Lawmakers Call for U.S. Asylum ‘Pipeline’ : Soviet Defectors Relate Afghan Trauma

Two Soviet defectors Wednesday offered a rare glimpse of life in the Red Army in Afghanistan in hopes of gaining political asylum in the West for several hundred other Soviet soldiers thought to have deserted or been captured by the Afghan rebels.

Their Capitol Hill testimony described the disillusionment that led them to flee their assignments in the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Many members of Congress, meanwhile, are trying to pressure the Reagan Administration into setting up a “defector pipeline” to encourage disaffected Soviet soldiers to seek U.S. asylum.

“Having Soviet soldiers defecting in large numbers and telling their stories in the West will put substantial pressure on the Soviets to withdraw,” said Rep. Don Ritter (R-Pa.), a member of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe, which conducted the hearings. “And we will bring to freedom hundreds of young men who most likely face punishment or death if they are forced to return to the Soviet Union.”

The governmental commission was formed in 1976 to monitor compliance with the Helsinki human rights agreements signed by the United States, the Soviet Union and 34 other nations in 1975.

In a moving statement at the hearing, a Soviet electrician, Igor Kovalchuk, described his frustration and depression over being “sucked into a huge bloody whirlpool” of violence as a Soviet sharpshooter in Afghanistan.

Kovalchuk, 27, said that growing up in the city of Kharkov, “I was taught to believe that our system was the best and the most humane in the entire world, while Americans were egotistical exploiters of other people, who want to take over the world and keep it in their own hands.”

But after being drafted to fight in Afghanistan, Kovalchuk said, he began to grapple with questions about why the Soviets were there. He quoted a Soviet officer as telling his troops: “Stop your babbling. . . . American mercenaries are on the territory of Afghanistan and it is our duty to get them out of there, understand?”

Kovalchuk told commission members he “smoked dope,” cried to himself and sometimes closed his eyes when shooting someone at close range.

Finally, after a small girl was killed by his unit, Kovalchuk decided to escape in 1982, he said. He joined and fought with the Afghan resistance and four years later won asylum in Canada.

Similarly, Sergei Busov described “the lying, the thievery, the servility and the cruelty” that he said prompted him to flee the Soviet army for the foothills of Afghanistan in October, 1983.

Ludmilla Thorne, a Soviet human rights specialist in New York who helped gain asylum for Kovalchuk, Busov and 12 others, said that several hundred Soviet soldiers, either defectors or held captive by the resistance movement, want to leave Afghanistan for the West.

Lawmakers on the commission told Thorne that they would encourage expanding asylum proceedings for would-be defectors and setting up a communication network to let Soviet soldiers know their options for asylum.

A State Department official said later that the Administration supports free choice for Soviet soldiers who do not want to return to their homeland and actively aids those who may want to come to the West.

But Sen. Gordon J. Humphrey (R-N.H.) called such assertions “sheer hypocrisy” and told commission members that the U.S. record of “failure” in aiding defectors is “disgraceful” and “intolerable.” Others also charged the Administration with dragging its feet on the defector question--perhaps for fear of damaging negotiations for a Soviet withdrawal.