When militancy travelled to Kashmir via Afghanistan

As Kashmir was erupting, the world was entering a new order. On November 9, 1989, in the most visible thawing of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall came down. It was history’s greatest street party. More than two million East Germans flooded into West Germany during the weekend that followed. The modern-day empire that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), seven times larger than India, with 11 time zones, was in ruins. And in Kabul, a mother and her two daughters took a secret flight out to New Delhi, while her husband stayed back.

Afghanistan president, Najibullah, the Butcher of Kabul to many, was the Soviet-backed president of Afghanistan from 1986 until the turmoil reached his palace in 1992. On April 17, at around 3 am, Najibullah boarded an armed convoy from his presidential palace to the Kabul airport. He was to take a chartered aircraft headed for India, which had offered him asylum, and join his wife and two daughters. The airport was under the control of Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Afghan Uzbek, who had raised a militia with active support from the president to take on the mujahideen fighters. But Najibullah was in for a nasty surprise. Dostum’s people would not let him enter the airport where, in the chartered aircraft meant for Najibullah, sat Behon Sevan, a senior UN official in Kabul who would accompany the Afghan president. Trapped in the city that he once ruled, Najibullah was forced to seek asylum in Kabul’s UN compound, from where the Taliban fighters dragged him and his brother out in 1996, and strung them from a traffic tower outside the presidential palace. His wife and two daughters would spend years in silence in a stately mansion not very far from the Indian Parliament.