Rebel 7
05-02-2004, 05:05 PM
Notorious Afghan prison where thousands died gets new life
The Canadian Press (CP)
May 1, 2004
PUL-I-CHARKHI, Afghanistan (CP) - It is said to have been the one reconstruction project Afghan President Hamid Karzai did not want to touch: renovation of the country's most notorious prison. When presented with a decree last year ordering the project, the interim leader declined to sign, asking instead that one of his ministers do the honours.
The sprawling complex on the eastern edge of Kabul represents one of the darkest periods in Afghanistan's history.
"It is no wonder Karzai resisted," says the prison warden, Gen. Zahirudin Zahir. "Too many people were killed here ... Pul-i-Charkhi has a very bad name."
The latest execution at Pul-i-Charkhi happened on April 20. Abdullah Shah, a military commander convicted of more than 20 murders, was shot in the back of the head. It was Afghanistan's first execution since the demise of the Taliban regime.
Built to hold 45,000, some say the 30-year-old prison held up to 170,000 inmates during the 11-year Soviet occupation that ended in 1990. Untold thousands died there - shot dead or buried alive by their own collaborative countrymen.
Their remains lie in unmarked graves at a nearby range, where Canadian and other NATO troops helping keep the peace in Afghanistan's capital now conduct gunnery practice.
These days, 90 per cent of the prison is closed. A small section has been renovated and 312 prisoners live under conditions far different from those endured by their predecessors.
Half are murderers. Robbers, rapists, drug dealers and about 30 political prisoners - including Taliban and al-Qaida - also inhabit the cells once reserved for anti-Soviet Mujahedeen fighters, opposition communists and religious clerics.
Today's prisoners have gardens, classrooms, a recreation area and even television. They are fed, washed and exercised.
"It is a good place," says Mohammad Asif, 24, mindful of the ever-present guards who are his keepers for the six years he will serve for robbery and murder.
But Mohammad Sami still lives with the nightmares of the old Pul-i-Charkhi 16 years after he left the prison. He spent more than four years behind its massive stone walls and his pain - mental and physical - is as vivid as if it were yesterday.
Sami, now 48, was a Mujahedeen fighter captured by the Soviets in Panshir province in the mid-1980s. He said the Soviets had spies in every cell, most of which were 10-by-10-metre holding areas populated by about 150 prisoners.
They had no bed rolls and only three toilets per cell. They cooked their own meagre rations, usually a small bread loaf and some rotten vegetables daily. Interrogation and torture - beatings, kicks, electric shocks - were routine.
Sami says there was a gallows in the prison. He says he was hanged by the neck until he passed out after he drew his interrogators a false map that was supposed to lead to a resistance hideout in the mountains.
He recalls mass beatings that left the floors of their cell covered in blood, and solitary confinement that lasted 60 days or more. He said prisoners would return from those sessions looking "like animals."
But worst of all were the almost-nightly visits from special guards who would call out prisoners' names and tell them to collect their clothes; they were off to "see the judge."
The prisoners would be loaded onto a bus and taken to the range several kilometres toward the mountains, where a pit was ready and waiting.
They were blindfolded, bound and shot, or simply tossed into the hole and buried alive.
"It was five or six virtually every night," recalls Sami. "Three hundred was the most I ever saw taken."
Sami described the feeling around 4 p.m. when the telltale rattle of the jailer's keys and the clank of the big iron door unlatching would be heard echoing through the chamber.
"The place went completely silent," he said. "Everyone would be in terror: 'Will it be my name that is called?' Our hearts would beat faster and faster until it felt like they would jump right out of our chests."
Sami recalls one night a colleague's name was called. The man was loaded on a bus with several other prisoners and taken to the range.
As Sami was later told, they were bound and blindfolded, then lined up next to a pit and machine-gunned with an AK-47. Sami's friend fell down before he was hit. He pretended he was dead while his would-be executioners left the pile of bodies to bury in the morning.
The man ran away and survived. But many others did not. Sami estimates up to 3,000 died at Pul-i-Charkhi while he was there.
About 27,000 were released in a general pardon issued by the Soviets in the dying days of their occupation, but Sami says all the friends he had among them have since died.
The place closed down, then reopened under the Taliban, but its population scattered with the regime's defeat at the hands of a U.S.-led coalition about 2½ years ago.
Masjidi Khan, who has worked as a guard at the prison for 20 years, remembers those times well. The Soviets were highly organized and efficient, he said, but under the Taliban the prison was chaotic.
"The Russians did take prisoners away but nobody could ever figure out what happened to them," he says. "It was a big secret."
Another guard, Karim Ullah, who also served under both regimes, said the Taliban didn't need to shoot their prisoners; they simply starved them to death.
Many had been beaten so badly before they reached Pul-i-Charkhi they never recovered, wasting away on the prison's cold concrete floors.
Ullah says he protested, telling his Taliban bosses that non-Muslims were better men than they. He was fired and imprisoned seven days for his trouble.
He looks through a barred door and points to his old cell, a three-by- three-metre concrete room among vast corridors of empty cells. Traces of prison art still adorn the walls - mostly scenes of paradise or roadways to freedom with Qur'anic verses and pleas: "Help me."
There is even a recreation of the Titanic, signed by Mohammad Kasim on June 8, 2001, just four months before the Taliban government sank.
Zahir, who helped clear the land for the prison's construction 30 years ago, says he believes Afghanistan is turning the page.
The prison now hosts a school for Afghan prison guards. It has a new kitchen facility, thanks largely to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Italy - working to re-establish the country's justice system - has helped reconstruct part of the prison.
But prisoners still live 10 to a three-by-five-metre cell and Zahir, a farmer's son from Panshir, says another $8 million US is needed to finish the job.
Sami hopes he never gets it, praying instead that Pul-i-Charkhi is abandoned and razed.
After the Soviets left, the bearded former fighter went on to become a school teacher. Now he's a deputy logistics officer in the Afghan militia.
Plagued with pancreatic, kidney and back problems that he says stem from his prison days, he has eight children and he remembers his oldest, 20- year-old Merajudin, coming to visit him as a young lad at Pul-i-Charkhi.
"He'd tell me that he would bring me a ladder so I could climb the wall, leave that awful place and come home," recalls Sami. "When it came time to for him to go, he would cry and say he wanted to stay behind with me."
"I still have nightmares about that."
The Canadian Press (CP)
May 1, 2004
PUL-I-CHARKHI, Afghanistan (CP) - It is said to have been the one reconstruction project Afghan President Hamid Karzai did not want to touch: renovation of the country's most notorious prison. When presented with a decree last year ordering the project, the interim leader declined to sign, asking instead that one of his ministers do the honours.
The sprawling complex on the eastern edge of Kabul represents one of the darkest periods in Afghanistan's history.
"It is no wonder Karzai resisted," says the prison warden, Gen. Zahirudin Zahir. "Too many people were killed here ... Pul-i-Charkhi has a very bad name."
The latest execution at Pul-i-Charkhi happened on April 20. Abdullah Shah, a military commander convicted of more than 20 murders, was shot in the back of the head. It was Afghanistan's first execution since the demise of the Taliban regime.
Built to hold 45,000, some say the 30-year-old prison held up to 170,000 inmates during the 11-year Soviet occupation that ended in 1990. Untold thousands died there - shot dead or buried alive by their own collaborative countrymen.
Their remains lie in unmarked graves at a nearby range, where Canadian and other NATO troops helping keep the peace in Afghanistan's capital now conduct gunnery practice.
These days, 90 per cent of the prison is closed. A small section has been renovated and 312 prisoners live under conditions far different from those endured by their predecessors.
Half are murderers. Robbers, rapists, drug dealers and about 30 political prisoners - including Taliban and al-Qaida - also inhabit the cells once reserved for anti-Soviet Mujahedeen fighters, opposition communists and religious clerics.
Today's prisoners have gardens, classrooms, a recreation area and even television. They are fed, washed and exercised.
"It is a good place," says Mohammad Asif, 24, mindful of the ever-present guards who are his keepers for the six years he will serve for robbery and murder.
But Mohammad Sami still lives with the nightmares of the old Pul-i-Charkhi 16 years after he left the prison. He spent more than four years behind its massive stone walls and his pain - mental and physical - is as vivid as if it were yesterday.
Sami, now 48, was a Mujahedeen fighter captured by the Soviets in Panshir province in the mid-1980s. He said the Soviets had spies in every cell, most of which were 10-by-10-metre holding areas populated by about 150 prisoners.
They had no bed rolls and only three toilets per cell. They cooked their own meagre rations, usually a small bread loaf and some rotten vegetables daily. Interrogation and torture - beatings, kicks, electric shocks - were routine.
Sami says there was a gallows in the prison. He says he was hanged by the neck until he passed out after he drew his interrogators a false map that was supposed to lead to a resistance hideout in the mountains.
He recalls mass beatings that left the floors of their cell covered in blood, and solitary confinement that lasted 60 days or more. He said prisoners would return from those sessions looking "like animals."
But worst of all were the almost-nightly visits from special guards who would call out prisoners' names and tell them to collect their clothes; they were off to "see the judge."
The prisoners would be loaded onto a bus and taken to the range several kilometres toward the mountains, where a pit was ready and waiting.
They were blindfolded, bound and shot, or simply tossed into the hole and buried alive.
"It was five or six virtually every night," recalls Sami. "Three hundred was the most I ever saw taken."
Sami described the feeling around 4 p.m. when the telltale rattle of the jailer's keys and the clank of the big iron door unlatching would be heard echoing through the chamber.
"The place went completely silent," he said. "Everyone would be in terror: 'Will it be my name that is called?' Our hearts would beat faster and faster until it felt like they would jump right out of our chests."
Sami recalls one night a colleague's name was called. The man was loaded on a bus with several other prisoners and taken to the range.
As Sami was later told, they were bound and blindfolded, then lined up next to a pit and machine-gunned with an AK-47. Sami's friend fell down before he was hit. He pretended he was dead while his would-be executioners left the pile of bodies to bury in the morning.
The man ran away and survived. But many others did not. Sami estimates up to 3,000 died at Pul-i-Charkhi while he was there.
About 27,000 were released in a general pardon issued by the Soviets in the dying days of their occupation, but Sami says all the friends he had among them have since died.
The place closed down, then reopened under the Taliban, but its population scattered with the regime's defeat at the hands of a U.S.-led coalition about 2½ years ago.
Masjidi Khan, who has worked as a guard at the prison for 20 years, remembers those times well. The Soviets were highly organized and efficient, he said, but under the Taliban the prison was chaotic.
"The Russians did take prisoners away but nobody could ever figure out what happened to them," he says. "It was a big secret."
Another guard, Karim Ullah, who also served under both regimes, said the Taliban didn't need to shoot their prisoners; they simply starved them to death.
Many had been beaten so badly before they reached Pul-i-Charkhi they never recovered, wasting away on the prison's cold concrete floors.
Ullah says he protested, telling his Taliban bosses that non-Muslims were better men than they. He was fired and imprisoned seven days for his trouble.
He looks through a barred door and points to his old cell, a three-by- three-metre concrete room among vast corridors of empty cells. Traces of prison art still adorn the walls - mostly scenes of paradise or roadways to freedom with Qur'anic verses and pleas: "Help me."
There is even a recreation of the Titanic, signed by Mohammad Kasim on June 8, 2001, just four months before the Taliban government sank.
Zahir, who helped clear the land for the prison's construction 30 years ago, says he believes Afghanistan is turning the page.
The prison now hosts a school for Afghan prison guards. It has a new kitchen facility, thanks largely to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Italy - working to re-establish the country's justice system - has helped reconstruct part of the prison.
But prisoners still live 10 to a three-by-five-metre cell and Zahir, a farmer's son from Panshir, says another $8 million US is needed to finish the job.
Sami hopes he never gets it, praying instead that Pul-i-Charkhi is abandoned and razed.
After the Soviets left, the bearded former fighter went on to become a school teacher. Now he's a deputy logistics officer in the Afghan militia.
Plagued with pancreatic, kidney and back problems that he says stem from his prison days, he has eight children and he remembers his oldest, 20- year-old Merajudin, coming to visit him as a young lad at Pul-i-Charkhi.
"He'd tell me that he would bring me a ladder so I could climb the wall, leave that awful place and come home," recalls Sami. "When it came time to for him to go, he would cry and say he wanted to stay behind with me."
"I still have nightmares about that."