Afghan Leader Forced Out by Army, Rebels

Afghanistan’s strongman Najibullah was forced to resign Thursday after four of his regime’s top generals apparently joined hands with the country’s most powerful rebel commander in a move that drove the ravaged nation closer to chaos.

Within hours of Najibullah’s fall, Afghan Foreign Minister Abdul Wakil told reporters in Kabul that the 44-year-old president, whose family fled to New Delhi several days ago, was stripped of his power after he was stopped at the airport Thursday morning by rebel militiamen loyal to guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah Masoud.

One report from Moscow said that Najibullah was under arrest, but his whereabouts remained unknown Thursday night.

According to sources in the ruling party, a key presidential loyalist, Ghulam Farouq Yaqubi, who took over from Najibullah as chief of the dreaded secret police when the Soviets installed Najibullah as president six years ago, killed himself after learning of the takeover.

Wakil, a onetime Najibullah supporter who joined the dissidents for the coup, said the former leader had been replaced by a ruling council of four vice presidents, whom he did not name. Other reports indicated that the generals held actual power and that the naming of the council was intended to cast the move as a smooth transition of government.

Early today, Kabul Radio gave conflicting reports. First, the official broadcast confirmed Wakil’s version that Najibullah had been stopped at the airport just after midnight. Then, in a subsequent, lengthy broadcast, the radio commentator asserted that Najibullah “illegally resigned” and that “stealthily, he fled.”

Kabul Radio said the new ruling council is committed to U.N. efforts to end the nation’s 13-year war, which has left more than a million dead, 5 million in exile and Afghanistan deeply divided along ethnic and ideological lines.

But the ouster of Najibullah--apparently the result of a slow-rolling coup that evolved over months of secret planning by dissidents in the army and the ruling party and by guerrilla leader Masoud--appeared to have all but sabotaged an ambitious U.N. peace plan that was close to fruition.

Several international analysts who were consulted said the events in Kabul were extremely fluid, and they warned that things could turn chaotic.

The U.S. government, which armed the guerrilla insurrection for years, reacted sharply to the takeover, with the State Department warning that Afghanistan may be fast slipping into anarchy. “Regime control is rapidly collapsing,” said spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, who intensified an American call to all rebel factions to stop fighting and support the U.N. attempts for peace.

In a strong statement, Tutwiler declared that if the rebel factions begin fighting each other along ethnic lines, “You could have chaos.”

She implied that Najibullah will soon go into exile.

“We know that there are countries where he could seek asylum,” she said. She did not elaborate, but a senior State Department official said later that Washington knows of specific countries that are ready to accept him.

Moscow, which had fought a proxy war with Washington in Afghanistan by arming the Kabul regime for more than a decade, likewise urged restraint. The Soviet army invaded Afghanistan in December, 1979, and propped up successive strongmen there until pulling out the last of its estimated 115,000 troops early in 1989. Moscow and Washington agreed to stop arming the two sides as of the end of last year.

U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali called for calm in the troubled country, and the Security Council began private consultations on Afghanistan on Thursday evening.

The U.N. plan, which would have set up an interim ruling council acceptable to both the regime forces and the more fundamentalist of the moujahedeen, the Muslim rebel groups, was to have arranged a transfer of power from Najibullah before the end of the month. Boutros-Ghali announced the results of nearly two years of painstaking shuttle diplomacy at a press conference last week in Geneva.

The secretary general’s special envoy on Afghanistan, Benon Sevan, who was in the final stages of selecting the interim council’s 15 members this week, apparently had just left Kabul when the generals took over. Some initial reports said Najibullah had taken temporary refuge in Sevan’s office in Kabul, but U.N. officials denied those accounts.

There was no public comment from Sevan during the day. According to some reports, he flew back to the Afghan capital Thursday night and was negotiating with the nation’s new leaders.

What was being presented as a new coalition government cannot in itself prevent bloodshed, most diplomatic analysts agreed. The charismatic Masoud’s rebel faction, the Jamiat-i-Islami--which several top ruling party sources in Kabul said is backing the new council--is bitterly opposed by at least two of the heavily armed fundamentalist Muslim rebel groups that have been battling a succession of Soviet-backed regimes in Kabul since the Soviet invasion.

Although not considered among the three moderate rebel factions, Masoud’s Jamiat-i-Islami has shown a greater willingness to compromise with U.N. negotiators and some regime commanders than have the three hard-line fundamentalist parties. All seven of the rebel factions have been fighting the war from bases in Pakistan, whose government has been opposed to Kabul.

Pakistan called Thursday for an immediate cease-fire among the antagonistic guerrilla groups. “All moujahedeen leaders and forces must act with utmost restraint,” Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif said in Islamabad. “They must take all possible steps to prevent bloodshed and to ensure there is a smooth transfer of power.”

From their headquarters in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar, spokesmen for the Hizb-i-Islami party, headed by fundamentalist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, angrily rejected Kabul’s new leadership.

“Either they transfer power to the moujahedeen (holy warriors) or we’ll attack the city,” declared the party’s hard-line strategist Nawab Saleem, who also acts as Hekmatyar’s translator. “Everything will be clear in the next 24 hours.”

Among the key factors that remained unclear Thursday were the exact positions of Hekmatyar’s forces, who claimed that it was they, and not Masoud’s men, who took over the strategic Bagram Air Base earlier in the week. The base, 30 miles north of Kabul, had been the linchpin of Najibullah’s military protection. Official reports from Kabul early Thursday indicated that it was Masoud’s forces that had persuaded the base’s military commanders to surrender, a development that triggered the military moves in Kabul later in the day.

Several analysts said the guerrilla factions that are not part of the coalition may renew their rocket attacks on the capital today.

Such attacks were common during most of the war, but there were none during Thursday’s extraordinary power play. In fact, residents of the capital were struck by the quiet: Shops were open, traffic flowed and there were no heavy troop movements through the city.

But there were fears that Najibullah’s ouster would touch off widespread fighting in the capital, once it became clear which generals were behind the move. Senior ruling party officials said the key figure in the power play was Mohammed Nabi Azimi, a Soviet-trained field commander who was serving as Najibullah’s deputy defense minister. Azimi is an ethnic Tajik, as are rebel commander Masoud, Foreign Minister Wakil and several senior ruling party members who were also described as being behind the takeover.

Several of those officials indicated during interviews with The Times last month that just such a takeover was being plotted, stressing that Najibullah had no intention of giving up power peacefully as he had promised.

“It’s like a long chess game,” one Asian diplomat in Kabul said at the time. “It’s designed to push Najibullah into a corner, disarm him and get him out. The problem is, nearly everyone behind it is Tajik, and they’re risking a backlash of bloodletting from the Pushtun majority if they go through with it.”

The Tajik leaders’ coup is likely to deepen the historic divisions that have pitted them against the Pushtuns many times in Afghanistan’s history. Hekmatyar and several other powerful rebel commanders are Pushtun, as are most of their guerrillas, and analysts say that without U.N. intervention, the war that began as a religious crusade against the Communist invaders may well plunge into a bloody and bitter ethnic conflict.

Afghanistan: A Nation in Turmoil

Here are key facts about Afghanistan, where President Najibullah was forced to resign early Thursday: * Population: About 20 million, including an estimated 2.4 million nomadic people. Nearly 5 million Afghans are refugees in exile.

* Ethnic Makeup: About 55% are Pushtuns (also called Pashtuns and Pathans), living mainly in the east and south; 30% Tajiks, who speak Dari (a variant of Persian). Other groups include Uzbeks, Hazaras, Baluchis and Turkomans.

* Religion: Islam is the main religion; most are Sunni Muslims.

* Area: 250,000 square miles. Landlocked Afghanistan borders former Soviet republics of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan to the north, Iran and Pakistan. Its northeast tip touches China.

* Capital: Kabul (population: about 1.5 million).

* Armed Forces: Army: 40,000 troops, 860 tanks. Air force: 5,000 troops, 253 combat aircraft, 90 armed helicopters.

* Recent History: Soviet troops invaded in late 1979 to ensure a pro-Moscow regime in Kabul. Afghan guerrillas fought the Kabul regime and the Soviet troops propping it up. Pakistan provided base areas for the guerrillas, and the United States and other nations money and arms. Moscow withdrew its forces in February, 1989, but the fighting continued. With the Cold War over, Washington and Moscow agreed last year to cut off arms to their respective allies. A U.N. peace plan envisaged a council of neutral Afghans to take over this month and pave the way for an interim government.

* War Costs: An estimated 1 million Afghans died, and 5 million are refugees in Pakistan and Iran. Moscow lost nearly 15,000 men. U.S. aid to the rebels totaled about $2 billion.

Sources: Political Handbook; Times staff and wire reports

Los Angeles Times

* NAJIBULLAH PROFILE: A7

Times staff writer Norman Kempster in Washington contributed to this article.