Afghans in S.D. Tell of Country’s Plight : 6-Year War Against Soviet Invaders Has Taken a Terrible Toll

Six years ago, on Dec. 27, Soviet troops marched into Afghanistan, ostensibly at the request of the faltering Marxist regime that had seized power in a bloody military coup there a year and a half earlier.

The invasion was denounced by much of the world. The United States responded with a Soviet grain embargo, which has since been lifted, and a boycott of the 1980 Olympics.

Though poorly armed and organized, the mujahadin, Afghanistan’s resistance fighters, have surprised the world by holding the Soviets at bay.

“Six years ago they were fighting with rocks,” says Sayed Nasir, an Afghan-born engineer who heads the Free Afghanistan Alliance here. “Now they are getting better organized.”

Even now, the Soviet Union is said to successfully control only 15% to 20% of Afghanistan’s territory, and reports of defection from the Soviet army are widespread.

San Diego area activists and Afghans who now live here are working to keep the Afghan plight in the public eye. Organized in several groups, they are also raising money and gathering medical supplies, clothing and food for the embattled Afghans. The Afghan Help Organization has been collecting non-perishable foods, sleeping bags and warm clothing for an airlift in late November to Peshawar, Pakistan, near the Afghan border, said Larry Dickson, a Poway mathematician who heads the group’s Southern California chapter.

Soviet Indifference Decried

Local activists say that what they find most galling is the Soviets’ profound disregard for the humanitarian and medical concerns of the Afghan people. The International Red Cross, the World Health Organization and similar groups were summarily evicted from the country after the invasion. Reports are commonplace of indiscriminate bombing of civilians and the maiming of children attracted to anti-personnel bombs designed to resemble toys.

Activists charge that vaccination programs have been largely discontinued in Afghanistan, and diseases such as malaria, tuberculosis, diphtheria, meningitis and measles--previously under reasonably good control--are now causing serious epidemics. The infant mortality rate has escalated, some say up to as high as 30%. Severe malnutrition, resulting from the destruction of livestock, orchards and cultivated fields, has made Afghan civilians further prone to disease. And there are stories of the deliberate contamination of village water supplies, and the razing of schools, hospitals and clinics.

Medical issues are a key rallying point for Afghan supporters here.

“Before the coup, infant mortality was low,” said Dr. Ali Hussainy, a pediatric surgeon who lived in Kabul until he left Afghanistan in September, 1980, for India and ultimately San Diego. “We planned and got vaccinations all over the country. We looked after our maternal cases. Our economy was also improving at that time.”

Dr. Zaher Ghazialam reiterated the drastic lack of medical care inside the country. Ghazialam, 49, is an Afghan orthopedic surgeon who came to the U.S. with his family several months ago. He had left his home in Kabul in 1980 to join the resistance and offer the fighters medical assistance. He is now a student of public health at San Diego State University, and hopes to someday return to his country to help rebuild its crippled medical facilities.

“The wounded patients, when they leave for Pakistan, most of them die on the way,” Ghazialam said. “Primary medical aid is not available inside Afghanistan. Most of the patients have to be carried by horse or camel or donkey from inside Afghanistan into Pakistan. It takes two weeks or sometimes one month to reach Pakistan. So most of them die on the way.”

And those who are treated in Pakistan often become permanently handicapped or face amputations because of chronic infection of wounds, Ghazialam added.

Acute Shortage of Doctors

“At this point, there is a dearth of doctors in Afghanistan,” said Bea Loynab, who heads the San Diego chapter of the International Medical Corps (IMC). “There are only between 20 and 25 medical doctors left in what they call free Afghanistan.”

Loynab lived in Kabul for a total of 11 years between 1962 and 1979; she worked for the United Nations and was married to an Afghan. Now a La Jolla resident, Loynab said that outside of Kabul “there is, for all intents and purposes, no medical care, no medical attention. All the doctors have either been killed in the country or they’ve been expelled. The people who are wounded in Afghanistan, if they can’t get immediate first aid, they just die because they bleed to death.”

The International Medical Corps was started in 1984 by Dr. Robert Simon, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCLA Medical Center, after he learned of the dire medical situation in Afghanistan.

“Outside of Kabul, the medical units--all of the hospitals and clinics--were destroyed,” Simon said. He wanted to set up medical units in Afghanistan manned by volunteer doctors and nurses, and initially contacted groups such as the International Red Cross to see whether he could do so under their banner. But the Red Cross charter does not permit its presence in a country where the government does not welcome it, Simon explained, so he started a new organization. At present there are four IMC mobile medical units in Afghanistan, run by volunteer doctors and nurses.

“About a quarter of the people we treat in our clinics really would die if it weren’t for the antibiotics and so forth,” Simon said. He showed pictures of wounded being transported atop crude wooden bed frames on the backs of donkeys, pictures of starving children, pictures of youngsters missing fingers or hands because they picked up colorful “toy” bombs.

Simon also enumerated other problems in Afghanistan. For example, because of severe protein and vitamin deficiencies, he said, a full third of the children now born in the country are retarded.

“I think Dr. Simon’s impact has been incalculable,” Dickson said, recalling what one Afghan told him in October, 1984, during his own visit to Peshawar. “According to him, the first thing the Soviets built was a prison and the first thing the Americans built was a hospital,” Dickson said.

Another purpose of the IMC is to help train citizens. Dr. Farid Hakim, 29, graduated from Ningarhar Medical School in 1981 and shortly afterward joined the freedom fighters. In 1984, he met Simon and helped him set up a clinic in Kunar province.

Atrocities Recounted

Because of the war, Hakim had never had the opportunity to do a medical residency. The IMC sponsored Hakim’s seven-month visit to the United States, where he studied trauma care, including care of gunshot wounds, at hospitals in San Diego and Los Angeles. He spent three months at UC San Diego Medical Center earlier this year.

Interviewed in October, shortly before his return to Afghanistan where he plans to rebuild his bombed clinic and train paramedics, Hakim told of atrocities he had witnessed--including the burial alive of 400 villagers near Kirallah in Kunar province--and outlined some of the problems facing his country.

“We don’t have schools. We don’t have medical supplies. We don’t have shoes. We don’t have warm clothes. We don’t have food. We don’t have anything.

“Eighty percent of trauma patients die because of the lack of instruments and medicine,” Hakim continued. “Donkeys and camels are slow ambulances.”

The IMC had sought to establish a training center for medics and an acute care facility in Peshawar, Pakistan. This summer, the State Department agreed to give the group $675,000 for that purpose, with the stipulation that no more American doctors and nurses would volunteer in the mobile clinics inside Afghanistan. The problem with the grant, Simon and others say, is that it ignores the immediate and critical need within the country. To get around the agreement, the IMC is now recruiting internationally.

“We believe that the Red Cross and all these organizations are doing a fine job in the refugee camps (in Pakistan),” Simon said. “But there’s nothing inside the country. What this does is hold a carrot in front of these people. It lures them out of their country.”

Bea Loynab agreed.

“The whole thing is the Afghans do not want to leave their country,” she said. “They have a great love of country. Witness how they are fighting, practically with their bare hands.”

Massive Refugee Problem

The war in Afghanistan has created many refugees. Of a pre-war population estimated between 15 and 17 million, about 4 million Afghans are now refugees, primarily along the Pakistani border, where nearly 3 million now live in camps. Another million or so are in Iran. Estimates vary or are unavailable on the number of Afghans who have been imprisoned or killed or have become refugees elsewhere within their country.

“I’m sure they don’t want to become expatriates,” said Dennis Aronson, a computer specialist who lives in Poway. “They have trouble finding work. They are in limbo.”

Aronson and his wife, Susan, both involved with the Afghan Help Organization, spent two years in Afghanistan in the early 1960s as Peace Corps volunteers.

“It is so hard to imagine,” said Susan Aronson. “They’ve always had a hard, hard time keeping their heads above water. Even in the best of times, things were so difficult there.”

Afghanistan has been a nation, albeit a factionalized one due to long-entrenched tribal loyalties, for two centuries. With an economy that is primarily agricultural and a people that is overwhelmingly Moslem, Afghanistan historically has been a buffer state between Russia and the British Empire, and has ferociously fought off foreign powers that have attempted to dominate it.

But refugees continue to leave Afghanistan.

Mark Lederer, 23, spent three months in Islamabad, Pakistan, teaching English to Afghan refugees. Now a graduate student in history at San Diego State University, Lederer said his trip was sponsored by his church, Rancho Bernardo Community Church Presbyterian. The English school in Islamabad where he taught is operated by Hayat Services, an umbrella organization funded by the World Relief Organization, a Dutch relief group called Zoa, and the Evangelical Alliance for Missions. Some of Lederer’s students were wounded mujahadin who wished they could still fight. Others were teen-agers avoiding the draft in Afghanistan.

“And some of them were there because they were just absolutely shell-shocked,” Lederer said.

The Afghans study English for several reasons, he said. “It helps them to get out of the country. A lot of them want to get out of Pakistan. They have no future there. They can’t own land, and there are no schools.

“But mostly,” Lederer said, “they are just bored out of their skulls. They want to do something.”

American Blind Spot

Those supportive of the Afghan cause say they constantly struggle against a widespread lack of information among Americans--an enormous blind spot. They watch people rally around disasters in Ethiopia, South Africa and Mexico City and wonder why so few people are even interested in the Afghan situation, one they repeatedly characterize as a massacre, a genocide.

“It’s not the subject that is getting this grand media attention, like a famine or earthquake, where the problem is so dramatic,” Loynab said. “It’s because it’s been going on for six years. It’s not the kind of thing that has captured that sort of popularity.”

Nevertheless, she charged, the Russians are theoretically destroying the culture of a people, noting that the attack on landowners and intelligentsia has been particularly virulent.

“It seems to be an intentional destruction of a people,” Loynab said. “They are being obliterated.”

“The atrocities are so enormous that if they were known in this country, the people here would go crazy,” Nasir said.

In order to make local high school students more aware of the country’s culture and history, the Afghan Help Organization is working with both the San Diego and Sweetwater school districts to start a pilot program on Afghanistan, Dickson said.

Lederer, a student of Afghan history, plans to participate in that project. Whenever he talks with his friends about Afghanistan, he said, “most of them don’t know the magnitude of the situation. I say 3 million refugees, and they say, ‘No way.’ They’re pretty incredulous.. . . We’ve never had a public outcry about what’s happening in Afghanistan. It’s a dead topic. I’m not sure why.”

Zaher Ghazialam sat in his living room in La Mesa, surrounded by his wife and six teen-age children. One of his daughters described their journey out of the country, showing the pictures she had taken.

“When I tell my friends in school, they don’t believe me,” she said. “They don’t want to hear.”

“The common people in America should understand what is going on in Afghanistan,” her father said. “Russia has isolated Afghanistan from the rest of the world and started its massacre without being criticized by the world. I don’t mean Americans should go there and fight. We need just their shout and cry and criticism. . . . Otherwise, everything will be meaningless for what we claim as a free world, as a civilized society.”