Afghanistan's Saur Revolution : Anniversary of a revolution obliterated from history

Lal Khan

Some of the other radical programmes undertaken by the Saur Revolution were cancellation of revenue dues, equitable distribution of water and establishment of peasant cooperatives

South Asia is well known for celebrating landmark dates and there are many. However, the Saur Revolution that took place on April 27, 1978 in Afghanistan has been feloniously erased from the annals of regional history. Ever since the dramatic events that led to this revolution and the radical and far-reaching reforms in its aftermath, the corporate media, the intelligentsia and official historians have distorted, debased and tried to obliterate the memory of this glorious episode in Afghanistan’s past. This revolution dared to free the oppressed masses in Afghanistan and the region from centuries of brutal despotism and ferocious devastation by imperialists of all shapes and shades in different historical epochs, and even today remains the only beacon of hope for the toiling masses of this tragic land under mafiosi capitalism and imperialist hegemony as a way out of the ongoing suffering and devastation.

Bourgeois hirelings have deliberately equated the Saur Revolution with the occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet army and criminally concealed that Soviet forces entered Afghanistan 18 months after the revolution on December 29, 1979. The first two presidents of post-revolutionary Afghanistan and leaders of the Khalq faction of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Noor Mohammad Tarakai and Hafeezullah Amin, had little faith in the bureaucratic regime that prevailed in the Soviet Union and were bitterly against any foreign intervention from outside, including the Soviet Union. Tarakai was killed earlier on and it is highly probable that the KGB or the pro-Moscow faction of the PDPA assassinated Hafeezullah Amin on the eve of Russian intervention.

It would not be wrong to say that the Saur Revolution was imposed from the top in a revolutionary military uprising with ideological, organisational and political weaknesses and was not a classical socialist revolution from a Marxist standpoint. However, no other event in the history of South Asia struck such a blow to the feudal drudgery, tribal primitiveness, religious oppression and exploitation of capitalism and imperialism. This was a revolution by decree, which was immediately supported by millions of oppressed Afghans. These decrees were directed at the most extreme forms of coercion that prevailed within society. For example, decree six cancelled debts, loans, mortgages and revenues due from peasants to the usurers and big landlords (in most cases inherited debt from generation to generation of peasants). The decree fully exempted “landless persons who work on a landowner’s land as peasant or hireling (wage-labourers)” from paying any dues and usury to the landowners and usurers.

Decree seven was “to ensure equality of rights between women and men in the domain of civil law, to eliminate unjust patriarchal feudal relations between wife and husband”. It also criminalised: 1) a girl’s marriage based on exchange for money and goods, 2) forced marriage and 3) acts that either prevent a widow, because of family or tribal kinship, from wilfully remarrying or forcing them into an unwanted marriage. It further fixed the age for engagement and marriage at 16 for women and 18 for men, thus effectively banning child marriage.

Decree eight confiscated lands owned by feudals and the deposed royal family without compensation and their redistribution among landless peasants and peasants with small land holdings. Its aim was first and foremost “to eliminate feudal and pre-feudal relations from the social and economic order of the country”.

Some of the other radical programmes undertaken by the Saur Revolution were cancellation of revenue dues, equitable distribution of water and establishment of peasant cooperatives. Major literacy programmes were launched: by 1984 one and half million people had finished literacy courses and, in the same year, 20,000 literacy courses were functioning throughout the country, enrolling 377,000 people. The target was to eradicate illiteracy by the year 1986 in urban areas and by 1990 all over Afghanistan. In the period prior to the Saur Revolution, only 5,265 people had finished literacy courses.

The leadership of the PDPA (Khalq) initiated these decrees before the intervention of the Soviet forces. They had to overthrow the system, oligarchy of capital and the state even to begin these reforms. The Saur Revolution proved yet again that, in neo-colonial countries, not even the basic tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution could commence under the rule of this rotten colonial bourgeoisie. Such radical measures were a death knell for imperialist interests and the capitalist-feudal system in the whole region. This sent tremors in the echelons of power from Islamabad to Riyadh, London and Washington. To counteract this revolutionary change springing from Afghanistan, the CIA launched its biggest covert counter-revolutionary operation. This was imperialism’s jihad against ‘communist infidels’. It was a reactionary insurgency that has wreaked havoc in the region, and the imperialists and their vicious stooge Ziaul Haq bred and propped up this bestial menace of Islamic fundamentalism with vast networks of drugs, weapon smuggling and criminal gangs, otherwise known today as the Taliban. Now they have turned into Frankensteins for their own creators. Such has been the devastation from this imperialist counter-revolutionary war that, for 36 years, this region has been plunged into a deadly conflagration that has pulverised the lives of generations of ordinary people.

What has been vividly demonstrated is that there is no way out of this war of attrition, bloodshed and mayhem under the present socioeconomic system. The revolution and the counter-revolution in Afghanistan have exposed the absurdity of the Durand Line, artificially drawn in 1893 to dissect a living and dynamic nation of the Pashtuns. However, this also brings to the fore the reality that Afghanistan and Pakistan are integrally linked and only a unified revolutionary approach can overcome the religious and imperialist reactionary mayhem engulfing the whole region.

Noor Mohammad Tarakai, leader of the Saur Revolution, was unambiguous on the internationalist character of socialism to succeed and for the survival of revolutionary change. In a speech marking the first anniversary of the Saur Revolution on April 27, 1979, Noor Mohammed Tarakai thundered, “I congratulate my fellow countrymen, gallant soldiers, my Pashtun and Baloch brothers and the workers of Asia, Africa, Europe and the US on the first birthday of the Saur Revolution. The Saur Revolution is not limited to the workers and soldiers of Afghanistan. It is the revolution of the workers and oppressed masses of [the] whole world. This revolution, which was carried out by armed soldiers under the leadership of the Khalq Party, is a great success and a victory for workers all over the world. The great October Revolution of 1917 shook the whole world. That revolution is a source of guidance and inspiration for our revolution, which once again has begun to shake the planet.” This is the real essence of the Saur Revolution and a message to the new generation of workers and oppressed masses of the region, and far beyond. Nothing less than a socialist revolution can deliver the region from this harrowing episode of wars, mayhem, bloodshed, poverty, misery and deprivation.