03.10.1996
Final act of counterrevolution
Dr Mohammed Najibullah was murdered by soldier-bandits of the Taliban Muslim militia on Friday, September 27. Dragged from the supposed safety of a UN compound in Kabul, Najibullah and his brother, Shahpur Ahmadzai, were shot, mutilated and strung up outside the presidential palace - as a warning, and as a sign that the fanatic Taliban had instituted their own version of sharia, or Islamic law, throughout the areas of Afghanistan they control.
Najibullah was the last Soviet-backed president of Afghanistan before a ‘coalition’ government of former mujahedin factions formed a government under Mojadadi - who was soon replaced by Burhanuddin Rabbani. Rabbani’s forces have now fled north of the Afghan capital. Najibullah, born into a middle class family, was a medical student at Kabul University in the 1970s while Rabbani was an academic there. It was while at medical school that Najibullah joined the Marxist movement in an atmosphere bubbling with those wanting to modernise backward Afghanistan.
The incidents of the last week signal the complete victory of the reactionary counterrevolution in Afghanistan - Najibullah’s mutilated and hanging corpse the disturbing symbol of the black reaction to follow. Already, throughout Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, women are being stoned, are forbidden to work and cannot even walk in public without being accompanied by a male relative. Women caught without their shawls are being sprayed with acid. Petty thieves are having limbs amputated. The Taliban have destroyed televisions, radios and musical instruments.
Revolutionaries must take a long look at the recent history of Afghanistan in order to understand the complete victory of forces which are so thoroughly reactionary. The Taliban or ‘students of Islam’ emerged in 1994 under the leadership of Kandahar mullah Mohammed Omar Akhund. Mullah Omar recruited refugees from the camps in Pakistan’s border provinces. Omar earned his ‘stripes’ as a mujahedin field commander against the Soviet forces in the 1980s.
In order to understand this period in Afghanistan it is vital that we see this as the end of a long drawn out counterrevolution.
In April 1978, military units under the control of the Peoples’ Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), of which Najibullah was a member, overthrew the repressive government of President Mohammed Daoud after widespread discontent and a burgeoning mass movement.
Daoud had come to power through a coup against his brother-in-law, King Zahir Shah. Although initially Daoud’s regime instigated limited reforms, it became increasingly repressive - particularly against the PDPA. The arrest of the leadership of the PDPA on April 25 1978 was the trigger for the insurrection.
However, at the time of the revolution, the PDPA was not a united party. Formed in 1965 as a legal organisation in a brief liberal period of the feudalistic monarchy, the party soon split into two wings. The revolutionary Khalq (The People) wing, and the reformist Parcham (Flag) wing. The publication of the revolutionary wing, Khalq, was banned in its sixth issue by the monarchy. The leader of Khalq was Hafizullah Amin; the leader of Parcham was Babrak Karmal. The struggle between these two wings was to be crucial to the outcome of the Afghan revolution.
The PDPA was reunited during Daoud’s rule. In the deal to reunite the party, equal representation was given on the central committee, even though Parcham only represented 40% of the membership. However, Amin, who had been given responsibility for party work in the armed forces by conciliationist party leader Tarrakki, maintained control of this work. The army cells were overwhelmingly Khalq.
This was crucial in the success of the insurrection. Although many pundits, including most of the revolutionary left, labelled the victory of the Saur (April) Revolution a coup, it was clear that this was a social transformation, a thorough-going routing of the state. Almost immediately after taking power, the tensions within the party came to the fore. With the wide-ranging changes taking place within the country - decrees on the status of women, on land, on control of industry - the rural areas, dominated by conservative landlords, began to fight back. The counterrevolution was beginning.
From the outset, the Soviet Union was not happy with a social revolution occurring on its doorstep. As a ‘great power’, it was not prepared to see such instability on its back doorstep. It had been much happier dealing with Daoud’s regime and it even maintained good relations with the king before him.
In mid-1979 the leadership of the Parcham wing of the PDPA was expelled from the party. Amin, the mastermind of the Saur revolution and Khalq leader, became prime minister under the conciliator, Tarakki. The piecemeal land reforms were increased, the education of women and literacy programmes moved forward.
The revolution in Afghanistan bore all the hallmarks one would expect from one of the poorest countries in the world. Amin and his Khalq wing, despite their centrist waverings, were clear that the way to beat the counterrevolutionaries was to step up the tempo of the revolution.
Throughout 1978 and 1979, the reactionary landlords in the countryside had been mobilising against the new revolutionary government in the cities. Funded by Pakistan, Iraq and the US, they were gaining ground. In this environment, the PDPA repeatedly called for Soviet military assistance, which was consistently refused. With the death of Tarakki under suspicious circumstances, Amin became president. This was too much for the Parcham wing. In December 1979, Soviet troops pour into Afghanistan, overthrow
Amin, execute him and 97 other leaders of the PDPA and install the leader of Parcham, Babrak Karmal, as president. Amin was branded a CIA agent.
As The Leninist, precursor of the Weekly Worker, said in issue no2, the Soviet intervention “represented the extinguishing of the flame of the revolution” and that if it was not recognised as such “the revolution will either have to suffer major amputations or face death” (Spring 1982). Yet, paradoxically, the Soviet intervention shored up the length of time the PDPA government survived.
With the Soviet pull-out in 1989, it was clear the PDPA would not survive, yet many - including the US Secretary of State - thought its collapse would be imminent. That the Najibullah government survived nearly four years was testimony to the support in the cities for many of the changes the revolution had delivered.
The death of the Afghan revolution and the death of Najibullah present us with many lessons. The Soviet Union, already in its death throes in the late 1970s, intervened in Afghanistan out of its interests as a ‘great power’, not through any internationalist duty. Its troops were both the crutch and the death blow to the flame of revolution. The split in the PDPA, between those who consistently compromised the programme of proletarian dictatorship to make alliances with ‘progressives’ - either in the monarchy, Daoud’s regime or amongst the mujahedin - and those who, despite their shortcomings, strove for a clear revolutionary line, saw the ultimate collapse of the final PDPA government under Najibullah in 1992.
Karmal, and the Soviets’ line of trying to stave off counterrevolution by making concessions to it, only fanned the flames of reaction. The left in Britain, who almost as one voice supported the Soviet withdrawal, sided with this counterrevolution.
In 1989 The Leninist described those leftists who saw a Soviet withdrawal as the best condition for the Afghan working class to assert itself as being blind to reality:
“Your textbook working class will be nowhere to be seen, but real workers and progressives, all those who made and defended the Afghan revolution, will face death. Yes, if the mujahedin take over there will be a black reaction that will make Khomeini’s regime look positively benign. The country will fall into the hands of Islamic warlords who consider the only good communist a hacked to death communist” (The Leninist February 17 1989).
Although the betrayals of Karmal and Najibullah fanned the flames of this counterrevolutionary blood-bath, the mutilated corpse of Mohammed Najibullah should serve as a reminder to those leftists who in the 1980s sung a chorus against the Afghan revolution, alongside the liberal (and not so liberal) press, and who urged on the mujahedin. This final, brutal collapse of the revolution, beheaded by Soviet intervention, betrayed by Najibullah, Karmal and Gorbachev and slaughtered by the mujahedin, Pakistan and the US, also leaves bloodstains on those leftists who cheered on the mujahedin and supported Soviet withdrawal.
While abandoning and betraying a revolutionary perspective, Najibullah defended the progressive elements of the revolution, such as a secular state, the status of women, trade union rights and the role of education.
In 1989, The Leninist said:
“The blood of Afghan progressives is not only on the hands of the mujahedin, the imperialists and Gorbachev. It is on the hands of the RCP, the SWP, the Euro-communists and all those who refused to defend the Afghan revolution. You are all guilty and we shall make sure that the working class never forgets your crime.”
In cases such as these, communists are loathe to be proved correct. The mutilated body of Mohammed Najibullah serves as a bloody reminder of your betrayals.
Martin Blum