Afghanistan Death Lists

David Loyn investigates how a lost document is helping Afghanistan come to terms with its painful past.

It revolves around the lesser-known moment when Afghanistan began to fall apart - 1978, a year before the Soviet invasion. It's lesser-known, partly because the world wasn't really paying attention but also because evidence of state murder and disappearance was covered up after the so-called Saur Revolution.

But now, a war crimes trial in the Netherlands has unearthed a list of 5,000 prisoners detained, tortured and killed by the radical communist regime in 1978 - 79. This "Death List" has fewer than half the total number of people unaccounted for during that period but it has finally given some families of the disappeared confirmation of the fate of their loved ones, and allowed them to mourn. The reverberations of this are being felt strongly in Afghanistan.

Image: Kabul citizens reading newspapers during the period of the communist regime. Credit: Getty