Nur Muhammad Taraki
Nur Muhammad Taraki was president of Afghanistan from April 1978 to September 1979, the founder of the People's Democratic Party, the country's communists, whom the officers of the Saur revolution took from Daoud's prison and made head of state. He was smothered with a pillow on the orders of his own deputy seventeen months later. That was the beginning of the war that has not ended. He was the party's writer and its Khalq faction's chief. He was a Ghilzai Pashtun of a poor family from Ghazni who had worked as a clerk for a Bombay fruit company, learned English there and Marxism from Indian communists, been a press attaché in Washington under Daoud's first government and resigned, and written novels of village misery that the party's cadres read. He founded the PDPA in his own house on 1 January 1965 and was its general secretary through the split with Karmal's Parcham in 1967 and the reunion of 1977 that Moscow imposed. The seventeen months were the revolution by decree. There was the land reform that took the fields from the landlords and gave them to peasants who would not take them. There were the debt cancellation, the marriage decree that abolished the bride-price and set a minimum age, and the literacy campaign that sent young cadres into villages to teach women. There were the red flag in place of the green, and the terror, twelve thousand executed at Pul-i-Charkhi prison in a year. There was the Herat rising of March 1979 in which the city killed its Soviet advisers and the air force killed perhaps twenty thousand of the city. The country was in revolt from Nuristan to Herat. That was why he asked Moscow for troops in March and was told no. The cult grew with the trouble, the great leader and the genius of the East. Behind it Amin, his student and prime minister, took the ministries one by one. Taraki came home from Havana and Moscow in September 1979 with Brezhnev's blessing to remove Amin, the shooting at the palace on 14 September went the wrong way. He was arrested, held for three weeks, and killed on the night of 8 October by three officers of the guard with a pillow. The radio announced that he had died of an illness. He was born in Nawa, Ghazni. His murder was the thing that decided Moscow that Amin could not be trusted. That decided the invasion.
- Lived: 1917 CE – 1979 CE
- Nationality: Afghan
- Roles: president, writer, politician
