather unique flow of gu~rril~fighters in a
hurry or smugglers who, without etopping, greetQd eacn other with a brief "Salam
- aleikum," mumbling through their teeth. This went so far tl~at, if our companions
had not pointed out to us, up on the higii gr~und, some villages which were sti11
under the control ~f the Hezbi, we might have believed that we were in a quite
- inreal, phantom country where the moet discrete, the cleanest, or the moat neutral
of neutral bombs had ~uet wiped out everything to the very last traces of life.
But there wae one sign among many others which, in this guerrillazone, was
- quite unmistakable: the fact that we were able to march in this fashion, from
morning until night, without really running tnto a single friendly farms a shelter
where we would havA been able to catch our breath. flere is another terr3ble and
pathetic thing: that old Arbab, the "big f ather of waters," which we croased by
f erry at a nearby village, where they told us how the "Communists" came one night,
poisoned the narrow canal around which life had been organized, and thus in a few
days emptied the village when everybody left. There ia a third village on the
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other bank, a little further away; it is Chigal, the dead town, with its mosque
intact, its long dirt streets covered with weeds, and its houses mede of mud bric.ks
similar to the dirt and dust in the streets. But I was forgetting the essential
thing: along the main road, there were tank tracks several weeks old and half way
toward the river, there was the ruin of a fort which had been destroyed a Yong time
ago; I must say that we did not even find the shadow of an enemy soldiex..
Should we believe one of guides who told ue by way of explanation: "The
Russians are cowards who never leave their barracks out of fear of running into a
patrol of Mujahedin?" Should we believe the secoad one when he ob~ects: "They
did comg out, last month, when they wanted to retake the forts of Asmar, Nari, and
Barikot , and if yoa do not see them anymore, it is becsuse unfortunate~y there is
nothing left to retake, everything has been destroyed?" Or should we once again
believe Amin, when he showe us quite clearly that "Afghattistan is not Vietnam,"
that "the Red Army is not an army of GI's," and that it has learned ''to control the
country without having to be everywhere all the time anc? be seen by everyone?"
What we saw in any case is the mark of a new, subtle, and really diaibolical strategy:
_ to rule without managing anything; to remain there without ehowing themselves; to
starve the people, to empty the land, to turn the l~nd int,a a des~rt by presenting
a grand military spectacle in an economical fashion .
Be that as it may, war being what iC is, it muat be adm~.tted, that for the
time being, the strategy in queation did not harm our designe toc~ much. It was
amid relative quiet, as a matter of fact, thaC we were able, on the crest, to turn
the radios over to Ishak and Safi, the two khane who had come to meet us. Without
too much apprehension we saw half of our escort leaving us arnd then, with the
technicians, they took the precious radioe to a eafer place. We arrived here, at
this refuge, almost after an easy walk; this is where we are ta hear the first real
broadcast.
Sixth Night
It is not yet midnight. We had just managed to 1~.~ down, atietching out on
our "charpoi" mats. A child, f urtive and serious at the same time, eatered with a
platter, with tea, griddle-cakes, and balls of brown sugar. Standing sti11 at the
door, he says: "It is time to get up; they are wait~.a~g for you outeide."
They were indeed waiting for us o~stside. But inatead of the two guards, whom
we had left outside, we now saw acores, perhapa 100 individualsr standing around in
the night, like an army of shadows, yet made of flesh, wearing the big, earth-
colored robes, witnin whose folds we can eomet~mes guesa the presence of a rifle.
There were children among them and also soffie ~aomen and, somewhat further away, the
group of "greybeards," the venerable old members of the tribes. "My brothers,"
Amin said simply, with a broad geature, "they have come to listen; they will go up
wi.th us."
We climbed up with them, behind t~em, stumbling after them, on the trail that
was only poorly illumi*~.ated by the moon. With each step, they miraculously managed
to avoid the ever-present rocks, helping us along, moving the black column all
along the slope. Finally the circle reforms around an old transistor from which we
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suddenly hear the magical voice caming from the other valley: "This is Radio Free
Kabul. First br_oadcast by the free Atghans. The Afghans speak to their brothers
~n Afghanistan."
And then, suddenly, there wae imprudence. The crowd made an irreparable
mistake. Before anybody could atop them, one, two, three, and then ten of our
commrades raised their weapons to the sky and fired a salvo of ~oy. The group
broke up and without a word, without making a noise, went down the slope. The
night, it is sometimea said, belonga to the Mu~ahedin; the trouble is that, during
that night, the Mujahed were just 800 uetere from a little Soviet fort.
The rest was almost beyond description. We returned in the middle of the
night along the trail we had taken earlier. During the night we quickly had to
cover the entire distance we had covered all day long, before. Quickly we found
the ferry, fortunately, and, early in the morning, we were barely able to avoid a
reconnaissance helicopter. We marched until we were dead-tired, our muscles tight,
the blood pounding in our heads, loosing track o� time until the creat was ~ust a
line on the horizon.
Seventh Day
"So, you are a deserter?" ~
"No, we do not desert any more. The barracks are locked. The scldiers have
been disarmed. And when they go out to shoot, theq do so with Saviet machine guns
at *heir backs."
"Still, you are here."
, "Yes, but that is something else again. That ia becauae we paid. So they let
me escape."
"How did that work? Who paid?"
"My fam3ly, of course. They paid the Afghan officer at my garrison."
"Does that happen often?"
"I think so. They were recruiting us by force. They put us into uniform.
They transported us by aircraft to the other ead of the country. And then they
talked to the family and f ixed the ransom."
We heard the beginning of this u~ique tale while sitting calmly on the hood of
the Toyota. The road from Badjawax to Peahawar as a matter of. fact will ~ust
short?y, before our eyes, in a few minutea, be flooded with water rushing down from
the mountains. This is the moment when the heros come out, when the women shed
- their veils, when the cowherd runs after his cow and the refugees come out of the
camps to pick up a little bit c,f dead wood awept along by the torrer.t. For us,
this is the time at least, without reservation and without any afterthoughte, to
listen to the story told by the little saldier from the Asadabad garrison.
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Eighth Day
This was a quiet day, without any stories. Rossel~ini returned Lc Dara x~o see
if someone could build a saf ety system capable of turning the transmitters cn at a
distance, between two popguns. Marek Halter remained at Peshawar to tza~aslate the
cas5ettes in which Bukovskiy, Maksimov, and some others addressed the S~viet
soldiers. Together we finally finished the "chart" draft which tomorrow ~re~ would
present to the brand-new Af ghan committee of Radio Free Afghanistan.
Ninth Day
There are those who are still worried about those Russian ~ass~etzea which--
"dissident" or not dissident--will disseminate the voice of the 5ovieCS in the
country.
There are also those who are quite ~ustifiably concerned witY~ pursuading the
- Pakistanis and who suggested thaC a recording studio, which we ~aere going to leave
behind us, shoull be set up in the tribal zone.
There was also the statement by Amin, broadly outlining the technical, politi-
cal, and military aspects of the "~rogram schedule" wlhich, ac~arding to him, is to
be started up quickly.
Ther.e were the remarks by Abdul, the elite sharpshaoter, thanking the French
government for having, through us, aided the Afghan people and then we, a little
~ bit embarrassed, said that "the French government" unfortunately was not mt~ch right
- here.
Then there was our pledge to continue the ftght, to spread the solidarity
campaign in Eiirope, to do everything we could so that scorea of new transmitters
would be able next year in Kabul to relay the voice of liberty.
Only one question remained: after returning to Paris, wi11 we know how to
keep the promise we made to the Afghans--as we were ab~e, at Peshawar, to keep our
promise to the French, perhaps not too badly after all ?
FOOTNOTES
1. According to our information, gazhe~ed on the spot and from witnesses, very
severe clashes took place around these frontier foxta d~:ring last July.
2. This stretegy was analyzed by Gerard Chaliand, in his "Rapport sur la resistance
afghane," Berger-Levrau~t, 1981.
- 3. To enable Radio Free Kabul to cor~tinue, send your donations to the Comite
Droits de 1'Homme, 152, rue du Chateau, 75014 Paris.
COPYRIGHT: [1981] "le Nouvel Observateur"
5058
CSO: 4619/4
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AFGHANISTAN
CORRESPONDENT DESCRIBES DEVELOPMENTS IN HOSTILITIE~
Milan PANORAMA in Italian ,5 Oct 81 pp 90-10a
[Report by Carlo Rossella]
[Text~ PANOitAMA's correspondent was one of the few to exper~ ~
ience at first hand the way things were in Kabul w~th
the Afghan l.eadership group after the Soviet invasion.
What are they thinking inside those government build-
ings, under the watchful eye of the Red Army? Will
the guerrillas win? Or will the tanks crush them all?
I. Situation in Kabul
By 10 o'clock at night in Kabul you can't hear so much as a sigh. The
curfew is rigorous. Only the military and gavernment officials, in
their white Niva sedans given tner.i by the Soviets, can move about.
The movie houses, most of them showing ~rna$h~hit Indian cartoons, close
at 9� The restaurants douse their kebaU grills even earlier. Recep-
ti_ons at the embassies start at.$:30 and end promptly at 8. Anyone
who has to stay home must be content with television. Every evening
Kabul's ~00,000 citizens can watch the animated cartoons, films, and
political documentaries f lown in daily from the Soviet Union. In a
city without bookstores, TV is a potent educational tool in the hands
of Babrak Karmal's regime. The enchanted sileiice of an evening with--
- out tr�affic is broken now and then by the sound of far-off cannon-fire,
or by machinegun fire on the outskirts of the city.
There are two versions as to where the gunfire come~ from: one is the
one you hear in the streel-,s ("It's the war between the N~ijahim and the
- Shuravi tr~e Russians"), and then there's the official version.
= Questioned about the gunFire, the policeman on guard at the now-deser-
ted Intercontinental Hctel told PANORAMA: "They're building a big new
~ road, and blasting the rock." Pressed to explain the machine~gun fire,
the policeman replied: "Tney're building a littl~ street and breaking
up the ground with air hammers."
It is no secret from anybody that the guerrillas are sniffing round the
edges of Kabul, even though the authorities say those svho do ar~ merely
isolated suicide units. The Mujahim come down into the city to hit
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safe targets: a party official, a union organizer, a mullah who sup-
ports the regime, a schoolteacher conspicuous for his zeal in the li-
teracy camp�ign, perhaps an occasional Soviet patrol. There can be
no large-scale, spectacular actions in a ci~~y watched around the clvck
by Af ghan troops and by the "limited contingent" of Soviet troops.
And yet, in spite of the t~~ht controls, Kabul is still the central
target for anti-government instincts and stirrings. On Tuesday 8 Sep-
t,ember, a few hours after the call to mobilization ~or every male from
"?5 to 3S, students, men and women alike, spontaneously formed proces-
sions along the Parwan road and in the old city, around the Enquelab
high school, chanting "Russia, get out i We' 11 take care of our own
country!" The police and the army let them mareh, while youthful party
_ activists tried to convince their peers of the need to enlist new re~
- ~ruits toreplace the 10,000 troops who were about to be mustered out.
Theri an Saturday $ September, in the face of a general shutdown by the
city~s shopkeepers to protest the call to arms, armed party milit;ia
made the rounds oF all the shops. A few shopwindows were shattered,
but in most cases after interminable argument the shops opened
again. "In the days of Hafizullah Amin, before the second revolution
on 2~ December 197~,, the students and shopkeepers would have come to
grief,'~ the proprietor of the Antique Shop on Chicken Street told PANO-
- RAMA, "but this regime is betting on talkin g to the people; they want
to broaden their consensus, to win the people's sympathy.~~
Put into power with the telling support of the Soviets, Babrak Karmal,
leader of the "Parcham" (flag) wing of the People's Democratic Party
(the bloody dictator, Amin, belonged to the "Khalq" wing), did and is
_ doing everything he can to achieve party unity by doing away ~vith the
long-standing feud between L-he two factions, and to uni~y the nation.
f3oth goal s are on the outer fringes of possibility. Karmal himself is
' thoroughly aware of that . After A?nin~ s elimination, many of his men
~ thosc who had not; been deeply comprumised by the repression of his
regime kept their positions at the summits of government and of the
- party. One of those purged, Assadulla~? Sarwari, who headed the secret
police, was appointed ambassador to Mongolia. Others, like Mohammad
Aslam Watanjar, Cor,imunications Minister under Amin and now under Kar-
mal, have never left off criticizing the Parcham wing~s policy deci-
sions, beginning with the Soviet military intervention so off ensive to
so much of the ci~izenry.
Iri a long~ talk with PANORAMA about the state of the party, Dastaghir
Panchiri, 48, a member of the politburo ancl head of the central control�
commission, admittPd albeit with a plethora of diplomatic euphemism
that there was sti7~l conf'lict between Parcham and Khalq. Saic! he :
"People bring their own class person~lities with them into the pGrty.
There are not many workers there. Party members are an aristocr:.cy
made up of petit-bourgeois intellectuals. We have to fight for u~~ity
every single day."
Or;anized along classical socialist .lines (Centr~~i c;ommittee, Politburo,
general secretari.at made up of tra.i_ned ca.~res (18, 000 members), run
by full-time salaried officials, maint,aining close ties with the various
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trade and nrofessional organizations, with women's gr~ups, religious
organizations, and the unions, and playing a conspicuous role in a
National Patriotic Front made ~:p of various social forces, according
to a technique perfected i~n the Third-World countries that are build-
ing on the Soviet experience, the People~s Democratic Party (PDP) has
never called itself a Marxist, much less a Leninist party.
PANORAMA got an explanation of this anomaly from Haider Massoud, Deputy
Minister for Inf ormation: "Socialism is not on the agenda in Af ghani-
stan. Our revolution is nationalist and demucratic and anti-feudal,
- not socialist."Recalling the excessAs committec't in Amin's time, when
the president used to r~ad the Soviet ambassador lessons on the prin-
ciples of Leninism and when the national f lag was replaced with a Bol-
shevist-style red banner, Panchiri added: "In its political action the
party must make allowances for r~l~gion, habits, tribes, and nationali-
ties, and above all remember the high percentage of illiterates and
the need for c lear, un ambiguous, non-traumatic talk." It is no acci-
dent, for example, that Babrak Karmal, a Marxist veteran, always be-
gins his speeches in the name of Allah, attends the mosques, praises
the great ancestral traditions of the people doing his level best
to shake off the charge that his regime is "atheistic, bolshevist, and
anti-national," as the rlujahid propaganda artists so assiduously charge.
In the immediate aftermath of tche coup there were many Afghans who did
not believe Karmal's professions of faith; now, however, popular con-
sensus behind his government seems to be building albeit at a moder-
ate rate. The government-built mosques are beginning to fill. T~e
country schools, one of the guerrillas~ prime targets, can count a few
more pupils, in spite of guerrilla threats against those who send their
children to the government~s schools. Farmers are attending govern-
ment-sponsored extension courses in greater numbers. In the major
cities military control, incessant propaganda, and government invest-
ments are beginning to win new support for the regime.
- Pledged to fight the Mujahim with an ill-trained, undisciplined army
riddled with desertion (hundreds of young men who answered the call to
arms have left Kabul and gone home to their mountain villages), the
Afghan government, which just a few days ago set up a national defense
- council to improve the anti-guerrilla eff ort, is centering its atten-
tion so as to boosi; its prestige among the people on the schools
(hundreds of youngsters are being sent to study in the Soviet Union~,
on agriculture, and on technical and economic progress. Pervasive for
at least 20 years in all Afghan ministries, Soviet civilian advisers
have concentrat ed their efforts on precisely these sectors. "The So-
viets are very generous with their economic aid; agriculture, indus-
try, construct ion, and social amenities are the sectors where they rou-
tinely spend milli~ns of dollars," PANORAMA heard in confidence from
Sultan Ali Kishtmand, Afghanistan's prime minister and the regime's
top technocrat. Soviet experts, as Abdul Hakim, deputy Minister for
Agriculture, confirmed, are to be found, for instance, in many of the
1,200 government-founded cooperatives. "It was a tremendous effort,"
says Hakim. "Our people were used to feudalism, and totally lacking
in anything like a cooperative mindset."
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After the fiasco of Amin's agrarian reform program (distributing land
to the peasants), a good 195,000 small f armers agreed to join the new
units and, according to Hakim, the plan~s target of increasing produc-
tion by 3 percent has been reached "despite attacks by counter-revolu-
tionaries on the trucks carrying f arm products to their local collec-
tion centers." According to many of the Western experts in Kabul, the
Af ghan economy is not doing at all badly, despite the war. Kishtmand
confirms their opinion. Says he:" The market is thriving, prices are
stable, and the balance of~payments shows a surplus." In the colorful
bazaars of Kabul the "nan," the f~r~tia~tiional Afghan sweetened bread,
sells for 3 afghani (75 lire) a kilo. Mutton costs 100 afghani a kilo
(`L,$00 lire). Milk sells for 10 afghani per liter (2$0 lire). The
average worker earns 2,000 afghani per month (50.,000 lire), while a
top government official takes home 7,000 afghani (1~5,000 lire). These
are incomes on which one can subsist in what is still a primitive eco-
nomy (there is full employment, for instance, partly because 2 million
Afghans have f led the country). Based on small tradesmen, on the
crafts, and on barter, the economy is thriving in a capital which has
no sewers and reeks of hashish, where the latter-day blue-collar neigh-
borhoods have almost all been built (with prefabricated construction)
by the present government. Will economic and military efforts, literacy
campaib s, and Soviet investments manage to increase the Karmal re-
gime's prestige among the tribes and nationalities, and to dry up
those waters in which so many guerrilla fish now swim so merrily? That
~ is a q?xestion a lot of people are asking in Kabul.
According to Western analyses, the Afghan question is destined to remain
an open one for some time to come. One thing, though, seems to be sure:
the Soviets will never abandon the Afghan regime to its own resources,
and no matter what it costs they are very unlikely to pull out
of K�~bul before they have a complete guarantee of a free and peaceable
e:cistence for their "brother regime." Even in Moscow these days, the
Afghan expert;s at the Far East Institute, while they admit that Karmal
is in trouble, and that he has his work cut out for him in his pursuit
of popular consensus, view his leadership group as the protagonist in
, a long and exhausting march that may, when it is over, produce "good
results." The Soviet experts comp~re it with the almost 10-year strug-
- gle agair.st the Emir of Bukhara, who was finally defeated by the bol-
~heviks. Europeans in Kabul, though, tend to quote a 300-year-old
Gurmukhi prophecy, which goes: "Punjabey Roose avayaga, purian atta
wakagaya." What does it mean? Some day the Russians will come into
the Punjab, and flour will be sold in bags.
- 'l. Allah Is Great. Brezhnev, Though....
- Standing guard over him is a special squad of Soviet soldiers. They
wear olive drab unifor:r~s, without insignia. Babrak Karmal, 64, presi-
dent of Af ghanistan, lives all by himself in what used to be the imper-
ial palace in midtown Kabul. He doesn~t sleep muclz. He reads a lot of
books, mostly on economics. In an imposing room still redolent of the
ancient palace, among Oriental rugs and gilt mirrors, PANORAMA inter-
viewed him. Here is what he had to say.
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_ Question: They are writing in the West that Babrak Karmal's regime
could not last 48 hours without the Soviets to prop it ixp. Is that
true?
Answer: I know they are talking nonsense ~.ike that. But let~s talk
facts. The Soviets~ "limited contingent" is here on the basis of an
agreement between our countries and on the basis of a specific article
article $1 of the United Nations Charter. There is an undeclared
war being waged against us, supported by Pakistan with the backing of
the United States, China and such reactionary Arab states as Egypt
and Saudi Arabia.
- Question: The guerrilla war the Mujahim are fighting is a tough one.
How long do you think it will last.
_ Answer: Without support from the reactionary powers it would sputter
out within a few months. Unfortunately, though, there is very strong
outside support.
Question: And so...
Answer: Bandit incursions across our borders continue. They come in
small groups of 10 or 20 people. They work as terrorists.
Question: Is it true that they control whole provinces?
Answer: ~rhere are districts where they maintain a presence. Our armed
forces destroy them every day. But there is something you should know..
= In Af ghanistan, down through history, there has never been full autho-
rity for any central government over the entire extent of our territory.
Now for the first time there is a State determined to impose that au-
thority.
Question: The government has drafted ten levies. What does this gi-
gantic recruiting effort mean?
Answer: We have an undeclared war to fight. Reagan has said openly
- that America is helping the bandits. Pakistan, directly or indirectly,
is chal~e~ging Afghanistan. We are determined to defend and clean up
our territory, and this latest draft was levied to enable us to resist
any aggression. ~
Question: Does that mean that the war will be fought by the Afghans,
rather than by the Soviets?
Answer: The Soviets' "limited contingent" is here to help us and to
control aggression from abroad. But the fight against mercenaries~
within our borders is for the Afghan army to fight.
Question: When will the Soviets pull out o~ Kabul?
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Answer: !~Ve want to settle that through diplamatic channels. We have
asked Pakistan and Iran to sit down with us at the negotiating table.
We have a;reed to mediation by the United Nations. But Pakistan and
Iran have not replied, and are still supporting the counter-revolu-
tionary gangs. That means that the imperialists, the Chiriese hegemo-
nists, anc'. all their allies do not want the Soviet contingerit to leave.
Because make no mistake the Soviets will leave when any and all
interference with us has stopped. Every nation must be free to deter-
mine its own destiny. All that is written in the United Nations Char-
ter. So it is for the Afghan people to decide, and nobody else.
Question: In other words, you would oppose any negotiations that would
_ cast doabt on the legitimacy of the Kabul regime.
Answer: Absolutely. It was the people who made the revolution, not I.
I am equally opposed to certain plans, such as the one proposed by Lord
Carrington...
Question: Why?
Answer: Because it is not for the European Community or for other coun-
tries to meddle in our internal affairs. We rejected the Carrington
plan because it was desib ed to make the Afghan situation an interna-
tional issue.
Question: What sort of society are you trying to establish in A�'ghani-
stan?
Answer: We are now going through the democratic revolution phase. We
must establish a genuine political, economic, and social democracy. We
are cietermined to abolish any and all ki~ds of oppression, despotism,
and exploitation.
Question: You talk of democracy, but are you ever going to have free
and open elections, open to all political parties, as the Western sys-
tems do?
Answer: We are already plannin~ for elections. We have a tradition
here called "jirga" (a kind of council made up of wise men and of in-
_ dividuals deemed typical of Afghan society: Ed.). We shall set up
villabe and district and city and provincial jirgas. Anybody who is
a;ainst imperialism, anybody who is for the revolution w.ill be eligible
- For el_ection. And then we have established the National Front, a mass
organizatior~ where there are voices for the writers and workers, jour-
_ nalists and peasants, organized labor and the Muslim clergy who are not
members of ~he party.
Question: Your regime is trying hard to reconcile Marxism with the
~ Koran. Doesn't this look to you like a flat contradiction?
Answer: Tiy ideology is that of the party and of the working class,
but as it applies to our society. Our party, our government, and I
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myself have a profound and sincere respect for the traditons and the
religion of the people. We allow nobody to engage in anti-religious
propaganda. We respect the tribes and the ethnic and national groups.
Afghanistan is a Muslim, nonaligned nation.
Question: Yet it is also a country practically isolated from the in-
ternational community...
Answer: We have a lot of enemies, but then we have a lot of friend~,
too...
= Question: In recent months you have struck up a close friendship with
Indira Ghandi's India. How in the world did that happen?
Answer: India is a traditional friend of ours. India and Afghanistan
both want a return to the peace and security of our region that has
been troubled by the American attempts to use Pakistan as a polic eman
by stuffing it with bases and weapons. Right now, India's role i s of
vital importance to us. The next few months will give you some idea
~ of what that means.
3. With Ivan in Kabul
This is a look at the way the 80,000 Soviet soldiers
in this country have been living since they occupied
it on 2~ December 1979. They fight a while. They
work a while. And they shop in the bazaar with a
wary eye out for ambush.
Planned initially, according to Western ambassadors in Kabul, with cru-
cial input from Vassilli Safrontchouk, the number-three man in the So-
viet embassy in Afghanistan, the Afghan diplomatic offensive against
Pakistan and Iran enjoys the natural support and full backing of Mos-
cow.
The Soviets have made India fertile ground through Sha Mohammad D ost,
the Afghan foreign minister. And now Indira Ghandi is canvassing the
non-aligned nations on behalf of Babrak Karmal!s repeated request s for
a three--way Iran-Pakistan-Afghanistan confrontation under the United
Nations umbrella.
- In Moscow, thaugh, PANORAMA managed to discover that other very dis-
creet diplomatic moves were made by the Soviets to stage negotiat ions
on the Afghan question that would guarantee the existence of the pre-
sent regime there. Active among others in this area has been
Vsevolod Benevolensky, deputy director of the Oriental Studies Insti-
_ tute of the USSR's Academy of Science.
Late in August or early in September Benevolenski, his boss, and his
colleagues spoke with several diplomats.in the Chinese embassy in Mos-
cow, and made contact with twa~ Iranian political figures: Amadi, who
is departmental director at the Foreign Ministry, and d~ialaek, adviser
to the Prime Minister on political matters. A diplomatic solution just
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might let th~ USSR cut back and, once it has specific guarantees, ac-
tually withdra~v its 80, 000-man '~limited contingent At the CPSU Cen-
tral Committ~e offices in Moscow they tell you: "We shall leave Af-
ghanistan when the Afghans ask us to." Soviet leaders know, though,
that nobody is going to ask them to leave for quite some time tQ oome.
Meanwhile Ivan, the ordinary soldier in the Red Army, will just have
to stay in Kabul. In their summer khakis and their canvas cowboy
hats, the soldiers in the army of the USSR are extremely young, and
straight out of basic training. They come from every one of the Soviet
Socialist Republics, but in the Cities the ones you see are mainly
tall, blond youngsters from the Baltic states or Finland. Out in the
country, though, most of the troops are Uzbeks, Tajzks, Cossaks,or
Kirgiz. Life in Afghanistan is deadly monotonous for them. They
muster at 0$00. They have breakfast, then set off for the area of
operations or for the constructin sites. They go back to the big bar-
racks in town, or to their posts in the mountains.
Red Army headquarters in Af ghanistan, according to Western sources in
Kabul, have split the country up into five operational zones, each of
them in turn broken down into several peripheral headquarters. The
service branches in Af ghanistan in massive numbers are the air force,
the Blue Berets, the infantry, and, more numerous than any others, the
engineers. Soviet soldiers build houses, schools, roads, hospitals,
- and even a railroad, the first in Afghanistan, which someday will link
Kabul with Tashkent.
Nlainly, though, the Red Army is engaged in expanding its own bases. In
the Khari Khana district, some 10 kilometers outside Kabul, something
that can only be described as a complete fortified town is going up.
In town, the soldiers are seen only aboard trucks, jeeps, and armored
vehicles. At night they are stationed at all the major intersections.
Late in the afternoon, with their Btr-60s, they show up on Chicken
Street, Kabul's main shoppirg center, to buy or to trade their own pro-
ducts for those of the local shopkeepers. Their wares are vodka, ca-
viar, c~ns of food, leather belts, automobile spare parts, and gasoline
coupons, and they buy Afghan hats with the fur side in, jeans, leather
jackets, Rayban sunglasses, and sometimes even hashish.
PANORAMA talked L-o a soldier named Sasha, a 20-year-old laborer from
Leningrad: "Shopping is our only amusement in Afghanistan. For the
rest of the time, we~either work or fight." Soviet tactics, as PANO-
RAMA learned at first hand, is designed to ~et "maximum results with
minimum losses." The Red Army in Afghanistan is aiming at control of
- the cities and of the major lines of communication, particularly the
road that leads north, toward the USSR, which is the Red Army~s supply
lungs. A full-scale military offensive during the summer months was
maunted in the Panshir Valley north of Kabul on the Pakistani border,
an area which, sooner or later, and whatever the cost, the Soviets
are determined to win control of so as to stop or at least slow
the more massive guerrilla infiltration efforts. Right now they are
fighting at Kandahar, which is a fairly big town.
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Wh.en the Soviets move into a zone of operations they do it with columns
' of armor, espe~ially with their little BNID tanks or their ~TR-60 ar-
mored personnel carriers. When a convoy is attacked they call in the
Mi-24, Mi-24d, MI-25, or Mi-6 helicopters. The Red Army moves in as
a rule only when Afghan troops find themselves in trouble. In the
most serioLS cases they bring in airborne troops in their enormous Mi-
6s. They are deployed on the peak of a mountain, and slowly move down
into the valley, mopping up the whole area and forcing the guerrillas
to defend themselves on two fronts.
While the Red Army has the upper hand when it encounters the gues~r~illas
- in the open, it does not have so easy a time of it when it has to .:ope
with sudden raids by the Mujahim commandos on the major corruni~nication
arteries and in the impassable mountain terrain.
In Afghanistan the gueriillas swim through the people lilce fish through
water, and it is hard for the Soviets to predict their moves and coun-
termoves, their surprise attacks and hit-and-run assauli;s. What is
- more, petty terrorism scares Ivan. His comrades who die~or are wounded
in Af ghanistan f all mainly during unsuspected ambushes, or even at the
point of a knife. Since the beginnin~ of armed. intervention in Afgha-
nistan t;he USSR has lost no more than 1,$00 men, according to reliable
~'estern sources iii Kabul. Many of them died in combat. Others succu.m-
bed to disease, particularly viral hepatitis. PANORAMA saw 32 ambu-
lances enter the Red Army hospital in Kabul on an ordinary September
afternoon, Most of those in them were sick, not wounded.
If Ivan dies in Kabul, his body is sealed into a zinc coff3_n (crafts-
men in the old quarter of the city make them in Afghanistan). And in
the USSR, above his grave alongside his name, his photograph, and the
dates of his birth and death, ~here is the inscription: "Fallen in a
military maneuver zone." Nobody, not even his family, needs to know
that this particular Red Army so~dier died in Afghanistan. A disci-
plinary regulation says that no recruit may tell anyone where he is.
When his parents write to him, they use the equivalent of an APO num-
ber.
There are a lot of soldiers in Af ghanistan, though, who break the rule
and tell their mothers, brothers, and best friends about their experi-
ences. PANORAMA found out, while talking with several Soviet soldiers
- in Kabul, what they wrote in their letters: Accounts of their daily
lives, complaints of homesickness, but mainly social and political
analysis. Ivan the soldier is politically literate, and propaganda
has convinced him that he a.s ~~fighting to help a friendly country to
progress." One Uzbek soldier wrote to his mother: "Can you imagine?
There are still women here who wear veils, and children who go bare-
f oot ! "
Others talk about the guerrillas: "They blow up schools and shops."
Still others promise to get their money's worth for what they have
earned in Afghanistan and to bring home fine gifts and a"dublonka" (a
sheepskin overcoat with the fleece side in). Of course there is the
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fear of being killed or waunded, or even falling into the hands of the
Mujhadim "who donit take prisoners."
Subject at home to their office~s by a harsh hierarchical relation-
ship, the Soviet soldiers in Kabul allow themselves considerably more
freedom. You see shirt collars unbut~oned, shoes half-heartedl,y shined,
and occasionally even a schoolboy escapade. They are still talking in
Kabul about the particularly hot and dusty night when there was a full
moon, when two soldi.ers were caught taking a dip in the swimming pool
- at + he French ambassador's residence. The man who saw them reported:
"They were doing a first-rate crawl."
COPYRIGHT: Arnaldo Mondadori Editore S.p.a. Milano
618L
CSO: 4b28/1
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IRAN
IRANIAN JOURNALIST DESCRIBES PRISON ORDEAL
PM061527 Paris L'EXPRESS in French 2 Oct 81 pp 49-51
[Interview with Iranian ~ournalist Siyavush Bashiri by Christian Hoche in Paris:
"Iran: A Condemned Man Tel].s His Story"--date not gi.ven]
[TextJ [Bashiri speaking] It was the lOth of August 1980. I think it was a
Sunday. Night had just fallen over Tehran--a warm and silent night. Since being
fired as an editorialist on the newspaper ETTELA'AT I knew that my life was in
danger. What was my crime? At the shah's request I had written a book on the
Pahlavi monarchy which was the first volume of a 30,000-page encyclopedia on
Iran's history. Ayatollah Do'a'i, nicknamed "Lafayette," the newspaper's new
boss, had thr~atened me. When he was in exile with Khomeyni at Neauphle-le-
Chateau, he was caught redhanded stealing from Galeries Lafayette. Ayatollah
Montazeri was forced to pay a Fr 4,000 fine to get him out of that mess. Hence
the nickname...
For several months I worked clandestinely with 3ournalists, writers, and intellec-
tuals, denouncing the Khomeyni regime. For instan~ce, we collected proof that
the top clerical bodies were misappropriating money from the central bank's
coffers. Ayatollah Montazeri and his son, Ahmad Khomeyni (the imam's son) and
Ayatollah Shahab Eshraghi among others were involve3. Many other clerics were
also involved and they were and still are turning the plundering of the country
into a government system.
On 10 August 1980, therefore, I had hidden in the house of some friends as I did
_ almost every evening. Ayatollah Sadeq Khalkhali, chief of the antidrugs-drive
and the Isalmic courts' prosecutor, was having people arrested and executed
arbitrarily. At around 2300 hours some Pasdaran (revolution guards) surrounded
my hiding place. They broke down the door, fired several rounds into the house
and arrested me. The insulted me and took me to Qasr prison. To the north of
the capital it was called the Khalkhali prison because the ayatollah was there
for a long time. I was trembling with fear.
The next day at 1900 hours I was subjected to ~y first interrogation. Opposite
me were two of the Islamic courts' inquisitors: Safa Tahmasebi and Mohammad
Rezvar~i, a member of the Tuden (Iranian Communist Party), who is responsible for
the death of 450 people (note 1) (he is now being held in Evin prison).
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Rezvani: "Wher~ are you hiding your weapons? Confess. We know that you are
working for Bakhtiar, the shah and the Feda'yan-e Ktialq. You will tell us eventu-
ally, you'll see!"
I did not answer for the simple reason that I was not a terrorist. Rezvani
ordered me to be taken to Mashallah Qassad, one of the leaders of the students'
committee at the U.S. Embassy. Qassad and his thu.gs beat me from 1900 hours to
0400 hours: they hit me in the kidneys with the butts of their rifles and kicked
me in the face. To end with they gave me 100 lashes with an electric cable. I
was covered with blood and in a comatose state. I was already a physical wreck.
There was a terrible buzzing in my head. At dawn they dragged me into a 40
square-meter cell in which 80 poor devils were packed. They had heard my cries.
0*ie of them tried to ease my pain with a dirty rag soaked in oil.
One File Per Arrival '
On Monday 11 August, the 'Eydi Fitr Festival (last day of Ramadan), my companions
_ were anxiously listening to the groans which ~could be heard in our building.
"Haj-aqa," one of them shouted. This is the name given to Khalkhali. Everybody
held his breath. Almost every day in midafternoon he personally chose future
victims for exceution. His timetable had scarcely varied since he set up his
headquarters at the prison. From 0800 to 1400 he sat in Parliament. Then he
returned to Qasr and sat in the court r~here he has amassed silk carpets stolen
from condemned people. He rested there for a good hour and then went to his room.
- It was there tnat he sat in judgment. At dawn the Pasdaran unloaded truckloads
of prostitutes, homosexuals, drug-addicts, "counterrevolutionaries," big bourgeois,
Baha'is, former officers and so forth. Mohammad Rezvani drew up the same file
_ for each "arrival." All that was missing was the sentence opposi.te the names.
Khalkhali dealt with that. The door of the room opened: Immediately the Pasdaran
pushed a good 20 prisoners in, mosi arrested for drug trafficking. The prisoner
was forbidden to speak. He could not even give hia name. Rezvani went up to
_ Khalkhali, whispered a few words in his ear and, "In the name of God the almost
and merciful," the ayatollah passed sentence: immediate execution, 10, 20 or
30 years' imprisonment. This mockery of a trial lasted between 3 and 5 minutes.
Khalkhali mopped his brow. Then, singing and accompanied by the warders, he
- would visit the "political prisoners" cells. He chose his victims at random with
a snap of his fingers: "You, get out. You must go." There was no appeal against
the verdict. A few hours after that lottery they were shot.
The day after my ~rrest, when the others in my cell, which had been christened
"the antechamber of death," heard Khalkhali snapping his fingers and speaking
in his falsetto voice, they prayed quietly. Suddenly a small, ugly, plump
figure appeared, shifting from one foot to the other: Khalkhali. He looked
around. He snapped his~ fingers. Seven people, including me, were picked out in
that way. Among us was Gen Mohammad Shahnameh, who was responsible for the
- capture of Navab-safavi, founder of the Feda'yan-e Eslam (Muslim Brothers,
Iranian branch).
The Kurd's Will
Before we left everybody gave us a long embrace. With an impatient gesture a
Pasdaran ordered us to `ollow him to a small room to write our wills. That was
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the rule. Any condemned man had to write his last wishes before dying. Of course
they were never passed on to the family. If somebody left a certain sum of money
to his wife and children, the Pasdaran gave him a 24-hour reprieve. Indeed the
next day they accompanied the prisoner to his bank aud drew the money out of his
account. In fact all that money was paid into Khalkhali's personal account. The
condemned man knew nothing about trat and was convinced that he had escaped
~ execution. I remember that one day a Kurd named Parviz Manaseki, had left almost
Fr 70,000 to his children in his will. The usual scenario took place: 24-hour
reprieve, withdrawal from the bank account and return to the prison. At dinner
time two Pasdaran rushed toward him. In his terror he choked. He was led, or
rather drabged, to the firing squad.
But that Monday 11 August I could not believe that I was going to die. How could
I be executed before first being tried? Five of the seven condemned people were
~ sobbing. A small trader from the bazaar had even collapsed. He was incapable of
writing and asked me to write his will while the Pasdaran stood behind us cleaning
their guns.
"I am going to kill you!" a young revolution guard screameu at General Shahnameh.
Each Pasdaran chose his target. Since I remained standing, confidently, they
demanded that I write a few lines to my family. I wrote these words: "Tortured,
not tried, innocent."
My will, like the six others, was taken to Khalkhali. One by one we entered
his room. He was alone and muttering something, I did not know what. He has a
- strong Turkish accent and he asked me without looking up:
"Don't you want to ask me for anything? Don't you want to see yoir children?"
"You know very well that my children are living in Paris. But I would ~ust like
to ask you to allow General Shahnameh's family, who are weeping in the parlour,
to see him one last time."
"Son of a whore, son of a bitch, you must be 3oking."
' The conversation last barely 1 minute. I was thrown out of the room. We were
kept in a narrow corridor for almost 2 hours. One of the condemned men asked for
some water~ he was refused. "No water for the corrupt on earth," a Pasdaran said.
At 2100 hours Khalkhali came out of his room and gave the order for us to be led
into the courtyard in the center of the prison. We took about 10 steps toward
"Allah Akbar" wall, the red wall of the executed. Suddenly Khalkhali signaled
to the warders with a snap of his fingers. About turn, back to the cell, but
I was the only one concerned. As I passed he stopped me. "I must torture you
before you die," he said. He smiled and ordered 100 lashes. I staggered.
There was a concrete bench in the courtyard which was used for the torture. Men
and women were laid down on it without distinction as soon as they entered Qasr.
The punishment was always the same: 100 lashes. Only the instrument of torture
differed: an electric cable 3 cm in diameter for the men, a watering hose for
the women, whose legs were covered with a gunny bag. Islamic morality had to be
observed. Many had their arms or ribs broken. Some were left paralyzed because
they received no medical treatment.
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~
'�'t~rity Minutes to Die
When I lay down on ~he bench for the second time in 24 hours I looked at the skyi
it was black. After a few sec~nds, when I received no lashes, I asked why I was
not being beaten. A policeman whr~, like all the police, hated the Pasdaran, had
taken pity on me. He helped me to put my shirt back on, which made Khalkhali
angry. He hit me in the face with a big wooden ruler and shouted: "We'll meet
again." I was thrown back into the "antechamber of death" and my comrades crowded
round me to kiss me. They could not believe their eyes. Neither could I. At
that very moment all the lights went out. It was time for the executions, which
usually take place between 2200 hours and midnight. They never take place at
dawn. From our cell window we could see "Allah Akbar" wall, hear the guns being
loaded, the cries of the condemned men and, suddenly, the shots. The next day
we could see the Pasdaran spreading whisky and vodka to try to remove the smell
of blood. They did so in vain.
At 2310 hours my six fellow prisoners entered the courtyard. Powerful searchlights
were turned on the wall. Their hands were not tied. Those who did not have a
piece of materia~. or a handkerchief did not have their eyes covered. Haj~i Ahmad
the leader of the firing squad, is proud of his mission: he executes people in
the belief that he is serving Islam. He is doing so very badly because his men
do not know how to shoot through the heart. One condemned prisoner, riddled
with bullets, took 20 minutes to die. General Shahmaneh wasthere, holding his
head high. When the automatic weapons were fired a prisoner scratched a little
mark on the wall: the 427th mark...
Some 2 days later I was summoned by Khakhali again. "Khomeyni has told me that
I should ki?1 100 people a day. I am killing between 10 and 20 out of the goodness
of my heart."
,
This time there could be no miracle. Khalkhali condemned me to death. The search-
lights were switched on. At the end of the yard was the red wall and the Pasdaran.
I brought up the rear of the condemned men. Mr Iravani, a big Tehran capitalist,
was beside me. My mind went blank, I can't remember any more. But I can sti11
see Hajji Ahmad taking aim with his machinegun 10 meters away from me. I was
looking death in the face. The guns fired. Men fell. I remained standing. Was
I alive or dead? My heart began to race. A Pasdaran pulled my arm. My right
cheek was burninn. I ran my hand over it, it was red with blood. My shirt was
soiled. I had been splattered with Mr Iravani's blood as he fell. The Pasdaran
- ref used to allow me to wash my face.
Stench and Smell of Garlic
Some 3 days after my imprisonment I was summoned again. Alone. Mohammad Rezvani
and Mashallah Qassad were waiting for me in the courtyard. They immediately asked
me for Fr 3.5 million otherwise I would be executed. I told them that I did not
have the money. Qassad pressed the barrel of his gun against my forehead. I had
seen a condemned man killed like that the previous day at 0900 hours. I begged
them to believe me. After 10 minutes they gave in and insulted me,
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That was to be the last time I saw them. I did not see Sadeq Khalkhali again
either. I was i~mmediately transferred to Evin prisen where I was subjected to two
interrogations which concentrated on two obsessions: weapons and money. Then ~
_ returned to Qasr after 14 days. There was a change of scene! I was imprisoned
in another building, in prison number 7. Meanwhile I learned that the Islamic
, Court had s~ntenced me to 3 years imprisonment. How? Why? I will never know.
But I am sure of one thing: in tha.t building designed for 400 prisoners (1,800
had been packed into it) I breathed more easiiy already. Nonetheless, the standards
of hygiene were terrible. Our mattresses were swarming with fleas, our hair with
lice. We had to relieve ourselves in our mess tins. The food was revolting.
Moreover our rations were to be cut by half when the war with Iraq broke out.
All the prisoners consumed an enormous amount of garlic to treat their illnesses.
But the stench was so bad that it covered the smell of garlic. In winter the
cells were icy cold, in summer they were suffocating. Despite everything we
stuck together.
There were all kinds of people in prison number 7: two of Bakhtiar's cousins, a
large number of doctors, deputies including Senator Homayuni, some officers and
"co~on law" prisoners. There were also a few foreigners, notably Germans,
French and English. I do not know why there were being held with us. But above
all the Pasdaran had imprisoned mullahs. Around 10 of them, former Islamic
judges, each responsible for the death of 150 people, quarrels with Khalkhali.
The disagreements related solely to the division of the money stolen from the
people sentenced to death! The prisoners cursed them. On the other hand they
respected and even protected 60 or so religious dignitaries, supporters of
ayatollahs Qomi and Shari'at Madari, who are completely opposed to Khomeyni.
They include Allameh Vahidi Mazandarani, Oj~at ol-Eslam Ra'issi Gorgani, Ha~ji
- Ghavam-khataib and Ayatollah Mowla'i, a childhood friend of Khomeyni. It was
through them that I learned that Sadeq Khalkhali had formed a pretorian guard of
- 5,000 men, extremely well trained and equipped. The ayatollah chose them hin?self
from the students in Qom`s theological schools and universities. Those chosen
are all members of the Feda'yan-e Eslam organization. Every 2 weeks a team of
200 students arrives at Khalkhali's new residence in Shemiran, in Tehran's
northern suburb. For 2 weeks, under the guidance of military instructors, they
receive a very thorough training, usually reserved for paratroopers. Their
"boss" is Lt Col Hamid Ta'ati, orie of the "toughest" members of the former
imperial army rangers. The existence of these "Islamic rangers" is a very
closely-guarde3 secret. I was able to check all that when I was released from
prison.
On Orders From the Imam's Office
One day, when Bani-sadr had just revealed the use of torture to the whole world,
Khomeyni's supporters started opening the prisons. I was filled with wild hope.
But I remembered that one Hajji Kushesh, prisoner number 28114, who was shot in
August 1980 had received notice of his release 4 months before his death...On my
file the following was written, underlined in red: "This prisoner must not be
released, on orders from the imam's office." My prison comrades went on hunger
- strike in solidarity. Finally on 6 February 1981, the prison council director
summoned me. He was about to be f ired. He told me: "Since you are a writer
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anc: can bear witness, I will have you released tomorrow. Leave Iran as soon as
posa~ble tiE~aus~ your file will follow you a]ways."
He ke~t his promise, The next day I was released. Some 48 hours ~ater a new
warrant was issued for my arrest. I did two things before fleeing via Turkey.
- I teleprioried my mother but she had died of griPf 6 months earli~r when she was
told that I had been shot. I then hid my shirt which was stained with Mr
Iravani's blood. It is one of the many proofs of Khomeyni's crimes. Today the
- only memory I have is that of my suffering.
COPYRIGHT: [1981] s.a. Groupe Express.
CSO: 4619/13
~

~
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IRAN
PARIS MAGAZIN~: INTERVIEWS BANI-SADR
JNO51110 Paris AL-WATAN AL-ARA.BI in Arabic 2-8 Oct 81 pp 42, 43
[Interview g~.anted by former Iranian President Abolhasan Bani-Sadr to AL-WATAN
AL-ARABI in Auvers-sur-oise--date not given]
- [Excerpts] [QuestionJ How can the massacres committed since the eruption of
_ th e first revo lution up to the second revolution in Iran be ~ustified in the
name of Islam?
[Answer] Th ey cannot. It appears to me that these massacres are being committed
to take vengeance on Islam in the name of Islam. Islam as a religious call is a
real revoluti~n and could be the greatest revoluiion ever known to the world.
Khomeyni, however, is taking vengeance on Islam. Khomeyn3's theory is that Islam
~ can never be applied except in crises. For Che sake of applying Islam, Khomeyn3
is pursuing violence to confront the crises. Khomeyni believes only in violence
- and nothing else.
[Question] Does this mean that the bloodbaths will continue?
[Answer] Regrettably yes. Iran is now disintegrating because the present regime
is impotent to solve th a political and economic problems. The regime has no
choice, becaus e if it allows the opposition to express their ideas, it would mean
its end.
[QuestionJ There is a U.S, theory that the Iraqi-Iranian war must continue for
th e longest possib.le period because this would facilitate U.S. intervention ln
the Gulf when the time comes.
_ [Answer] I believe that the Americans wish to prolong the war because *_his is
part of their M~ddle East policy as a whole.
[Question] You do not accept the theory that Khomeyni's downfall would serve ~
_ Soviet interes ts?
[Answer] The Soviets do not benefit from the vacuum in Iran. The Tudeh Party
does not exist as a popular base. It has lost many of its assets since the
eruption of th e revolution due to its participation or collusion in chasing the
opposition, I want to say that the Soviets are currently gaining nothing. If
Khomeyni falls, the Americans might prepare some kind of intervention.
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[Question] Do you expect a[words indistinct] based on liberalism; the second
is one of extremism; and the third is being prepared. What are we observing
in Iran today? Two extremist parties are liquidating each other. The first
partiy is the Islamic Republic Party and the other is Mo~ahedin-e Khalq. When
the two parties are exhausted, everything will be ready for the third stage--
the American stage.
_ [Question] Why is it American, and not Soviet, for example?
[Answer] This is simply because the basic Iranian structures are still American
and the ruling forces, or those who can rule, depend on U.S. aid.
[Question] Do you expect a military coup d'etat?
- [Answer] Why not?
[Question] If you were in a position to en~3 the war through negotiations'
would you begin these nego.tiations [words indistinct] is of the Algiers agreement. �
[QuestionJ Cannot this agreement be overlooked?
[Answer] No. This agreement can only be overlooked by means of force. Also,
any forcible concession could cause subsequent wars and these could be waged
either by the Iraqis or by us. This means open war.
[Question] Did you meet with Hani al-Hasan, Yasir 'Arafat's envoy, on the
occasion of his meeting with Mas'ud Rajavi?
[Answer] Of course, I have met him.
[Question] How do you explain Tehran's current relations with the PLO and
particularly with Fatah?
[Answer] I do not believe that the PLO wants to cooperate with Khomeyni. The
PLO's relations with the present regime are purely formal.
[Question] But th e Palestinians did not choose to cooperate with the opposition?
_ [Answer] They do not hide their feelings toward the opposition. Hani al-Hasan's
visit to Auvres -sur-oise conf irms this reality.
[Question] What about your personal relations with Fatah? Also, are you in agree-
ment with Abu 'Ammar [Yasir 'Arafat]?
[Answer] I am in agreement with the Palestinian issue and I b~lieve there is nothing
that can dissociate us from the Palestinian struggle. We both belong to one
culture--the Islamic culture. We also are in solidarity with the Palestinians.
CSO: 4604/2-A
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TUNISIA
NEW LAW PROMOTES MORE VIABLE, DECENTRALIZED EXPORT INDUSTRIES
Paris MARCHES TROPICAUX ET MEDITERRANEENS in French No 1869 4 Sep 81 p 2269
~ext7 Just before the year 1972 began, the Tunisian Investment Code, dating from
1969, seemed inadequate and unexciting to the planners. It was clear that only a
valid legal instrument could stimulate foreign and Tunisian capital to invest for
~ the conquest of foreign markets.
Law 72-38 of April 1972 instituted a particular regime on exporting industries. This
is what industries are called whose entire production is destined for export. This
law, a creator of jobs, aimed principally at setting right the chronic disequilibrium
in the balance of trade. It offered great advantages to investors such as tax
exemptions, easing of constraints in matters of currency exchange, and in repatriation
of benefits and exemption from customs duty in the importation of raw materials and
semimanufactured products used in their production.
After 9 years, the balance sheet of this sector shows that of the 781 projects approved
by the Agency for the Promotion of Investments (API) from 1 January 1973 to 30
December 1980, of the total, 276 enterprises are presently operational. We must add
to this number 7 companies under provisional decree for cammercial reasons, 21 having
asked for reconversion under Law 74-74 relating to investments in the manufacturing
industry (of which 9 are Tunisian and 12 have Tunisian participation), and 26 com-
panies closed as a result of various difficulties.
The 276 businesses employed, at the end of the past year, 27,251 people for an invest-
ment on the order of 85 million dinars (1 Tunisian dinar = 11 French francs). Fore-
casts reckoned on the creation of 68,687 jobs and an investment of 25'7 million dinars.
Of the 276 companies operating today, 203 were created during the first 5 years (1973-
1977), the ?3 others formed during the period 1978-1980. The reason for the slowdown
can be found in the world economic climate and in Europe's protectionist measures in
regard to products coming from Third World countries. The EEC's restrictions on imports,
implemented in 1977 and aiming essentially at combatting the wave of cheap imports
from Asia, were a blow to the Tunisian textile industry.
For the 8 years (1973-1980), the losses can be counted, on the average, at 3 companiQs
a year and 3,440 jabs. The Agency for the Promotion of Investments undertook great
efforts to help bu~inesses in difficulty. Thus, the startup of a dozen projects.
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The Contribution of Exporting Businesses to the Tunisian Economy
Export businesses represent only 4.6 percent of the total number of manufactu.ring com-
par?ies started during the same period 1973-1980 (6,000 units). But they created 16
percent of the total number of jobs in this sector.
In comparison to the results realized from industries ].icensed by Law 74-74 of 3
August 1974 relating to the conditions and advantages applicable to investments in
manufacturing firms, the rate of realization of these licensed projects remains weak ~
when it pertains to the export business (36 percent of the total number of projects,
- 33 percent of the sum of investments, and 40 percent of the jobs forecast). More rapid
in their realization, enterprises of this type often encounter great obstacles before
even seeing the light of day.
- Although preferring urban areas offering, in general, better operating conditions
(infrastructure, transportation, communication, etc.) 34 exporting firms were created
outside the capital and the coastal areas (12 percent). This is important, for Tunisian
authorities are anxious to create jobs in the less favored regions of the country and
- devote much effort (at great sacrifice) to decentralization and stopping rural exodus.
Statistics show that 87.6 percent of the export businesses are concentrated in the
_ cities and coastal regions: Tunis (103), Sousse (24), Monastir (38), Nabeul (44),
Sfax (14), Bizerte (18). The dry interior areas benefit only lightly from these
installations: Zaghouan (13) , Beja (6) , Kef (4) , Jendouba (2) , Kasserine (1) , Sidi
Bouzid (1), Kairouan (1). The other coast doesn't profit from it either: Mahdia (3),
Gabes (3). Law 72-38 doesn't give any specific privileges to decentralization, in
contrast to Law 74-74 and new measures taken by the government in April 1981.
Th~ principal pr~visions of the law of 23 June 1981 (OFFICIAL BULLETIN of 26 June)
_ encouraging invNstments in manufacturing industries and industrial decentralization
were analyzed in our 14 August edition (MTM, n� 1866, p 2099).
The 276 businesses realize about 10 percent of Tunisia's total currency receipts,
including those coming from tourism and services, and they leave in the country a net
added value of 50 million dinars per year.
The third benefit of this activity is the technological contribution. After a clear
preference was shown at the beginning for the textile and hides sectors, we are wit-
nessing a slowing down of this tendency and an orientation towards other sectors,
chiefly towards the mechanical, electric, and electronics industries.
Promoters favored the industries which were easy to start and those requiring a large
manpower factor. The current tendency is rather the installation of more viable
export companies and of a greater technological contribution.
Distribution by Nationality
The promoters of manufacturing export companies are, by more than half, Tunisian or
with Tunisian participation: 134 projects (48.4 percent of the total). The totally
Tunisian enterprises represent 20.6 percent of the total with 57 units, of which 46
are in the textile sector. Seventy-seven (77) are with Tunisian participation (27.8
percent), 51 of which are in textiles and 9 are in the mechanical and electronics
- sectors.
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The other units which are foreign, or in association with other countries, are dis-
tributed as follows: German, 64 (41 in textiles); French, 20 (11 in textiles); Benelux,
36 (24 in te:ctiles); Arab or Arab/other ~ountries 4(currently just starting); others,
18 (14 in textiles).
Those businesses which are French, or partially French, total 70 projects (25.3 percent),
with 7,573 jobs (27.5 percent), and those which are German, or partially German, number
83 units (30 percent), employing 9,809 people (36.6 percent). The other principal
nationalities are Dutch, Italian, English, Japanese, Swiss, and American.
Sectors of Activity
Of the 276 enterprises created, 187 (68 percent of the total) are concentrated in
textiles and 21,384 ~eople (77 percent). These firms specialize in the manufacture of
all kinds of clothing, knittec3 goods, lingerie, undergarments,. swimsuits, furs, wigs,
embroidered goods, caps, etc.
The mechanical and electric industries are in second place with 28 units, employing
2,455 people. These units are devoted to the manufacture or installation of such
things as conveyor belts, transistors, batteries, coils, measuriny tools, potentianeters,
circuit-breakers, etc., and to construction with metals.
In third place is the leather and shoe sector with 21 projects and 1,765 jobs. The~e
firms specialize in the manufacture of shces, boots, soles, fancy leather goods, hand-
bags, etc.
- The chemical industries include 5 units (1.8 percent) and 568 employees (2.1 percent)
and orient their activities towards granular phosphates, triphosphate of soda, ammonia,
an:i rubber.
The remaining 35 firms employ 1,349 people and are involved in diverse activities such
as furniture, craft~, and pottery, but especially coral and diam~nds (cutting,
~olishing, and mounting).
Distribution by Nationality of Projects Under Way
to 30 December 1980 Textile
Nationalities Number ~ Jobs ~ Industries $
Tunisian 57 20,7 4,.143 15 46 80.7
Tunisian-foreign 77 27.9 8,516 30.9 51 62.2
West Germ~n 64 23.2 7,076 25.7 41 64.1 '
France 20 7.2 1,478 5.4 11 55
I3enelux 36 13 4,314 15.7 24 66.7
Arab oc Arab/Foreign 4 1.4 currently under way
Foreign or Mixed Foreign ~ 18 6.5 2,044 7.4 14 77.8
Total 276 100 27,571 100 187 67.8
COPY RIGHT: P.ene Moreux et Cie Paris 1981
9803
CSO: 4519/57 END
29
FOR OFF[~'IAL [;51~, ONLY
APPROVED FOR RELEASE: 2007/02/09: CIA-RDP82-00850R000400060037-1