Nationality Afghanistan Role Polit. Name Tahir Badakhshi | Occupation Political activist Ethnicity Turk & Tajik Died 1979, Kabul, Afghanistan | |
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Born 1933 Badakhshan province, Afghanistan | ||
Taher Badakhshi (1933–1979) (Persian: طاهر بدخشی) was a cultural and political personality in Afghanistan and region. He performed a large variety of cultural activities and was the founder of the Revolutionary Organisation of Hardworkers of Afghanistan, a liberal-democratic group with affinity to the freedom movements of the third world and a small but firm touch to the leftist ideas of those days. (Persian: سازمان انقلابی زحمتکشان افغانستان).
Biography
Taher Badakhshi did his primary studies in Badakhshan, and then moved to Kabul for continuing his higher studies in economics and law at the University of Kabul. During this time he was very close to a Kabul-based literature scene under the influence of Sufi poets Ghulam Dehqan and Khalilullah Khalili. He began contacting a broad circle of urban intellectuals with activities in the field of culture and politics. He was connected in long lasting friendship to the avant-garde intellectuals like the university professor, poet, linguist Wasef Bakhtari and the novelist and historian Azam Rahnaward Zariab, who were the primary sources of the contemporary poetics and fiction of Persian literature in Afghanistan. He was actively involved and proactive in literary and intellectual circles of Kabul.
He was a co-ordinator of the first congress of People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan, the first main leftist democratic party in Afghanistan. He left the party in 1967 after the membership of Hafizullah Amin who had a suspected prehistory of ethno-centric chauvinist activities in the south of the country and recently returned from the United States. He arranged a circle named "Mahfele Entezar" (Waiting circle) movement and later the Revolutionary Organisation of Hardworkers of Afghanistan" or SAZA Political movement , speaking out for the basic political rights for all citizens and for improvement of economic and educational conditions of the people.
The main political background was built by third world freedom movements like in Vietnam, Palestine, or African anti-colonial fights and it was orientated on non-aligned Movement. The political activities between 1965 und 1978 were mainly focussed on basic reformative goals toward a republican and democratic system in which basic human rights of all inhabitants of the country, independent of their ethnic or economic background, would be respected. A special regard was concentrated on the obvious and objective antagonism of ethnic disparity and inequality in favour of Pashtuns and, in evident disfavor of other ethnic groups as they are uzbeks, hazaras and to some extent even tajiiks. Activities were directed against the Pashtun ethnic-dominance and elitism in relevant fields of politics, finance, military, police; asking for equal rights of all other ethnicities in Afghanistan. The political organization he led was labeled as Setami Milli (National Oppression) by the royal family and, at the same time, by the "leftist" functionaries, interestingly mainly by Pashtun activists of the "People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan". He came because of his opposition to the system into political detention many times in his life, for days, weeks or multiple months: during the times of King Zahir, during the first republic of President Daoud. In the meantime he worked in the Ministry of Education, where he kept working during the regime of Nur Muhammad Taraki after the leftist coup d état in April 1978 too. His cultural work and productivity in terms of writing multiple newspapers, journals and magazines on poetry, prose, philosophy and theology had been documented well, but mostly got lost in the years of the war that came after 1980. The theoretical work done by Taher Badakhshi in the meantime extended from poetry and prose to solid concepts of political thinking and action that are yet in urgent need to be studied. Experts in area studies from the Global North (or the Western hemisphere) are at the beginning of research.
Later he was arrested by the secret service of the Taraki government. He was murdered by the nationalist chauvinist government of H. Amin in 1979 after political detention and inhuman torture by the secret service (led by the brother of the dictator H. Amin ) and military police of the "leftist" regime. His political and theoretical legacy in the years to come experienced heterogenous transformation, often by good will or by theoretical misunderstandings, it remains still a current issue in the politics and concepts of politics in Afghanistan.
His 20th death anniversary was held in Dushanbe in 2000 by the Institute of Oriental Studies as well as his 32nd anniversary in February 2011 in Kabul.