Copyright © Dr Ehsan Azari
Mohammad Zahir Shah
Born 16 October 1914; died 23 July 2007 aged 93.
A king who was borne as a prince and died as an ordinary citizen, the ex-Afghan king, Zahir Shah was the most democratic head of state in Asia for many decade until he was deposed in 1973. He ascended to the throne in 1933 when his father was killed by a student with a personal vendetta. During the time of his reign, all neighbouring countries of Afghanistan had been ruled by tyranny and colonial powers. Iran was under a despotic monarch, Raza Shah, with his notorious intelligence Savak, Pakistan was under a military dictatorship, and Central Asian countries, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan, were all colonies of the Soviet empire.
In 1964, he formed a new constitution in the country which ushered in a democratic and parliamentarian government. Within an overall Islamic context, the constitution guaranteed woman emancipation, human rights, and freedom of press. But he failed to sign the legislation authorising the formation of political parties, despite its recognition by the constitution. This also helped the semi underground communist party to flourish across the country.
He advocated modernisation, reforms, and economic development. In his timeAf ghan women were more freer than hey have been in the past three centuries of Afghan history. Women were not forced to cover themselves from head to toe with burqas and they had full access to education.
“When we were kids our family used to live in single room that was too long. When one began to cough all would cough, and if one fell ill all would fall ill. At elementary school in Kabul, our teacher beat us by rulers. When young I tried to learn Sitar but failed,” he said in an interview to BBC.
Zahir Shah was a soft hearted and peaceful leader who was tolerant of his political dissident. His subjects remember more of this than himself. (He was once driving past a busy street in Kabul when he saw a public water tap had been left open, he stopped and from his Choverolate window asked a person to close the tape and advised that it was not wise to leave water going down the street. The young tailor’s apprentice who knew he was the king shouted: “you are drinking the blood of a thousand poor people, it is better to stop that”. The king slowly drove past.
Watching all this, the tailor stormed out of his shop and began to beat the rude folk black and blue while crying: “What have you done? What will happen to us now?” A few weeks later, the young man recovered from his wounds and the king forgot everything.
Another time a man was once sentenced to death in Kandahar for killing someone’s brother. According to Islamic laws if the closest one to murdered victim pardons the accused, he can be saved from execution. The king took his hat off to the man and begged for the convict to be pardoned. But the vengeful man refused.
Sadly, there was a snake lurking amongst the royal court. His own fist cousin and brother-in-law, Daoud Khan, staged a bloodless coup and deposed the king while holidaying in Italy. Like Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s tragedy, Daoud had overweening arrogance, and after five years of an authoritarian rule he was brutally killed by a bunch of low-ranking communist and non-commissioned officers in a bloody coup, slaughtering nearly all of his family and close relatives in 1978.
Zahir Shah’s fall was not only the fall of his dynasty but the portent of the endless tragedy in waiting for his country. A year later the communist coup paved the way for the Russian genocidal occupation. A decade later, the Russian’s defeat and departure from Afghanistan, and the loss of one and a half million Afghans didn’t bring liberty and peace. Upon the toppling of the communist regime in 1992, the warlords and Islamist militants entered Kabul and avenged themselves upon the city and its tortured inhabitants with murder, pillage, rape, and destruction. Then the Taliban ushered in a galloping medieval theocracy, philistinism, and the terrorism of Osama bin Laden that reduced Afghanistan to the land of the dead.
Zahir Shah was married to Lady Humaira when he was 16 at a time when the entire country was suffering from the nine-month rule of Amir Habibullah, known as Bacha-e-Saqa (Son of water carrier), a highway man and a warlord. In an interview, the king is reminded of the young age at which he was married, “It was a very hard time; everyone in the royal family had been in fear of the fate of his young teenage daughter, because Saqa wanted to marry someone from the royal family. So everyone was willing to marry his daughter blindfully to any one except the criminal ruler. This was the reason that Humaira (his queen) become mine, otherwise she couldn’t have been mine”.
The gracious king, however, made a fatal error that brought on the demise of his dynasty and the tragedy of his country. He placed his country politically in the orbit of the Soviet Union. His military was controlled from top to bottom by the pro-Moscow Marxist-Leninist party members. Babrak Karmal, head of the communist party, who served as a Russian puppet when Afghanistan was in turmoil, was the son of a four star general. He was ignorant to the fact that this friendship would end one day in the ominous destruction of himself and his nation.
Zahir lost the throne but remained to the last days of his life king of hearts. During the Russian occupation he did not just sit and cry about his country. He was part of the resistant and tried hard to play a unifying role in his country. But, Pakistani ruling generals gave the leadership of the Afghan national resistance to the most sworn-in enemies of Afghanistan, the West and democracy. Given three decades of foreign puppets, and warlords elevated his status to the status of a new messiah. Hearing his reign is enough to fill most Afghans with nostalgia, despite the backwardness and poverty of his time.
After the US-led forces overthrew the Taliban regime, Zahir Shah returned home from 28 years of Italian exile and was awarded by the Afghan grand assembly (Loya Jirgah) the title of “the Father of the Nation.” He supported President Karzai’s government and helped him expand his influence among the various Afghan tribes.
Even at 93 years of age he has never gone gaga. His life style was modest, often dressing in Western suits and smart ties. He loved Sufi poetry, music, golf, gardening, and hunting.
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Ehsan Azari – author of 10 posts on Registan.net.
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{ 2 comments }
Thanks to Dr. Azari for sharing such a pleasant obituary to a man most in the west have forgotten even existed.
Dr. Azari is giving a rosy and romantic picture of Zahir Shah’s reign probably from a Pashtun perspective. The rulers of modern Afghanistan, for at least more than two centuries, have been coming from Pashtun tribes of Durrani confederacy. The only exception was Amir Habibullah II or Bacha Saqoa (a Tajik) who is being mocked by official historiography for being a brigand. This itself is an indication of Pasthun Chauvinism not being able to tolerate non other than Pashtun dominance in a ‘country of minorities’. Azari does the same.
Dr. Azari is right in some of his description of the decade of democracy (1964–73), but with some serious exaggeration. All those achievements which Azari is proud for were confined to the walls of Kabul city and those above nine years.
Regarding the democratic character of the King recently a commentator wrote: “But Zahir was essentially disinterested in this much-trumpeted democracy and the moment that his courtiers warned him that a party system would prove a threat to the monarchy, he refused to sign the new party legislation into law – even though it had been passed by the new parliament. Parties were closed down. So were the newspapers. He created democracy – and then he destroyed it” (see Robert Fisk, Zahir Shah the Last King of Afghanistan, in independent online, published on 24 July 2007, available at: http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2795821.ece).
However, the most important story untold during his reign and that of his father (Nader Khan) is the massacre of Tajiks in north of Kabul (who has supported Habibullah II to the throne) and the massacre of the Turkic and Tajiks of Turkistan (north Afghanistan) and confiscate of their land to be redistributed to Pashtun settlers to these newly usurped lands. These actions in modern terminology are called ‘racial cleansing’. The aim was to establish the idea of Pashtun supremacy and ‘Pashtunisation of Afghanistan’ (see Mousavi, S. A., The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic, and Political Study, London: Curzon Press, 1998).
A glance at the 43 years of the ‘Musahiban dynasty’ (Nader and Zaher) will reveal, killing, discrimination, repression, etc. As I mentioned above except the decade of so called democracy, which was more mockery of democracy.
To be fair to Zaher Shah, much of the above atrocities’ responsibility falls on his father and his uncles (when he was proclaimed a King he was only 19 and his uncle were ruling instead of him). But we should not forget that he released a statement from Rome to congratulate the victory of the Taliban when they managed to occupy Mazar-e Sharif, where they massacred again thousands of non-Pashtun of that area, as a positive step toward so called stability the country.
What Azari is doing is creation of a “myth” around the personality cult of the diseased King to make him a symbol of Pashtun supremacy and unity. It is not a bad thing to do. But one should not do unfair to the “others” by ignoring them all together: the atrocities done to them and the injustice they have been subjected to. Dr. Azari should know that it is difficult to build a turret without putting its foundations right. The foundations will only be put right if started to we tell and accept the “truth”: although it might be “ugly” as Nietzsche said, or a Persian saying goes “you cannot hide the sun with two fingers”. Why one should be so one dimensional?