all of them city based (Emadi 2002).
Women were also present in the different ranks of the party and the government with the exception of the Council of Ministers. The Loya Jirga (parliament) counted seven female members in 1989. The Central Committee of the PDPA included Jamila Palwasha and Ruhafza (alternate member), “a working-class grandmother and ‘model worker’ at the Kabul Construction Plant, where she did electrical wiring” (Moghadam 2002, 24). Women were working in security, in intelligence, and on the police force. They were employed as logisticians in the Defense Ministry. In 1989, all female members of the PDPA received military training and weapons.
The true innovation of the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan was the women’s branch of the party, the Democratic Organization of Afghan Women, also founded in 1965, which set about to address specifically every aspect of women’s conditions, not only limited to issues of marriage, with the aim of turning women into citizens and partners in an egalitarian secular society (Moghadam 1994).
The program of the DOAW was very much based on strategies of public visibility, which involved women’s enrollment in grand marches organized by the party to foster ideas of women’s emancipation. Nancy Hatch Dupree writes: “Frequently, these grand marches ended in ‘volunteer clean-up’ sessions, and the people of Kabul were treated for the first time to the sight of girls wielding brooms, sweeping the streets in public in the company of men” (1984, 318).
Nevertheless, the distance between reforms on paper and actual practice was considerable. The DOAW and its supporters were generally sophisticated cosmopolitan middle- to upper-class women with a foreign education—just like the progressive circles around Kings Habibullah and Amanullah with equally limited connections to the rural majority. According to Nancy Hatch Dupree (1984, 317), women activists under the Communist regime were totally co-opted to “the purposeful manipulation of the women’s movement as an appendage to national politics.” As a result, no strong and well-organized women’s movement emerged from this period.
In the countryside, the imposition of compulsory education for both boys and girls, forced enrollment of men and women in “detachments for the Defence of the Revolution,”2 and coercive secularization attempts provoked strong resentment and resistance. In general, gender policies implemented under the Soviet occupation were imposed with little sensitivity for local codes and practices, often using heavy-handed tactics to implement programs. The PDPA coup of 1978 met with violent opposition not so much because of its progressive ideology but because of its brutal implementation, which cost the lives of thousands of Afghan citizens. The reforms, instead of being presented in a pragmatic, technical manner, were given a Marxist packaging that alienated the vast majority of the population. Compulsory education, especially for women, was largely perceived as an encroachment of the state in families’ private affairs. The secular narrative that accompanied the reforms was seen as going against tradition, as antireligious, and as a challenge to male authority. This lack of regard for religious and societal sensibilities resulted in massive backlash, especially in rural areas.
Figure 8. General Khotul Mohammadzai, 1970s. Collection of Julie Billaud.
Figure 9. “Women at a demonstration in Kabul” (original caption). From The Revolution Continues, ed. Makhmud Baryalai, Abdullo Spantghar, and Vladimir Grib (Moscow: Planeta, 1984), 58.
The war against the Soviet occupation had a devastating impact on Afghanistan’s economy. An estimated five million people fled to Pakistan, Iran, and further afield. As a result of the war, social services provided by the government became largely limited to the urban centers. Both the human and economic costs and losses of the war were enormous.
Figure 10. “Volunteer detachments for the Defence of the Revolution include urban and rural workers, men and women, middle aged people and young patriots of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Their country has given them arms to fight the enemies of the Revolution and they are defending it without thought of their own life” (original caption). From The Revolution Continues, ed. Makhmud Baryalai, Abdullo Spantghar, and Vladimir Grib (Moscow: Planeta, 1984), 193.
Jihad
Armed by the United States, the different mujahideen factions organized resistance from the refugee camps in Pakistan to their villages of origin. Village women participated in the movement in various ways: by transporting weapons under their chadari, installing landmines around their village, looking after the wounded, and cooking for the combatants (N. H. Dupree 1984).
Women did not only support the jihad but they also encouraged their husbands to go to war. Of the time of resistance against the Soviets, cultural historian Nancy Dupree writes: “During the jihad one would often see men coming home from the war to rest with their families in the Pakistani camps. If they were a little slow about going back to the battlefield, the women would push and shame them into doing their duty for the jihad. The women therefore played a vital part in the war, for it was their strength that motivated men to keep fighting” (1986, 10). From their participation in the resistance movement, women developed a sense of pride and usefulness. In recognition for their participation in the war effort some of them were given political positions once the mujahideen government took over Kabul.
Pul-i-Charkhi
Conducting clandestine activities was not without risk. Repression was severe, systematic, and merciless. Political opponents were tracked by the secret services, arrested, tortured, and executed. Located just east of Kabul, the prison of Pul-i-Charkhi became one of the darkest holes in the last quarter century of Afghanistan’s war-torn history. During the years of Soviet and Communist control, hundreds of thousands of prisoners were kept behind the solid stone walls in dark concrete cells with unknown thousands never coming out alive, victims of nightly executions on the military range beyond the prison walls (Barry 2002).
What happened behind the stone walls of Pul-i-Charkhi reflects the dark side of the PDPA’s political agenda. Modernization projects conducted under the Communist government were meant to convey an ideology, a particular vision of social organization that tolerated no opposition. The immense enterprise of social engineering was conducted by the regime under the guise of development aimed at gaining people’s consent for the Red Army’s occupation of the country. But the remolding of the Afghan nation along secular lines triggered fierce resistance to social changes that were perceived as threats to Afghan culture and tradition. In obedience to the Islamic principle of leaving lands occupied by infidels, millions of Afghans sought refuge in Iran and Pakistan.
Life in the Refugee Camps
During this period Afghanistan became the battlefield upon which the United States conducted a proxy war against the Soviet Union. The Afghan resistance movement was organized around U.S.-sponsored conservative Islamist groups under the rubric of the mujahideen. The very first refugee camps were probably extensions of military training camps that the Pakistani government built for the opponents of the left-wing and pro-Soviet elements of the Afghan government. Since 1973 (nearly six years before the Soviet intervention) Gulbudin Hekmatyar, Ahmad Shah Masood, and Burnanuddin Rabbani—the leaders of resistance—had fled to Peshawar to build up support with the help of the Pakistani government. A number of camps, military in origin, may have been conceived as rallying points around specific military commanders with strong fundamentalist leanings, not just as neutral gathering places for refugees (Mackenzie 2001).
As in Chile, Guatemala, Indonesia, and the Congo, the United States supported opponents to the pro-Soviet regime, without any regard for
