Old Atrocities, Now Official, Galvanize Afghanistan

By ROD NORDLAND, NYT

KABUL, Afghanistan — So many people were buried alive by bulldozers in the barren fields around the Pul-e-Charkhi Prison on Kabul’s outskirts that guilty soldiers later said it was like an earthquake as their victims tried to claw their way out.

Thirty-four years later, the names and details of nearly 5,000 of those victims — arrested, tortured and killed by the Afghan Communist government in 1978 and 1979 — have resurfaced, cataloged in records released in September.

The so-called death lists were originally compiled by the Afghan government. They languished, unreleased, for decades, until unearthed by Dutch investigators and published on the Web site of the Netherlands national prosecutor’s office.

The Afghan government’s reaction to the release of the lists was initially cautious, and President Hamid Karzai was quoted as saying that reconciliation was more important than prosecutions.

(More here.)