Today I have the pleasure of interviewing Dr. May I call you Barney? Q: Just to start off, can you tell us about your background and how you got to be so involved with Afghanistan. I wrote my dissertation on India. While I was in Chicago, I also founded, with a colleague, an Amnesty International adoption group, which is the basic grassroots unit of Amnesty International. I did that together with another colleague from the University of Chicago, Patricia Gossman. Then we started working on all South Asia.
At that time, soon after the Zia coup, a lot of the work we did was on Pakistan. Then after —, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and I started getting, from various sources, a lot of information about atrocities and abuses, and so on, which Amnesty was not covering for various reasons. I started working to research human rights violations in Afghanistan, myself, from various sources: France, Afghans who came to the United States and so on.
Then I was asked by Jeri Laber, director of what was then Helsinki Watch, which was something that became part of Human Rights Watch, to write the first human rights report on Afghanistan. By that time, I started getting interested in Afghanistan as a research subject as a political scientist as well. It was a magazine.
He was the South Asian Bureau chief. He was also covering Pakistan and various things about the Afghan war. I think I first met Cordovez in I also experienced blowback because a lot of the people—who wanted to support the Mujahideen and continue the war—were rather angered.
They liked what I had done earlier, documenting atrocities by the Soviet army, but they were very much against the idea of negotiation to try to end the war. I first experienced that in Then I looked at the Geneva Accords, which were signed in I told Cordovez these Geneva Accords were supposedly between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the communist government in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
