Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (38 page)

The greatest emotional test of the trip was still ahead. On June 6, John Paul II returned to his old diocese of Kraków, the place where he had spent most of his
adult life, honed his vocation as a priest, and built his extended pastoral family. The government was taking no chances. Having kept the police presence at previous venues relatively discreet, the authorities now sent dozens of militia vans ostentatiously through the main streets of the city. This had to be regarded as a calculated insult by people who had just succeeded in maintaining exemplary order amid enormous crowds attending the pope’s masses and rallies. University students greeted the security forces with whistles and jeers. A tightly meshed system of checkpoints around the city screened out anyone who could not produce tickets for the pope’s events.

The people of the city shrugged it all off. Whereas the crowds in Warsaw had greeted the pontiff with respectful calm, Krakóvians gave him a rapturous welcome as the papal vehicle, illuminated by spotlights, ferried him into the city from the meadow on the outskirts where his helicopter had landed. People gathered on rooftops or massed on balconies to get a glimpse of him on his way to Wawel Castle. “I especially greet you,” the pope said upon his arrival in a message addressed to the people of Kraków. “You are so close to me. Because of the separation to which the Lord has called me, I feel even closer to you.” But local media carried only brief excerpts of his remarks. In contrast to earlier stages of the journey, when local media had provided relatively detailed coverage of the pope’s stops, Kraków television and radio restricted themselves to a few brief reports of John Paul’s doings in the city. The state-run media were still trying to minimize the impact of the visit.

His main appearance the next day had particular resonance for a country that had known not only the horrors of Stalinism but also the terror of the Nazis. He visited Auschwitz, the city not far from Kraków whose name had become shorthand for the evils of totalitarianism. He knelt before the memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, declaring, “I couldn’t not come here.” He seized upon the occasion for a strong and unmistakable repudiation of anti-Semitism, presaging the efforts to overcome the church’s centuries of support for enmity toward Jews that later become a major theme of his papacy. Some 2,000 Jews had lived in his hometown of Wadowice before the year 1939, but nearly all of them—including some of his childhood friends—had been murdered in the Holocaust, making it an intensely personal and immediate issue for him.

His remarks at the death camp also directly indicted the present, in terms that were definitely not calculated to please the Communist Party. “Is it enough to put a man in a different uniform and arm him with the apparatus of violence?” he asked. “Is it not enough to impose on him an ideology in which human rights are subjected to the demands of the system so as in practice not to exist at all?” Visibly exhausted,
he then departed once again from his prepared text to proclaim: “Never, never again war. Only peace, only peace.”
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On many occasions during his pilgrimage, the pope had unmistakably but indirectly made the case for change. Here, once more, he emphasized that the cause of change should never be used to justify violence. It was a point he drove home more subtly the next day, when he celebrated mass for the students of Kraków—only a few hundred of whom fitted into the small church, while 30,000 others waited on the streets outside. He understood their desire for change, he hinted, but asked them to be “temperate” in how they pursued it. This, too, was a bit of advice that informed future struggles.
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The biggest crowd of all showed up on the last day of his pilgrimage, when an estimated 3 million people—in a country of 35 million—showed up on a field outside of Kraków to bid him good-bye. “When we are strong with the Spirit of God, we are also strong with faith in man. . . . There is therefore no need to fear.” By pronouncing the words, he demonstrated that he lived by the same credo. He had shown that he was not afraid to touch upon delicate topics and repeatedly invoked the people’s right to choose their own government as they saw fit. He balanced that frankness with a persistent invocation of the spirit of nonviolence, and the crowds who heard him responded with an orderly calm. Nothing could have been more ominous for the future of the Communist regime. Fear held the Soviet empire together, and the Poles, inspired by a Polish leader who lived in Rome, had declared an end to fear.

In his homily, he spoke again of his love for the city and his country. As he closed, he told them: “I beg you once again to accept the whole of the spiritual legacy which goes by the name ‘Poland.’ . . . I beg you never to lose your trust. Do not be defeated; do not be discouraged; do not on your own cut yourselves off from the roots from which we have our origins . . . and never lose your spiritual freedom, with which He makes a human being free.”
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In his nine-day visit, the pope gave twelve sermons and a host of smaller speeches. He was greeted and cheered by an estimated 11 million Poles, a third of the country’s population. State-owned television tried to broadcast his open-air masses without showing the pope himself, but the party’s efforts at censorship were negated not least by the sheer number of those who chose to receive his message in person. This was the real Poland, not the party.

That revelation was the product of myriad acts of courage—all reinforced and amplified by John Paul II himself in consonance with his fundamental philosophy of Christian humanism. At every turn during his visit, he seized the chance to stress the centrality of human rights and basic liberties (particularly, of course, religious
freedom). In June 1979, armed with his moral authority as the leader of 757 million Catholics, he preached a rejuvenating belief in Christ that ran counter to everything the Soviet system stood for. Along the way, he elaborated upon the simple idea that he had first aired in the speech he had held upon accession to the papal throne: “Be not afraid.”

One could claim, with ample justification, that Poland was a special case. The combination of Catholic piety and nationalist tradition was unique; no other country in Eastern or Central Europe could claim anything like it. So perhaps the effect was isolated. “As much as the visit of John Paul II to Poland must reinvigorate and reinspire the Catholic Church in Poland, it does not threaten the political order of the nation or of Eastern Europe,” commented the
New York Times
.
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How could you possibly challenge the entrenched power of the Polish Communist Party and its Kremlin backers with a few statements of principle? This was an eminently sound, reasonable, and commonsensical summation of the state of affairs. The fact of the matter, though, is that the course of human events sometimes stubbornly defies common sense.

T
he regime in Warsaw was, of course, deeply entrenched. It had enjoyed thirty-five years of unchallenged rule. It was Stalin himself, backed by the full force of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police, who had installed the Polish Communists in power in 1944. (A Soviet citizen and Red Army general, Marshal Konstantin Rokossovsky, even served as the Polish minister of defense for a few years.) The Kremlin’s careful engineering of the new administration in Poland was part of a broader, carefully conceived strategy for the Soviet domination of East Central Europe that had been tacitly endorsed by the Western Allies at Yalta. So the Sovietization of the countries in the region followed a clear and uniform plan; there was very little that was spontaneous or ad hoc about the process. Because the Polish Communists and their colleagues elsewhere took direct orders from their bosses in Moscow, all of them followed the same clearly articulated policy line; Stalin did not tolerate factional disputes among his proxies.

The contrast between this story of Communist rule in Poland and its Afghan equivalent could not have been starker. The Afghan Communists rose to power in their slapdash coup of April 1978 thanks to the improvisational initiative of Hafizullah Amin, who wasn’t even the head of his own party. President Mohammed Daoud’s arrest of other Communist leaders had prompted Amin to activate his far-flung network of contacts in the militia and the security services in a reactive strike against Daoud’s government. As a result, the coup’s success owed far more to Daoud’s own weaknesses than to any careful preparation by the People’s
Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Nor did the newly victorious Afghan Communists have a clearly thought-out strategy for the path ahead. For the PDPA leader, Nur Mohammed Taraki, his sudden release from prison and his ascent to the position of head of state were equally unexpected.

The same off-the-cuff style applied to the PDPA’s headlong implementation of its radical reform program. The Communists tried to push through rapid land reform in a country where there were virtually no formalized deeds or cadastral surveys, virtually ensuring chaos.
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They abolished mortgages and other traditional debt relationships without providing a new system of financing to replace them. And they vowed to open up their new institutions to women, an innovation that struck many ordinary Afghans as an affront to Islamic values. (The new PDPA rulers reinforced this sense that they had little respect for religion by replacing the old flag, with its prominent green stripe symbolizing the centrality of Islam, with a new revolutionary flag in Bolshevik red that had no space for religious imagery.) These ill-considered measures predictably sparked widespread resistance within conservative Afghan society.

The April 1978 coup was neither planned nor desired by the men in Moscow; they learned about it from news reports. They had little choice but to acquiesce. As the new regime in Kabul settled into place, its Soviet sponsors watched in consternation as the Afghan leaders recklessly pushed their agenda on a reluctant populace. For all of President Daoud’s faults, no one in Moscow had seen any reason to depose him, precisely because the Soviet party leaders were aware of the instability that might result. One reason for their anxiety was the deep, crippling split within the PDPA. They knew only too well how the radical faction, the Khalq (or “Masses”) group led by Taraki and Amin, despised the moderate members of Parcham (the “Banner”), exemplified by Babrak Karmal. Karmal was a Soviet favorite because he expounded a gradualist reform approach, which seemed less likely to tip the country over into chaos. Unfortunately, Karmal had taken a negligible role in the April 1978 coup, and he and his associates were soon marginalized by the country’s new leaders. But the men in the Kremlin could hardly afford to write off Taraki and Amin. They had already invested far too much in the place.

Events soon tested that commitment. Taraki and Amin desperately tried to stanch the growing signs of rebellion. They received and wooed delegations of tribal leaders, assuring them of the government’s good intentions. At every possible opportunity, they stressed their respect for Islam. But revolts continued to flare up around the country.
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Then, in March 1979, came the biggest explosion to date. So far the uprisings around the country had been confined to rural areas. Then, suddenly, a series of small revolts in neighboring villages tipped off a full-scale rebellion in the western city of Herat, the country’s third largest. On March 15, a mob launched an attack on government offices and security forces. Rioters also stormed the main military base, forcing the inexperienced young garrison commander to pull out his forces. For nearly a week, communications with the central government were completely cut, and anarchy reigned in the streets. This was the first time that the communists in Kabul had lost control of one of the country’s biggest cities.
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Many of the rebels were, like other Afghans, angry at the various manifestations of the “godlessness” of the new regime. But there were also deeper forces at work. Herat lies just over the border from Iran, and many of the Afghans in the city and around it were Persian speakers with a long history of cultural, economic, and social ties to their western neighbor. Tens of thousands of Heratis had worked in Iran during the days of the shah’s economic boom, and many of them had stayed on after the beginning of the Islamic Revolution. In the wake of the shah’s downfall in January 1979, many of them returned home, bearing a message of religious militancy that galvanized their compatriots.
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Some members of the Jamiat-e Islami, the Islamist organization headed by the Kabul University theologian Burhanuddin Rabbani, had sought refuge in Iran, and now they returned to Herat, where they made contact with sympathizers in the Afghan army—including a hard-bitten officer named Ismail Khan who defected to the rebel side during the uprising and later went on to become one of the most famous mujahideen commanders.
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But there was no real operational coordination between him and his sympathizers across the border. The revolt caught everyone by surprise. It was a genuinely spontaneous uprising.

The Soviet advisers in the city, many of them oblivious to the culture that surrounded them, were completely wrong-footed. One minute they were strolling through the picturesque streets of the ancient city. The next they were being chased down and attacked by angry crowds screaming for the blood of the
farangi
, the foreigners. Three Russians managed to escape in their cars. A few miles away from the city, the drivers of the first two cars noticed that the third was missing. They turned around to look for him and soon found his vehicle parked next to a mud-walled village. The driver was sitting behind the wheel of his vehicle, but he was dead. The attackers had disemboweled him and filled his mouth with sand.
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Within Herat itself, the corpses of other Soviets were paraded through the city on pikes.