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The ‘Saur’ Revolution

As king, Mohammad Zahir Shah (pictured below) ruled Afghanistan for forty years, coming to the throne as a 19-year-old in 1933. But in July 1973, while in Italy undergoing eye surgery, his cousin and former prime minister Mohammad Daoud Khan, whom Zahir had sacked in 1963, staged a coup, abolished the Afghan monarchy and established a republican government with himself as its first president.

Zahir Shah, king of Afghanistan, 1933–1973

Daoud set about implementing reform – the emancipation of women and the suppression of Islamic fundamentalism. The Islamists migrated across the border into Pakistan, where the Pakistani secret service trained them to fight. Among them were two men who were to play a large role in the Afghan civil war twenty years later: Ahmad Shah Massoud and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Both were members of the Mujahideen. Massoud exploited the discontent caused by Daoud’s reforms and staged an uprising. It failed and Daoud used the attempted coup as a pretext for enforcing greater repression of Islamic fundamentalists. Massoud and Hekmatyar fell out and although nominally fighting for the same cause became and were to remain bitter enemies.

Daoud had been accepting shipments of arms from the Soviet Union but following a falling out with the Afghan communist party – the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) – he expelled the Soviet advisers sent by Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader, and looked elsewhere for assistance.

The Soviet Union feared that Afghanistan was about to ally itself to the West. The final, irrevocable split with the Soviet Union came in April 1977 during Daoud’s state visit to Moscow. When Brezhnev objected to the encroachment of American and NATO influence within Afghanistan, Daoud reacted angrily, ‘We will never allow you to dictate to us how to run our country and who we employ in Afghanistan . . . Afghanistan will remain poor if necessary but free in its acts and decisions.’ As he left he had to be reminded to shake Brezhnev’s hand. A year later Daoud would regret his show of defiance.

In April 1978 a prominent PDPA member was assassinated and his subsequent funeral attracted and stirred the emotions of large numbers of Afghan communists. Daoud, sensing the danger, attempted a crackdown but not with sufficient vigour, for on 27 April, the PDPA, trained by the Soviet Union, staged a coup, the Saur (or April) Revolution.

Daoud, along with members of his family, was shot in the presidential palace. Brezhnev had no input into the coup but equally, still smarting from Daoud’s defiance, took no action to prevent it.

Daoud’s death was not publicly announced and the new president, the pro-Soviet Nur Mohammad Taraki, announced that former president Daoud had ‘resigned for health reasons’. Taraki renamed Afghanistan the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and introduced a red Afghani flag not dissimilar to the hammer and sickle flag of the Soviet Union. The body of Daoud was found thirty years later, in 2008, and in March 2009 Daoud was reburied with full state honours.