We waited for my uncle for 35 years: The names of 5,000 killed by the regime between 1978 and 1979 have been revealed. Baqir was on the list

For years, we kept hoping. There was always a new spotting. “I swear I saw Baqir Jaan with my own eyes. He has been forced to serve as a soldier, guarding a border post,” said one family friend about my disappeared uncle. “I have it from reliable sources that he is alive and in Siberia. The Soviets are keeping an Afghan prisoners’ camp there,” said an acquaintance. We kept hoping because we are human and that’s all we can do when regimes take away our loved ones, making them disappear.

There were sometimes grand humanitarian gestures. Amnesties would be announced. My grandma would dress in white and start cooking a festive meal. We would embark in cars, drive to Pul-e Charkhi prison, stand there for hours in dust and heat and there would be no sign of him. The food would remain unserved but we kept hoping, next year maybe. We decided not leave Afghanistan, despite the car bombs and rockets, just in case he was still alive. What if he is released and there’s no one to pick him up? Suspicion then turned inwards, with family members accusing each other of having murdered him because the government denied involvement. Rifts were created that have lasted until now.

Now, after decades of uncertainty, I have found out the truth. The Dutch authorities has released a list of 5,000 Afghans who disappeared between 1978 and 1979. My uncle was on the list: number 1416. It took several attempts to locate him, since they had misspelled his name. The sloppiness reminded me that evil, after all, is banal.

The list was testimony to a regime that perpetuated terror because it was terrified of the very people it was trying to reform. There were farmers on the list, high-school students, businesses owners, bureaucrats, intellectuals and many listed as unemployed. Some were categorised as “enemies of the revolution”, others as “landowners” or “rogues”. The purge included Maoists and Muslim Brotherhood supporters alike. The leader of the time, Hafizullah Amin, apparently saw Stalin as a source of inspiration.

As the day went on, more and more of my friends and acquaintances located the names of disappeared fathers and uncles, cousins and friends. We discovered lies and inaccuracies. Secular people had been falsely accused of being religious fanatics. Innocent people had been wrongly accused of being criminals. Amid this painful collective reopening of old wounds, we asked ourselves what was the purpose of all this suffering? The fact that the people who had ordered this purge had themselves ended up murdered was of little comfort.

Those of us who located the names of our own beloved disappeared on the list are the lucky ones. The regime of the time at least kept lists. The Dutch authorities had the decency to follow a lead thrown up by one of the torturers who had talked about the list. The German authorities worked with them. Europe, after all, had learned from its own painful history that there can be no peace without justice and closure.

From Sweden in the north all the way down to Germany, Holland and France, Afghans were offered refuge in the thousands. The Dutch authorities acknowledged the torturer’s guilt but did not send him back to Afghanistan because his life would have been in danger. A part of me felt enraged that the man had been given refuge. But another part of me could not help but admire the Dutch for their belief that more deaths amounted to the continuation of the suffering.

As I shed tears for my uncle, I thought of all those Afghans who are deprived of the chance of closure. Kept in a state of perpetual uncertainty, they are bound to keep hoping, imagining, speculating. The wives will remain in a state of limbo, married and widowed at the same time. The children will remain unacknowledged orphans. The parents will carry on grappling with unresolved grief, the worst of all terrible emotions.

I learned a lesson today – that without facts being established, there’s no freedom from the prison of history. Without justice, there’s no chance for peace. Afghan cannot do this alone – we need the world to stand by our side, to guide us, support us and in doing so, allow us to become part of a more civilised future.