A bloody coup rattles a shaky, strife-torn Soviet satellite
Gunshots echoed through the granite halls of Kabul's People' House, punctuating a fresh installment in Afghanistan's long history of violence and political intrigue. When the Shootout was over, some 60 people lay dead, including, apparently, President Noor Mohammed Taraki. The new leader of the strife-torn country was Hafizullah Amin, 50, most recently President Taraki's Prime Minister. Within hours, workers in the mile-high capital had stripped hundreds of outsize portraits of Taraki from the facades of state office buildings. Many of the red-bordered images of Afghanistan's "Great Leader" had been put up only two weeks ago, to mark his triumphal return from the nonaligned conference in Havana.
Amin's accession is unlikely to bring much peace to the ancient mountain kingdom. Afghanistan has been in continuous turmoil since Taraki came to power, in April 1978, following a coup in which former President Mohammed Daoud was gunned down in Arg Palace. Taraki's Marxist Khalq (masses) Party promptly launched a radical program of social reform and land redistribution. The policy met with violent resistance from the country's Islamic tribesmen, who make up some 85% of Afghanistan's 17 million people. Loyal to their old feudal leaders and enraged by the new, "godless" regime in Kabul, Muslim guerrillas launched a civil war that has kept the Soviet-backed Khalq government tottering on the brink of collapse ever since. Western diplomats in Kabul estimate that the rebels control 22 of the country's 28 provinces.
Taraki's end came suddenly, in the best Afghan tradition. On Sept. 14 he was warned by four loyal government officials that Amin was plotting his overthrow. Taraki heeded the warning but ignored the first rule of Afghan politics: kill the adversary immediately. Instead, he invited his rival to a Friday afternoon conference at People's House, possibly intending to arrest him. But Amin came to the rendezvous armed with a pistol and the knowledge that Taraki's personal bodyguard, Major Sayed Daoud Taron, had changed masters. It is not known how the Shootout started, but when the smoke cleared an hour later, Amin was in control of the palace and the traitor Taron and dozens of others were dead. On Sunday the Revolutionary Council announced that Taraki had resigned on "health grounds" and reassigned his posts to Amin. At week's end, the Kabul government still had not confirmed Taraki's death, but, considering Afghanistan's tradition of violent political change, it was hard to imagine that he was still alive.
A former education student at Columbia University, Amin tried to project a statesmanlike image in his first national radio and television address. In an apparent reference to Taraki, Amin rejected "one-person rule" and announced that certain enemies of the people had been "eliminated." He promised to introduce the principle of habeas corpus, to guarantee complete religious freedom, and to reduce frictions with neighboring Iran and Pakistan, which harbors some 185,000 antigovernment Afghan refugees.