Afghan Leader Likened to Stalin by Defector to Rebels : Brother Calls Najibullah ‘Weak Puppet’ Who Will Fall

The younger brother of Afghanistan’s President Najibullah, in his first public appearance since defecting to the anti-government guerrillas last year, charged Monday that his brother is “a murderer, a liar and weak puppet” who will fall soon after the Soviets complete their troop withdrawal early next year.

In a heavily guarded news conference at the political headquarters of Afghanistan’s Islamic resistance in this border city, Siddiqullah Rahi, 35, likened his elder brother to the late Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.

He charged that Najibullah ordered their father killed in 1983 because he disagreed with him politically and, two years earlier, also threatened to kidnap Siddiqullah’s two children to prevent him from publicly criticizing the Soviet-backed regime.

The Afghan leader did not react immediately to his brother’s charges.

Change in Focus

Analysts in Pakistan said the personal attack was an indication that the Afghan war is beginning to focus more on traditional, internal rivalries now that the Soviet withdrawal is halfway complete.

It also was a clever public relations stunt, the analysts said. Monday’s news conference was sponsored by the fundamentalist Muslim resistance party Jamaat-i-Islami and was deliberately timed to coincide with the Aug. 15 deadline for the pullout of half the estimated 115,000 Soviet troops that have occupied Afghanistan for the last nine years.

Siddiqullah, who refused to comment on reports that he has been granted political asylum in the United States, escaped from Kabul, the Afghan capital, with his wife and two children last November. He has spent the last nine months in the Afghan countryside with the moujahedeen, the rebels who have been fighting the Soviets with U.S.-supplied weapons.

Growing Sophistication

The president’s estranged brother was brought to Peshawar just a week ago. Jamaat-i-Islami party leaders indicated that the main purpose of Siddiqullah’s visit was to counter the publicity blitz of Najibullah’s government, which permitted scores of Western journalists to visit Kabul this week to witness the troop withdrawal ceremonies.

Western analysts at the border said Monday’s news conference was a sign of growing political sophistication among the moujahedeen, a largely illiterate force that has been staging its guerrilla war against Soviet and Afghan government troops from bases and refugee camps on the Pakistani side of the border.

Just three days earlier, the same resistance party took dozens of foreign journalists by jeep into Afghanistan to interview two Soviet prisoners of war, who said they preferred to join the moujahedeen and fight their own countrymen rather than accept offers of asylum in the West or safe passage back to the Soviet Union. The trip was arranged with the help of the Pakistani government.

During his news conference, Siddiqullah looked for any opportunity to cast his brother as a vicious Soviet puppet whose support in the country of 15 million amounts to less than 40,000 committed Communists.

Siddiqullah, who was an active member of the Communist Party in Kabul for more than a decade, said he became disaffected with the party and his brother after the Soviet invasion of 1979 but that he kept his criticisms largely to himself to protect his family.

Kidnap Threat Alleged

In 1981, Siddiqullah said, while working in an Afghan government bank branch in Hamburg, West Germany, he tried to seek political asylum there. But Najibullah, who was then head of the Afghan secret police, had his agents threaten to kidnap Siddiqullah’s children if he did not return to Afghanistan, Siddiqullah charged.

When Siddiqullah agreed to meet Afghan authorities at the home of the bank branch manager in Hamburg, he said, he was given drugged tea. “When I woke up, I was in East Germany with the KGB (Soviet intelligence agency),” he recalled.

“My brother threatened me a lot after that, but when it did not work, he tried to please me by giving me some bribes,” Siddiqullah said. “He asked me if I wanted to go to the Soviet Union as consul general and make very good contacts with the KGB, so when I came back I would get very good posts. I did not accept it.”

Finally, Siddiqullah said, Najibullah imprisoned him for four months. After his release last year--”part of Najibullah’s reconciliation campaign”--Siddiqullah defected to the guerrillas.

He did not elaborate on his charge that Najibullah ordered their father’s death.

Asked how long his brother can remain in power after the Soviets complete their troop withdrawal next February, Siddiqullah said: “If the moujahedeen can fulfill their pledge to bring unity amongst themselves and all the parties, I am sure the regime will be toppled and a Muslim government established very soon.”

Such unity, though, appeared remote among the still-fractious seven-party moujahedeen alliance Monday.

Asked about the importance of the press conference, sponsored by the Jamaat-i-Islami, a leader of another Muslim fundamentalist party in the alliance said: “There is nothing important at all about this man. It is just a good story for Jamaat.”