Sadness Pervades Camps in Pakistan : Afghan Refugees Mourn for ‘Our Martyr’ Zia

With moist eyes and an empty heart, the carpet master of Pannian Refugee Camp No. 6 began work this week on a new project.

For nearly nine years, Mohammed Yusaf Jawad has been creating rugs that depict the horrors and glories of the Afghan resistance’s Islamic holy war against the Soviet-backed government in Kabul.

He designs fine-textured Turkoman rugs with patterns characterized by AK-47 rifles, helicopter gunships, rocket launchers, tanks, bombs, grenades, corpses and burning villages. The rugs, woven by refugees and resistance fighters taking a break from the war, are sold to tourists and help finance the guerrilla war.

But now Jawad is designing an epitaph: a carpet bearing the portrait of Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq, who was killed last week when his plane exploded and crashed. Soon the weavers of Pannian Refugee Camp No. 6 will begin working at their looms, creating hundreds of rugs, 4 feet by 7, that will end up on the walls of most of the huts in refugee camps along the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

What Jawad is doing is typical of what has been going on in the past few days in the more than 350 mud-and-straw hut refugee camps in Pakistan, which at Zia’s direction opened its doors and its coffers to more than 3 million Afghans after Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan in 1979.

“When my father died, I was not very sad compared to this,” declared Said Sarajuddin, one of the many moujahedeen fighters who work at the looms to raise money for the war. “But when Zia ul-Haq died, I felt a great sadness. This is a greater tragedy than the death of my father. This is the death of the father of millions.”

Many Tears in Camps

Since Zia was killed, along with 10 of his generals and U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Arnold L. Raphel, there have been perhaps more tears in the camps than among the Pakistanis themselves.

Last Saturday at Camp No. 6, hundreds of red-eyed refugees crowded into the 15 tiny huts that have television sets to watch Zia’s funeral. They gathered around the sets again Saturday night to watch the new Pakistani president, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, meet with reporters for a discussion of such critical matters as his government’s policy toward the Afghan war and its refugees.

The refugees wept for joy when they heard the president tell an Afghan reporter, “We want to reassure the refugees . . . that we, too, will treat them as the honored guests of this country.”

The refugees are concerned about whether Pakistan will continue to serve not only as a safe haven but also as a conduit for arms and economic aid to the moujahedeen , who have already received covert CIA aid estimated to be worth $2 billion. The weapons and other supplies, delivered through Pakistan, are widely credited with helping force Moscow’s decision to withdraw Soviet troops.

There is also concern about future U.S. policy. Over the weekend, as visiting dignitaries were placing wreaths at Zia’s tomb, the leaders of the seven-party moujahedeen alliance were appealing to Secretary of State George P. Shultz to increase U.S. aid to the resistance “now that our martyr is gone.”

“After the death of President Zia, we are more in need of material help and all that from the United States,” one leader told Shultz.

Shultz nodded and replied, “We are there.”

War at Critical Stage

The moujahedeen leaders see such support as critical at this stage of the war. They and many U.S. analysts believe that the struggle that has taken the lives of more than 1 million Afghans and 30,000 Soviet soldiers may be nearing an end.

As the Soviet troops, estimated at 115,000, have gradually withdrawn from Afghan cities and military bases under an agreement reached in Geneva, the moujahedeen have retaken about 70 towns and districts and several hundred military garrisons.

But the resistance leaders, whose goal is to overthrow the Soviet-backed regime of President Najibullah and install an Islamic government, have found it difficult to hold their new positions. Government troops have bombed and shelled the so-called liberated zones and, in many instances, the moujahedeen have had to pull back.

In recent weeks the moujahedeen have been shifting to psychological warfare in the hope that the regime’s hold on Afghanistan’s largest cities, including Kabul, will crumble from within.

But such a waiting game takes time and massive support--not only weapons but the care and feeding of the refugees as well.

Against this military backdrop, the refugees’ return to Afghanistan has become one of the most sensitive issues in the region.

Moujahedeen leaders have told the refugees that they must not return to their villages until Najibullah is overthrown. Many of the refugees say privately that they want to return as soon as the Soviet troops are gone next February, in time for the spring planting season. But they say they are afraid that the heavily armed resistance fighters will not allow it.

More than half of the $2 billion that international aid agencies believe will be needed to repatriate the refugees has already been made available to the United Nations, which will be responsible for moving the refugees back across the border. But the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which has spent $700 million caring for them in the Pakistani refugee camps, has said it cannot begin moving them until they are ready to go.

‘Wrong Message’ to Refugees

“If we would go in now, stockpiling food and assistance, it could give the wrong message to the refugees,” Anne Bijleveld, deputy director of the U.N. office in Islamabad, said. “That’s why we feel it should be the refugees themselves who create this ‘pull’ effect. It definitely will happen, the Afghans are so keen to go back. But they must decide for themselves when it will be.”

So the world’s largest refugee population, more than 50% children younger than 14, is in a kind of limbo.

“We all feel like orphans,” said Mohammed Ismail, the manager of the carpet-weaving center at Camp No. 6, “because we were all so dependent on this man, this martyr, Zia ul-Haq. We were like his children. We feel as if we have lost our father.”

To underscore their sense of loss, the seven-party alliance met in emergency session Friday and agreed to print thousands of posters depicting Zia as a martyr of the war and put them up throughout Afghanistan. They also decided to rename the grand mosque in Kabul after Zia once the capital is recaptured.

So powerful was Zia’s influence with the resistance that many refugees believe his death could slow the movement, or at least lead to a shift in the moujahedeen power structure--away from the fundamentalist leaders Zia favored.

“The most tragic part of it all is that the martyr’s death comes at a time when we were so close to victory,” Ismail said. “Without this man, many fear that the war will go on longer.”

Soviets, Afghans Blamed

Many of the refugees are convinced that the Soviets or the Afghan secret police were responsible for the crash of Zia’s plane, which the Pakistani government has said it strongly believes was sabotaged.

“This is why we are calling Zia a martyr,” Ismail said. “He is not so much a martyr of Pakistan as a martyr of Afghanistan.”

And it is why Jawad, the carpet master, is working on the Zia carpet most of his waking hours.

“A piece of our heart was taken away with this fallen martyr,” Ismail said, “so we will make these carpets as our tribute. But they will not be permitted on the floor. They will be hung only on the walls, in the place meant only for martyrs and prophets.”