by Tim Bonyhady
Daoud seized power in July 1973 with the help of a small group of army officers who were covert Parchamis. In the absence of Zahir Shah, who had injured an eye and gone to Europe for surgery, no one defended his rule. The coup took only a few hours and led to just one accidental death. Having arrested and imprisoned Musa Shafiq, Daoud declared himself president of a new Republic of Afghanistan and did not bother to put Kabul under curfew. For Indian actor-producer-director Feroz Khan, who was about to film a Hindi movie in Afghanistan for the first time, the coup was no reason to reconsider. For American rug dealer James Opie, who was about to make his first visit, the coup was also of no concern. When Opie flew into Kabul three weeks later, the only sign of military activity was a tank outside the airport terminal, with a soldier in its open hatch enjoying a cigarette.
Daoud soon proved more the autocrat than ever as he ruled by decree, made all protest unlawful and stripped the judiciary of its autonomy. Cartoonist Rahim Nawin, who closed his own satirical weekly Tarjoman on becoming Daoud’s Minister of Information, shut down Kabul’s other private newspapers and turned those publicly owned into propagandists for Daoud’s rule. Having given Parchamis a place in his government because of their part in the coup, Daoud gradually excluded them. While Louis Dupree estimated that Afghanistan’s jails held ‘fewer political prisoners per capita than any nation in Asia’, Daoud set about giving himself the capacity to hold many more by constructing one of the region’s biggest prisons at Pul-e Charkhi on the outskirts of Kabul.
He also set about fashioning a cult of personality far eclipsing that of Zahir Shah, whose exile in Italy was funded by Daoud just as Amanullah’s was by Nadir Khan. Eager to be recognised as Afghanistan’s ‘great leader’, Daoud featured on banknotes and stamps. His portrait was in shops, restaurants, taxis and teahouses, on painted trucks and on rugs made for private sale and public presentation. Small photographs of him were in almost all government offices. Large paintings of him were erected in the foyers of ministries. His portrait dominated the Ghazi Stadium where he celebrated the anniversary of his coup, which he made Afghanistan’s Jeshyn.
Daoud identified as ‘leader of the Revolution’, heading a new ‘National Revolutionary Party’, but remained at most a modest moderniser. With assistance from Japan, he set about introducing television. He allowed Afghanistan’s first private film company, Nazir, which made the most ambitious Afghan movie Rabia Balkhi, based on the life of the semi-legendary ninth-century woman poet, and produced Afghanistan’s first cinema commercials. One in colour for Coca-Cola showed two buzkashi teams at the end of their contest during the annual tournament in Kabul draining Coke bottles with relish—as was in fact their practice when they did not prefer Fanta. Although Afghanistan’s painted trucks were exciting increasing international admiration, prompting books and a documentary about them, Daoud sought to stop their decoration because he considered it primitive.
The press claimed that the enthusiasm of women for Daoud’s return led them to garland the soldiers and the tanks that brought him back to power. It lauded Daoud as the architect of the ‘historical’ unveiling in 1959 that saw Afghanistan make ‘gigantic strides towards women’s liberation’ and be ‘the marvel of the whole world’, until Daoud ceased being prime minister and the movement for women’s equality and freedom ‘darkened’ in 1963. ‘Sisters and brothers’, he opened his first presidential address to the nation, in marked contrast to his old speeches addressed only to ‘countrymen’.
Kubra Noorzai, Afghanistan’s first female cabinet minister from 1965–69, was once again the most prominent woman in Kabul. She headed the National Campaign Against Illiteracy, led the Women’s Institution, as the Women’s Welfare Association was renamed, and orchestrated the local celebration in 1975 of International Women’s Year. Along with an array of seminars, meetings, posters, plays, poems and a film, girls schools in Kabul staged fashion shows designed to demonstrate the students’ capacity to make modern dress, while a photography exhibition at Kabul’s National Theatre focused on ‘the participation of Afghan women in social, educational and cultural fields’.
In 1975 Noorzai also instituted commemoration of the unveiling attended by Daoud’s wife, Zainab, and Sardar Mohammad Naim’s wife, Zohra, who had been at the Ghazi Stadium in August 1959 and, with Daoud back in power, again appeared at many public events. Newspapers decried the ‘traumatic’ era before 1959 when women had been ‘in bondage, under the veil’, that ‘social curse imposed by jealous males’. They lauded Daoud as ‘the founder of Afghanistan’s women’s movement’, whose ‘bold and chivalrous decision’ enabled women to become ‘confident and emancipated’ following their ‘real breakthrough’ at the stadium.
Foreigners who studied the situation of Afghan women identified limited progress. While UNESCO estimated that the ‘avant-garde of women’ with education and jobs had become 160,000, that was only two per cent of Afghanistan’s female population. Anthropologists Erika Knabe and Pamela Hunte found that women in Kabul could enjoy successful careers, but generally were dominated by their fathers, brothers and husbands, and often gained little help from other women. When they went out, many felt obliged to have a male chaperone and, even then, were liable to be insulted, cursed and threatened because of their western dress. If they were single, they lived with their parents. On marrying, or when they had children, many gave up paid work.
Zohra Yousuf, who completed a degree in French literature at Kabul University after becoming Miss Afghanistan 1972, was among the few to marry a man of her choice. Usually, parents controlled who their children wed, and expected them to live in the compound of the husband’s family. Those who complained were ‘coaxed or bullied into submission’ by the economic consequences of defying parental authority and the ostracism that followed. Women who adopted western dress and entered the workplace in other Afghan cities were even more likely to be abused or attacked.
Pictures of women—usually Bollywood stars but occasionally western women in bikinis—were widely displayed for the enjoyment of men on the stalls of drink vendors and in teahouses. The number of unveiled women in Kabul continued to grow. While some wore miniskirts and platform shoes, others preferred pants suits, flares or jeans, which were sold new by an Afghan Jeans Junction but were available in much greater quantities second-hand from the Nixon Bazaar. The closest that some women came to wearing chadaris was when local designer Hamida Sekander created a popular evening dress that combined the chadari’s pleated skirt with a crocheted bodice intended to echo the crocheted eye-covering of the chadari.
Some domains of the modern, such as Kabul’s airport and cinemas, were open only to unveiled women. In others, particularly the Shahr-e Naw, unveiled women were the norm. When Kabul’s ‘First International Rock Festival’ was staged at the university in 1975, featuring one Sri Lankan and two Afghan bands and lasting just three hours, the crowd of five hundred included many unaccompanied women in fashionable western dress, but several women in chadaris also attended. In the city’s oldest, poorest districts, cheap chadaris made of machine-embroidered blue synthetics were ubiquitous. Their wearers included many women who had moved from the countryside when their husbands found work in industry or on building sites.
Most westerners considered this embrace of the chadari a mark of regression. Nancy Dupree, who became one of the most incisive writers about Afghanistan between updating her guidebooks, disagreed. She argued that, without chadaris, women from traditional families were confined to their homes ‘except for occasional social functions, and then only in the company of a male relative’ and ‘even the daily shopping was done by men or young children’. With chadaris, they were able to go out alone or in small groups to shop in bazaars or visit friends and so the chadari’s increasing adoption was a ‘sign of liberation’.
Opposition to Daoud soon grew. Mohammad Maiwandwal, Afghanistan’s prime minister from 1965 until 1967, may have plotted against Daoud, or perhaps Daoud confected this plot as justification for arr
esting and jailing Maiwandwal along with forty-five alleged co-conspiritors. Before long, seven of the accused were serving life sentences and five had been hanged in the Afghan government’s first publicly acknowledged political executions for over forty years. Maiwandwal himself committed suicide in jail, according to Daoud, though it was generally believed the government killed him because he was its biggest rival.
Pakistan saw an opportunity to destabilise Afghanistan through Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the convicted murderer from Muslim Youth. After he fled to Peshawar, Islamabad made him its ‘contact’ for Afghans seeking Pakistani assistance. In 1975 he attempted to orchestrate a rebellion in Afghanistan which attracted no support, demonstrating the Islamists’ marginal status. The rebels’ only and very limited success was in the Panjshir Valley where they cut telephone lines, felled trees as roadblocks, attacked police posts and erected banners decrying Daoud as a godless communist. But even this insurrection barely lasted a day before Daoud crushed it.
Afghanistan’s Marxist-Leninists provided stronger opposition when Nur Mohammad Taraki and Babrak Karmal, the leaders of Khalq and Parcham, reunited within the People’s Democratic Party headed by Taraki. But the country’s Maoists fractured. Faiz Ahmad, a medical doctor, formed the Revolutionary Group of People of Afghanistan set on mobilising the peasantry. His wife, Meena Keshwar Kamal, who was inspired by the murdered Maoist leader, Saidal Sukhandan, established the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan ‘to organise women in the struggle for revolutionary change’, including their ‘advancement and equality’.
Alighiero Boetti was one of many foreigners who continued to visit. He commissioned more Mappe which came to feature the republic’s new flag, and stayed at One Hotel until late 1976 when it closed—probably because he and Gholam Dastaghir were unable to renew their lease in what remained buoyant conditions for Afghanistan’s tourist trade. In 1977, when a record 117,000 foreigners visited, prompting another edition of Nancy Dupree’s main guide, Boetti visited twice, as usual.
Renowned British theatre and film director Peter Brook came to make Meetings with Remarkable Men, based on the reminiscences of the Russian-Armenian mystic George Gurdjieff. Having failed in his initial attempts to film in Turkey and Egypt, Brook opted for Afghanistan both because he thought ‘a true spiritual life’ could still ‘be seen in the nobility and dignity of the people’ and because Daoud’s government was welcoming. Since much of the film was set in Russia, Brook had sets constructed with Cyrillic signs, a novelty for Afghanistan, where the only foreign-language signs were in English. Afghanistan’s foremost carpet dealer Abdul Noor Sher showed that he was much more than that when he organised costumes, props and extras for Brook.
Viktor Sarianidi, who led a new Soviet-Afghan archaeological collaboration from 1969, witnessed a marked increase in illicit excavations exploiting the weakness of Daoud’s rule in the far north. ‘Not only individual treasure-hunters, but whole clans and even whole villages’ set about looting Bronze Age cemeteries in broad daylight. It may be that Noor Sher was also involved in this trade—encouraging the pillaging of material that Sher would send abroad in breach of Afghanistan’s heritage control laws. Sarianidi’s own excavations stalled because of the enduring tension over the relative importance of Afghanistan’s pre-Islamic and Islamic heritage. In 1977 Daoud ordered Sarianidi to suspend his exploration of pre-Islamic sites, which were his expertise, and restore a mosque, where he had none.
CHAPTER 13
Red
On 27 April 1978, Afghanistan’s foremost communists Nur Mohammad Taraki and Babrak Karmal were both in jail. The catalyst was a political protest of unprecedented size, in response to the killing of another leading communist, Mir Akbar Khyber, which was widely blamed on President Daoud. When an estimated 15,000 people attended Khyber’s funeral led by red flags and banners, Daoud imprisoned Taraki and Karmal, fearing a coup. But a coup still occurred when Khalqis in the army and airforce—acting most likely without prior Soviet knowledge—attacked the heavily fortified Presidential Palace in central Kabul and killed Daoud and many of his family, along with more than forty soldiers loyal to them.
The only photographs were taken by a few foreigners, all amateurs, who took pictures of tanks heading towards the palace and jet fighters above it. No professional western photographers were in Kabul, as was generally the case. The local press stayed away. But the following day, government photographers recorded the communists’ celebrations. Like those taken when Daoud seized power in 1973, they featured a tank outside the Ministry of Information, but this one had been in the battle and had soldiers on it. The communists also invited Kabulis into the bullet-marked, blood-stained palace where they pulled a silk carpet picturing Daoud off the wall, cast it on the floor and encouraged Kabulis to trample on it. ‘The palace, in all its regal luxury, now belongs to you, the people,’ the communists announced. ‘Come and see the way the oppressors lived.’
Michel Setboun, a French member of the Sipa agency, who visited when the communists reopened Kabul’s airport after a few days, did not find much to record. A burned-out tank remained outside the palace. A soldier or two guarded public buildings. The government of the new ‘Democratic Republic of Afghanistan’ led by Nur Mohammad Taraki was eager to introduce itself with Taraki pictured biggest in a display case, followed by Babrak Karmal, then other ministers. Street vendors primarily sold photographs of Taraki. Setboun himself photographed Karmal.
Because ‘Saur’ was the Dari name of the month when they seized power, the communists called their coup the ‘Saur Revolution’, and their program, which they implemented with many Soviet civilian advisers, was revolutionary. They abolished most debts owed by peasants to local moneylenders, redistributed land, set a minimum marriage age of eighteen for boys and sixteen for girls, reduced the bride price to a nominal sum, established free kindergartens, introduced co-education in schools, encouraged and coerced women into adult education, and included dialectical materialism in the curriculum through a new series of doctrinaire textbooks.
Their goal was to address ‘the miseries of the people—the hungry, naked, barefooted’. But the communists were so intolerant of tradition and blind to the practicalities of rural life that they alienated many of those they aspired to help. They also engendered fear and hatred as they imprisoned, tortured and executed on an unprecedented scale—targetting not only public figures but also individuals of no prominence including students, teachers, mullahs, policemen, farmers and nomads, whom they identified as rebels, counter-revolutionaries, Maoists, royalists and followers of Daoud.
‘Emancipation of women’ was the title of one of their first postage stamps, depicting a woman who had broken the chains linking her wrists. But her long dress and headscarf suggested that dress reform was not one of the communists’ priorities. ‘We should work to change rural women’s thoughts—not their clothes,’ a senior official announced. ‘I’ll even wear a chadari if that’s what it takes to reach conservative women,’ a teacher stated. Still, there was a marked increase in the number of unveiled women in Kabul and women assumed new roles. At the end of government rallies, young women from middle-class families, typically wearing straight skirts, blouses and make-up, conspicuously engaged in menial labour by tidying the streets. When the communists inaugurated television with much fanfare in August 1978, the newsreaders included Shafiqa Habibi, long one of the most prominent women on Afghan radio, whom Daoud had chosen.
Anahita Ratibzad was the only female minister, responsible for social affairs. She dismissed the unveiling in 1959 as ‘just a superficial thing to show there was reform—but there was not’. Her goal was ‘to root out the idea of men’s superiority’ and achieve equal education for girls and equal employment for women. But when the Khalqis and Parchamis fell out again and the Khalqis prevailed, Ratibzad lost her ministry. She became ambassador to Yugoslavia, just as Babrak Karmal became ambassador to Czechoslovakia. When Taraki accused Parchamis of plotting against him, Ratibzad
joined Karmal in Prague and then Moscow in exile, and the Khalqis killed many Parchamis who remained in Afghanistan.
Some foreigners stayed away. Others left, including two of Kabul’s most longstanding western residents, Nancy and Louis Dupree, after the communists arrested and interrogated Louis for several days suspecting him to be a CIA agent. But as the communists readily issued visas and reduced the price of government-owned hotels and transport, some westerners, including many hippies, resumed their travels. In August 1978 the Economist reported that life appeared ‘to have returned to normal’ on Chicken Street, which it described as ‘Kabul’s version of London’s King’s Road’. Rather than produce new tourist booklets, the communists used those printed by the Daoud government, but had them updated by hand to take account of Afghanistan’s new rule.
Taraki, who became ‘Great Leader’, where Daoud had been just ‘great leader’, was Kabul’s new icon, pictured always in a three-piece suit. He was repeatedly inserted into press photographs, often comically supersized. Huge portraits of him were in and on public buildings. The government’s rallies featured these framed portraits, sometimes garlanded with flowers, as well as thousands of small ones held up by the participants. Street vendors sold passport-sized ones. Studios sold larger-than-life versions for display in shops and other businesses. Department stores sold oil paintings of him. Weavers depicted him on rugs, which were sometimes presented to him. Stamps featured ‘Comrade Taraki’ too. Yet Hafizullah Amin, who masterminded the communists’ coup and became Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister, may have always exercised more power.
Jeshyn had been staged in August in celebration of Amanullah’s war against the British and in July to mark Daoud’s ousting of King Zahir Shah. The communists moved it to April to commemorate their seizure of power, which was soon being celebrated in many different visual forms. A 1978 stamp depicted the communists’ aerial attack on the Presidential Palace and one of their victorious tanks. The Nasaji textile factory in Balkh produced a screenprinted fabric showing the palace in flames and another tank with its gun barrel bedecked in flowers. Weavers made a new form of rug depicting the start of the aerial attack, within a border of soldiers. A student at the polytechnic painted the battle. The government marked its first anniversary in