Mohammad Najibullah: KHAD chief and last Soviet-era president of Afghanistan

At a glance

• Mohammad Najibullah (1947–1996) was an Ahmadzai Ghilzai Pashtun from Paktia who trained as a doctor at Kabul University and belonged to the Parcham wing of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). [8, 10]

• He headed the secret police, KHAD, from 1980. Amnesty International found that political prisoners in KHAD centres were tortured systematically. [1, 2]

• He replaced Babrak Karmal as party leader in May 1986, and the Loya Jirga of 29 and 30 November 1987 elected him president for seven years. [3, 4, 8]

• His government outlasted the Soviet withdrawal of February 1989 and fell in April 1992, after Soviet supplies stopped. [8, 12]

• He lived in the United Nations compound in Kabul from April 1992. Taliban fighters took him out on 27 September 1996, killed him and displayed his body. [5, 14]

• He is buried at Gardez. In the 2010s a growing number of Afghans came to regard him with respect, according to the Afghanistan Analysts Network, while others point to the record of KHAD. [10, 17, 19]

A doctor from Paktia

Najibullah belonged to the Ahmadzai, a section of the Sulaiman Khel who are among the eastern Ghilzai. Kakar calls him an Ahmadzay Ghilzay Pashtun from Paktia. [8] Sources disagree on where he was born in 1947. The Afghanistan Analysts Network (AAN) says Sayyed Karam in Paktia. [10] The news agency Pajhwok says Kabul, with an ancestral village between Sayyid Karam and Gardez. [20] Amstutz, writing for the US National Defense University in 1986, said he came from a landowning family in Logar. [9] His family told AAN that his name was only Najibullah, without the Muhammad that newspapers add. [10]

He attended Habibia High School in Kabul. [9] At Kabul University's College of Medicine he became a PDPA student leader in the mid-1960s, and he graduated in 1975, ten years after he started, because political work and prison delayed him. [8, 10] Kakar remembers him on campus as a speaker who recited poetry, and says he was called Najib the Bull for his athletics. [8] Amstutz gives another reason, that he was burly and served as Karmal's bodyguard in the years Karmal sat in parliament. [9] His daughter Muska says the name came from his dominant personality. [18] He sided with Babrak Karmal's Parcham faction, and Amstutz adds that he was said to be Karmal's cousin. [8, 9] He joined the PDPA central committee in 1977. [8]

Ambassador, exile and the secret police

After the coup of April 1978, in which Nur Muhammad Taraki's Khalq faction took the upper hand, Parcham leaders were sent abroad. Kakar says the Khalqis banished Najibullah to Iran as ambassador. [8] Amstutz dates the posting to July 1978 and says he was dismissed after two months and fled. [9] Kakar adds that he lost his Afghan citizenship, and quotes the memoirs of Mohammad Hassan Sharq, a later prime minister, for the claim that he took about $300,000 of embassy cash. [8]

The Soviet invasion of December 1979 and the death of Hafizullah Amin brought Karmal to power. Najibullah was made head of the new secret police, and Kakar and Amstutz agree that he entered the politburo in 1981. [8, 9]

KHAD, 1980 to 1985

The State Information Service, Khedamat-e Etela'ate Dawlati, abbreviated KHAD, was set up in 1980 under Najibullah, according to Amnesty International. [1] The KGB's archive notes, published by Vasiliy Mitrokhin, say the security organs were restructured along KGB lines in 1980, and that KHAD's staff grew from 700 in January 1980 to 16,650 in 1982. [3] Amstutz estimated 15,000 to 30,000 full-time staff and perhaps 100,000 paid informers, and called Najibullah's direction "nominal" because of the weight of Soviet advisers. [9] Kakar's sources give 25,000 or 30,000. [8] Amstutz reports Najibullah telling a party conference that KHAD's slogan was "a weapon in one hand, a book in the other." [9] The dates of his tenure vary: Amstutz says 1984, AAN says 1980 to 1985, and the editors of Mitrokhin's paper say 1986. [3, 9, 10]

Several investigators documented what KHAD did. Amnesty International's report of 1986, summarised in its December newsletter, said it believed political prisoners were systematically tortured by KHAD agents. Former prisoners described beatings, electric shocks, burns from cigarettes and hair torn from the scalp, and said Soviet personnel were present at interrogations. [2] In March 1991, while Najibullah was president, Amnesty reported that KHAD, by then the Ministry of State Security, ran more than a dozen interrogation centres in Kabul, still called KHAD centres by the public. It said prisoners were held for years without charge or trial and that torture was routine, with electric shocks, beatings and sleep deprivation. [1]

The historian Kakar was one of those arrested, in 1982. He was held with a group of professors for nine months in the Sadarat building and sentenced to eight years, and the group was released early in 1987. He says KHAD did not torture him physically. Of the Shashdarak centre he writes: "Of those detained in Shashdarak, I have neither met nor heard of anyone who was not tortured." [8] He sums up: "KhAD was known to Afghans for house searches, arrests, torture, and execution." [8] Al Jazeera, in 2012, quoted the UN special rapporteur for Afghanistan as saying that KHAD "regularly practiced torture". [17]

How far Najibullah took part himself is argued. Amstutz reports that people he interrogated described him as a cold-blooded man who liked to wave a revolver. [9] Al Jazeera mentions a nickname, kashok, "the spoon", in reference to an alleged fondness for gouging out eyes. Daoud Kaiyan, who worked with him, told Al Jazeera that no documentation proves the accusations and that every government provides security. [17]

KHAD also worked abroad. Mitrokhin's notes say Najibullah met Murtaza Bhutto, son of the executed Pakistani prime minister, three times in Kabul, and that he once met him in person at the steps of a hijacked Pakistan International Airlines plane, wearing an airport worker's uniform, while the KGB advised him how to use the situation against Pakistan. The hijackers were given $4,500, an explosive device and three Kalashnikovs. [3]

Replacing Karmal

At the Soviet party congress in February 1986 Mikhail Gorbachev called the war in Afghanistan a "bleeding wound", and early in May Najibullah replaced Karmal. [12] The editors of Mitrokhin's paper date it to 4 May, when Kabul Radio said Karmal had resigned for "ill health". [3] The Library of Congress country study says Najibullah moved with caution, because Karmal's followers could use any concession to non-Marxists against him. [12]

National reconciliation, 1987

At the end of 1986 he announced a programme of National Reconciliation, with a six-month ceasefire and talks that could lead to a coalition government in which the PDPA gave up its monopoly. [12] Kakar dates the invitation to 15 January 1987. [8] The seven Peshawar parties refused. At a rally in a Peshawar sports ground on 17 and 18 January, which the Christian Science Monitor put at as many as 100,000 refugees and fighters, their leaders rejected the offer to join a coalition. [13] The Library of Congress study judged the programme "essentially a sop to Moscow's hope to tie a favorable political settlement to its desire to pull its forces out". [12]

It changed some things. Najibullah described himself as a Muslim, quoted the Quran in Pashto and Persian, and prayed on Fridays at the Pul-e-Khishti mosque. [8] Prisoners were released in groups, Kakar among them. [8] He also offered local commanders autonomy if they stopped fighting, and a good number agreed. [8] The government's own militias, which AAN calls an extensive programme strongly supported by the Soviets, took in former officers and fighters. [10] Sharq, the prime minister of 1988 and 1989, wrote that no known commander ever submitted. [8]

Najibullah put his own case to Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow on 20 July 1987. He said there was "no alternative to the policy of reconciliation" and that the years of fighting had "convincingly demonstrated the impossibility of resolving the problems facing Afghanistan by military means alone". He reported more than 10,000 reconciliation commissions and said 15,000 armed rebels had come over to the government, figures that are his own and not checked elsewhere. He also said it would be "premature and incorrect" to call the results tangible and irreversible, that the opposition was trying to separate the party from the policy so as to nullify it, and that the party was "lagging behind the situation and the reaction of the population". [7]

The alliance of seven Peshawar parties gave different reasons. Edward Girardet reported that at the rally of 17 and 18 January 1987 their leaders vowed to fight until the Soviets withdrew and would take part in no administration that included communists. One alliance spokesman said: "The communists know ... we would chase them out as soon as the Russians leave." The leaders announced instead a commission to draft laws for an interim government. Najibullah answered that he would go on with reconciliation and called them "warmongers" who showed "complete disregard for the people's desire [for] peace". [13]

The constitution of 1987

On 29 and 30 November 1987 a Loya Jirga in Kabul adopted a new constitution of 149 articles. [4] Kakar describes how its members were chosen by the authorities, and how four rockets from the hills of Paghman hit near the hall while Najibullah read his opening speech. He kept reading. [8] The constitution made Islam the religion of Afghanistan, allowed political parties and named Pashto and Dari as official languages: "Pashtu and Dari are official languages among the national languages of the country." [4] It declared Afghanistan multinational, and Article 14 pledged the state to the growth of the culture, language and literature of "all nationalities, clans and tribes". [4] The president was to be elected by the Loya Jirga for seven years, and for no more than two terms. [4] Najibullah was the only candidate. [8] The word "democratic" went from the state's name, which became the Republic of Afghanistan. [8]

The party changed its name later. Kakar and AAN both place the renaming as the Homeland Party, Hezb-e Watan, in 1990, and AAN says that year the party dropped its leftist programme for power-sharing with its armed opponents. [8, 10] Afghans outside the party, Kakar says, distrusted the change, because the security service, now the Ministry of State Security, was still run by the same Parchamis. [8]

After the Soviet withdrawal

The Geneva Accords were signed on 14 April 1988, and the last Soviet troops left on 15 February 1989. [8, 12] Najibullah then declared an emergency and removed non-party ministers from the cabinet. [12] Many expected a quick fall. The Library of Congress study says the attack on Jalalabad in March 1989 reached the airport and was thrown back, and that by May the government garrison had held. [12] The fight is described in the article on the Soviet war and the refugees. Soviet support, the same study says, reached $3 billion a year in 1990. [12] Kakar puts it at $250 to $300 million a month. [8]

On 6 March 1990 his defence minister, Shahnawaz Tanai, a Khalqi from Paktia, tried to overthrow him, and Kakar says Tanai then allied with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hezb-e Islami. [1, 8] Amnesty International reported that dozens of people were said to have been executed outside the law afterwards, among them four generals reportedly shot at the Riasat-e-Panj interrogation centre. [1]

The fall, 1991 to 1992

Khost fell on 31 March 1991, after what the Library of Congress study calls the collaboration of its garrison. [8, 12] On 13 September 1991 the Soviet and American foreign ministers agreed to end lethal supplies from 1 January 1992, and the Soviet Union broke up in December. [8] The study says that, cut adrift, his government began to fall apart, and that when the money stopped many bought-off militias abandoned him. [12] It adds that the regime fell while it still had more weapons than its enemies. [12]

On 18 March 1992, at the urging of the UN envoy Benon Sevan, Najibullah said he would resign once a transitional authority existed. [8] HRW adds that the United States and Pakistan pressed him through the UN. [11] Abdul Rashid Dostum, the commander of the Uzbek militias, turned against him, and on 14 April Dostum's militia took positions in Kabul. [8] At about 2 a.m. on 16 April, the Los Angeles Times reported, Najibullah reached the airport in a UN car with his brother, his chief of security, and was turned back by a senior national guard officer. [16] HRW says his car was blocked by militia and that he went back into the city and took refuge in the UN compound. [11] Mujahidin forces entered Kabul over the following days, and the story from there is in the article on the civil war and the Taliban.

Four years in the compound

Najibullah lived in a small room in the UN compound with a radio and a television. Al Jazeera says he spent the time translating Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game into Pashto. [17] His brother Shahpur stayed with him. [14] His wife and daughters were not there, and his daughter Muska writes that the family spent four years apart. [18] The government of Burhanuddin Rabbani promised the UN he would be protected, and the Secretary-General asked repeatedly for permission to fly him out. The government answered that his fate was for the Afghan people to decide. [5] When Sarobi fell, UN staff suggested moving him somewhere less known. He refused, saying he felt safer in the compound. [5] Muska quotes him as saying in 1992: "If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many more years." [18]

The killing of 27 September 1996

The UN spokeswoman said that at 4 p.m. on 26 September the government soldiers guarding the compound left. Only an unarmed night watchman remained with Najibullah and three others. At 1:40 a.m. five armed men walked in, went straight to his room and took him away. At about 6 a.m. a group came back for his younger brother. Later that morning the bodies were found hanging in a park. UN sources said Najibullah had evidently been shot in the head and his brother hanged. [5]

Other accounts differ on the place and the details. The Irish Times said the two men were strung up from a concrete traffic-control post at the gates of the presidential palace while thousands watched. [14] Pajhwok says Ariana Square. [20] Terence White, then a correspondent in Kabul, wrote that the two hung from a traffic-control box, bloodied and mutilated, and that Najibullah was said to have been castrated. [15] Al Jazeera and the Indian Express say he was castrated and dragged behind a vehicle, and the Indian Express adds that he was shot. [17, 19] Amnesty International said that "The manner in which Dr Najibullah was killed defies all norms of international law". [6]

The Irish Times quoted a Taliban commander, Noor Hakmal: "We killed him because he was the murderer of our people." The same report records another Taliban commander saying that the movement was not out for revenge. [14] The Indian Express wrote that some accounts put a Pakistani intelligence officer among the party. [19] Afrasiab Khattak, a former Pakistani senator, claimed in 2022 that a Pakistani officer ordered the killing. [22] None of the sources read here documents that.

Burial at Gardez

The Business Standard, a Dhaka newspaper, reported in 2021 that the Taliban barred funeral prayers in Kabul, that the bodies went to the International Committee of the Red Cross, and that Ahmadzai tribesmen prayed for both men and buried them at Gardez. [21] The Indian Express places the grave in the Melan graveyard at Gardez, and records that in 2020 Hamdullah Mohib, the national security adviser, prayed there, the first senior official of a post-Taliban government to visit. [19]

Two memories of him

When he fell in 1992, the Los Angeles Times saw "no celebrations, no sorrow" in Kabul, and described him as almost universally unpopular after six years without peace. [16] Human Rights Watch says he "stubbornly refused to step down" as his power eroded. [11]

Later the picture shifted. AAN wrote in 2017 that the memory of the PDPA's atrocities "still haunts many Afghans", but that his moderation lets him escape some of the worst judgements and enjoy "a moderate, and seemingly growing, level of popularity". It says a growing number consider him a shrewd politician and an organiser who ran a functioning security apparatus, and that "Some seem willing to now overlook the atrocities committed by the KhAD, also in Najib's time." [10] Its author first saw his portrait in a restaurant in Gardez in 2004, and later posters appeared on Kabul street corners and his speeches were sold on DVD. [10] A group of former party members held a congress in Kabul on 27 September 2012, the anniversary of his death, but the Ministry of Justice refused to register a party under the Watan name. [10]

Al Jazeera's 2012 report quotes the author Assem Akram: "The guy was a murderer, but the last thing the people remember is when they had some semblance of normalcy in their lives." Akram adds that the speeches people share online are the reconciliatory ones, and that talk of Najibullah today leaves out his years at KHAD. [17] His daughter Muska wrote in the Guardian in 2021 that after the Soviet withdrawal Western governments ostracised him, and that his warnings about fundamentalism were ignored. [18]