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Khalq
Faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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The Khalq (Dari/Pashto: خلق, lit. 'masses' or 'people') was a faction of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). Its historical de facto leaders were Nur Muhammad Taraki (1967–1979), Hafizullah Amin (1979)[10] It was also the name of the leftist newspaper produced by the same movement. The Khalq wing was formed in 1967 after the split of the party due to bitter resentment with the rival Parcham faction which had a differing revolutionary strategy.
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It was made up primarily of Pashtuns from rural backgrounds. Its leaders preferred a mass organization approach and advocated class struggle to overthrow the system to bring about political, economic and social changes.[11] They would rule the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan that was formed as a result of the Saur Revolution in 1978. The Khalqists introduced radical reforms and carried out brutal crackdowns on dissent turning Afghanistan into a police state run by the AGSA (and later KAM). The Khalqist crackdowns encouraged the rebellion of the religious and ethnic minority segments present in the Afghan society, which led more people joining exiled Islamist parties in Pakistan, however these rebellions did not pose an existential threat to their rule due to Khalq's large support base within the Armed Forces.[12] Khalqist rule would be ended following Soviet military intervention in December 1979 overthrowing Hafizullah Amin.
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Early political history
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The People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan held its First Congress on 1 January 1965. Twenty-seven men gathered at Nur Mohammed Taraki's house in Kabul, elected Taraki PDPA Secretary General, Babrak Karmal as Deputy Secretary General, and chose a five-member Central Committee(or Politburo).
Finally, Hafizullah Amin was the only Khalqi member of the PDPA to be elected to Parliament in 1969.
Khalq – Parcham division of the PDPA
The party was weakened by bitter, and sometimes violent, internal rivalries. The Khalq faction was more tribal and militant, whereas the Parcham had more support among the urban population and middle classes.[13] Especially on the ideological level, Karmal and Taraki differed in their perceptions of Afghanistan's revolutionary potential:
- Taraki believed that revolution could be achieved in the classical Leninist fashion by building a tightly disciplined working-class party.
- Karmal felt that Afghanistan was too undeveloped for a Leninist strategy and that a national democratic front of patriotic and anti-imperialist forces had to be fostered in order to bring the country a step closer to socialist revolution.
The newspaper was highly successful, especially among students. Its first edition sold 20,000 copies, and later editions numbered around 10,000 (there were only six editions altogether). On 23 May 1966, the authorities closed Khalq on the grounds that it was anti-Islamic, anticonstitutional, and antimonarchical. Karmal's faction founded Parcham, a weekly magazine that he published between March 1968 and July 1969. Parcham was shut down in June 1969 on the eve of parliamentary elections.
The Republican coup of 1973
Khalq was excluded from the new government because of its lack of good political connections and its go-it-alone policy on noncooperation. Taraki did advocate a united front briefly after former Prime Minister Mohammad Daoud Khan's takeover in an attempt to gain places in the government for his followers, but this effort was unsuccessful. The Khalqists claimed to be more leftist and more independent of the Soviet Union than Parcham, but their base of support was not strong among the masses, and much stronger in the military. Because of this, Khalq abandoned his party's traditional emphasis on working-class recruitment and sought to build his own power base within the officer corps. Khalq's influence at Kabul University was also limited.
In 1973, the Khalq faction energetically began to encourage military personnel to join them. Taraki had been in charge of Khalq activity in the military. In 1973 he passed his recruitment duties to Amin. This move was highly successful: by the time of the communist coup, in April 1978, Khalq outnumbered Parcham by a factor of two or three to one. The Moscow-sponsored union of Parcham and Khalq may have been in preparation for his peaceful passage from the scene in the near future. The merger of Parcham and Khalq rapidly became unglued. However, Mir Akbar Khyber, a prominent leftist, was killed by the government and his associates. Although the government issued a statement deploring the assassination, the PDPA leaders feared that Daoud was planning to exterminate them all. In this way, both Khalq and Parcham forgot their internal rivalries and worked to overthrow the government.
On the eve of the communist coup, Hafizullah Amin was the only member of the Central Committee that was not arrested. The police did not send him to immediate imprisonment, as it did with Politburo members of the PDPA on 25 April 1978. He was the last person to be arrested, his imprisonment was postponed for five hours, during which time Amin, without having the authority and while the Politburo members were in prison, instructed the Khalqi army officers to overthrow the government.
The Khalqist Army cells prepared for a massive uprising. On 27 April, the Khalqist military leaders began the revolution by proclaiming to the cells in the armed forces that the time for revolution had arrived. Khalqist Colonel Mohammad Aslam Watanjar was the Army commander on the ground during the coup, and his troops gained control of Kabul. Colonel Abdul Qadir, the leader of the Air Force squadrons, also launched a major attack on the Royal Palace, in the course of which President Mohammad Daoud Khan and most of his family, including women and children, were assassinated.[14]
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The Saur Revolution (April 1978 – April 1992)
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The Saur Revolution, as the new government labeled its coup d'état (after the month in the Persian calendar in which it occurred), was almost entirely the achievement of the Khalq faction of the PDPA. Khalq's victory was partially due to Daoud's miscalculation that Parcham was the more serious threat. This success gave it effective control over the armed forces, a great advantage over its Parchami rival. During the first months of the revolution, Cabinet membership was split eleven to ten, with Khalq in the majority.
Khalq as Government (April 1978 – December 1979)
Initially, the revolutionary government of Khalq had a period of acceptance from the Afghan populace partly due to its land reform program. Nur Muhammad Taraki brought up the issue of Pashtunistan during his first press conference on May 6, 1978. In August 1978, Hafizullah Amin told Soviet Ambassador Alexander Puzanov and Soviet Major General L.N. Gorelov
“We are not parading the question of Pashtunistan and Baluchistan in the press although this question is still on the agenda. The territory of Afghanistan must reach to the shores of the Gulf of Oman and the Indian Ocean. We wish to see the sea with our own eyes.”[15]
The initial, moderate, approach to Islam taken by the PDPA was quickly abandoned as the Khalqists sought to consolidate their hold on power. Khalq dominated the Revolutionary Council, which was to serve as the ruling body of the government. The Khalq leadership ran the country by issuing a series of eight edicts. They suspended all laws except those on civil matters and the criminal law of the Daoud period. They also embarked on a campaign of land reform that resulted in the arrest and summary execution of tens of thousands who were viewed as enemies of the state. By putting Afghanistan on the revolutionary road, the Khalq wing of the PDPA stirred reactionaries into revolt.
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PDPA general secretary Nur Mohammad Taraki refused to tolerate any Parchamis in the military and insisted that all officers affiliate with Khalq. By June 1978 an estimated 800 Parchami military personnel quit the armed forces in a purge of Parchamis. They accomplished this performing the elimination of the opposition and removal of any restraints posed by the Parchamis. Hafizullah Amin took over as Chairman of the Ministers Council (prime minister) in March 1979, retaining the position of field marshal and becoming vice-president of the Supreme Defence Council. Taraki remained General Secretary of the People's Democratic Party, Chairman of the Revolutionary Council and in control of the Army, though now he reportedly devoted a lot of his time at the Royal Palace, which had been renamed the People's Palace. Events also tended to sub-divide the protagonists. The intense rivalry between Taraki and Amin within the Khalq faction heated up. In September 1979, Taraki's followers, with Soviet complicity, had made several attempts on Amin's life. The final attempt backfired resulting in the death of one of Amin's close friends. Amin's murder of Taraki allowed him to purge his opponents and fully consolidate power within the Afghan Armed Forces suffering only one mutiny by the 7th Infantry Division at Rishkur on 15–16 October which was done by Anti-Amin elements of his own party.[16][17] The quick supression of the rebellion according to American inteligence, demonstrated that Amin maintained the loyalty of key armoured units in Kabul region aswell as the airforce.[18] In October 1979, Hafizullah Amin, now the leader of Afghanistan brought up the issue of Greater Afghanistan again saying
“Our task is to direct the officers and soldiers and all the Afghan people to the Durand line which we do not recognize, and then to the valley of the Indus which must be our border. If we do not fulfill this historic task, then one can say that we have been working in vain. We must have an outlet to the Indian Ocean!”[15]
In Mid-October, ethnic Hazara rebels briefly sized the town of Bamiyan however it was taken back by Amin's forces after heavy fighting.[19] In late October, Amin made a successful military sweep against the insurgents, driving many of them across the border into Pakistan. At the end of 1979 there were 400,000 Afghan refugees, mostly in Pakistan. According to American intelligence the rebels were poorly equipped and incapable of standing "toe-to-toe" with the Afghan military. Amin's regime was noted at being capable of retaking lost territory from the rebels when it directed its forces in order to do so, allowing Amin to control most of the important parts of Afghanistan by November 1979.[20] The USSR claims it had attempted to temper what it described as "Khalqis' radicalism", urging attendance at mosques, inclusion of Parchamis (Who did not have widespread support amongst the armed forces or general population compared to Khalq) and non-communists in the government, and a halt to the unpopular land reform movement. The Soviets and their Parchamite allies claim most of this advice was ignored. The last Khalq leader, Hafizullah Amin, was assassinated after Soviet intelligence forces took control of the government and installed Babrak Karmal, a Parchami, in his place.
The Parcham Government and Soviet invasion (December 1979 – April 1989)
Khalqi-Parchami differences began to rend the military as Khalqi leaders, fearful that the Parchamis retained their cellular organization within the military, mounted massive purges of Parchamis. Thanks to Amin's efforts in the 1970s, the officer corps consisted largely of Khalqis. However following his overthrow many of the politically reliable Khalqi officers mutinied against the newly installed Parchamite Barbrak Karmal and his Soviet sponsors.
As a result of the previous purging of Parchamis from the Armed Forces which had been already dominated by Khalqis before the purge, the Soviets had no choice but to rely upon Khalqi officers to rebuild the army. Khalq officers and men expressed bitterness over the preferential treatment given their Parcham rivals by the Parcham dominated regime. Disaffected Khalqis often assisted the Mujahideen. Khalqis in the armed forces often accused their Parchami officers of using them as cannon fodder and complained that young Parchami men were exempted from compulsory military service. A show of this was that, in 1980, at the April military parade celebrating the Saur Revolution, many Tank Corps continued to display the Red Flag of Khalq, instead of the new national flag adopted by Babrak Karmal.
There were also further differences within Khalq between the loyalists of Taraki and those of Amin. Asadullah Sarwari and Sayed Mohammad Gulabzoy were part of a pro-Taraki military clique, calling itself the "principled Khalqis". They clashed heads several times with the government of Karmal.[21]
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PDPA-Khalq (1989–present)
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Najibullah Administration (1986–1992)
After the 40th Soviet Army left the country, PDPA General Secretary and President Mohammad Najibullah suffered, to a lesser degree, the same disadvantage that Karmal had when he was installed as General Secretary of the PDPA by the Soviets. This fact was shown by the fierceness of the resistance to Najibullah's appointment within the Parcham faction. This split persisted, forcing PDPA leader Najibullah to straddle his politics between whatever Parchami support he could maintain and alliances he could win from the Khalqists.
In December 1989, 127 Khalqist military officers were arrested for an attempted coup. Twenty-seven officers escaped and later showed up at a press conference with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Peshawar. Former Minister of Tribal Affairs, Bacha Gul Wafadar and Minister of Civil Aviation Hasan Sharq were among the conspirators. In March 1990, once again the Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar cooperated in a coup attempt, this time led by the Khalqist Defense minister Shahnawaz Tanai. Tanai was apparently also supported by those important Khalqist who remained in the Politburo, Assadullah Sarwary and Mohammad Gulabzoi, respectively their country's envoys to Aden and Moscow. They were said to have been intimately connected with the coup and with Gen. Tanai. However, Tanai had no direct control of troops inside Kabul. The plot misfired and failed because of faulty communications. Sarwary and Gulabzoi were both expelled immediately from the party.
Afghan Civil War (1992–2001)
At the end, however, the former Khalqists either joined or allied themselves with the Taliban or other Mujahideen warlords after the collapse of President Najibullah's Government in April 1992. A perfect example of this was that, once Kabul was captured, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar gained the support of the majority Pashtun Khalqist hardliners, including the Minister of Internal Affairs Raz Mohammad Paktin and then Defence Minister Mohammad Aslam Watanjar. Another example of this is the fact that Gen. Tanai (according to western diplomatic sources) provided the Taliban a skilled cadre of military officers. The Khalqis also ran the Taliban's small air force and military artillery and tanks.[22]
In this way, the Khalqi faction were once again involved in the war, using his pilots to fly the Mig-21 and Sukhoi fighters of what was left of the Afghan Air Force, driving Soviet Tanks and using Soviet Artillery. With no central government and fighting for different groups, Khalq was merely a pawn in the Afghan Civil War between the Afghan Northern Alliance and the Taliban.
Karzai Administration (2002–2014)
After the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the presence of US forces in the province of Khost led to significant changes in the power dynamics of the region. As military units operated in the area, they sought alliances with like-minded individuals who shared their immediate goals. In a peculiar turn of events, the power vacuum created by the Taliban's defeat allowed former communists, who were once adversaries of the United States during the 1980s, to rise to power. These individuals, being staunchly anti-Taliban, became valuable allies to the US and Coalition partners in the region. This unexpected shift in power dynamics set the stage for the establishment of the Khost Protection Force (KPF), a paramilitary group that would play a significant role in the security landscape of Khost province.
Other Khalqists had developed fairly close relations with the Hamid Karzai regime after the defeat of the Taliban.
- General Babrak Shinwari, former head of the youth affairs section of the PDPA under Taraki and Amin, who migrated to Peshawar in Pakistan in the winter of 1992. He later helped found the Afghanistan-Pakistan People Friendship Society and was elected member of the Loya Jirga by a council of elders from Nazyan Shinwari area of Nangarhar province.
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External links
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