In Afghanistan, the 28^th April is regarded by many as Mujahideen Victory Day. The allocated political holiday commemorates the defeat of the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan’s 14-year conflict. 

The day also marks the beginning of the Afghan Civil War. The period of new violence, which saw rival mujahideen forces entering Kabul to fight for their competing ideas for a new Afghanistan, constituted some of the bloodiest years in the country’s history and saw the exodus of over 500,000 Kabul residents from the city’s urban centres. And yet, it is rarely paid the same heed as the Soviet and American occupations. 

Victory Day is not universally accepted as day of victory or freedom, however. The Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) instead remember the 28^th April as ‘black day’ – the day when ‘a gloomy and bleak religious domination’ prevailed in Afghanistan. The founder of RAWA, Meena Keshwar Kamal, a leading feminist militant who was assassinated in 1987, had anticipated the horror that would engulf Afghanistan in the years after the Mujahideen victory. Though she did not live to see the end of the Soviet occupation, her predictions were prophetic. 

When Meena founded RAWA in 1977, she did it out of a desire to strike out against a ‘suffocating political atmosphere’. Just as elsewhere, the university campuses of Kabul were hotbeds of radicalism. Student groups ranged from Marxists to Maoists, from traditionalists to revivalists, each intent on projecting their vision for Afghan society in a period of political uncertainty.

Despite the breadth and diversity of student politics, Meena and her future comrades in RAWA yearned for a platform that directly confronted matters of women’s rights. Though RAWA would come to share many of the same demands as the existing left-wing organisations, their distinction lay in the emancipation of women through the framework of secularism and democracy.

However, Afghanistan was becoming increasingly volatile. April 1978 saw the Saur Revolution, where Mohammed Daoud Khan – who had organised a palace coup against his cousin, Mohammed Zahir Shah, several years earlier – was overthrown by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) after Khan’s government killed a leading trade unionist. 

The subsequent Soviet invasion and occupation of the country saw an increasing number of RAWA activists being sent to work with refugees of the war in camps on the borderlands of Pakistan, meaning that after its establishment, RAWA was forced to avert their attention from achieving women’s rights to engaging in a “war of resistance”.

However, having started with a membership of five, the organisation’s membership grew as its work did. RAWA’s operations were conducted in a clandestine fashion, with its members and supporters rarely meeting face to face. Yet over several decades the association grew – eventually reaching 2,000 members by the turn of the century.

This relentless work entailed establishing schools and hostels for young children, as well as building a hospital in Quetta with mobile teams as well as handicraft centres. Additionally, it offered women nursery classes, literacy schemes and other vocational courses for Afghan women to engage with for the first time.

As a means of enhancing their international presence and projecting the cause of women throughout Afghanistan, Meena established Payam-e-Zan in 1981. A multilingual magazine whose title translates to Women’s Message, it allowed for a growth in RAWA’s influence both regionally and internationally. In 1981, she was invited to represent the Afghan resistance at the annual congress of the French Socialist Party, much to the distaste of their Soviet counterparts.

However, while she was organising RAWA from Pakistan, her husband Faiz Ahmed – a leader of the Afghanistan Liberation Organisation, a Maoist group – was murdered in November 1986 by figures close to the Islamist warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Meena herself was then killed in February 1987 by assassins who have never been identified, since her anti-Soviet, anti-fundamentalist stance made her an immediate target of both warring forces in Afghanistan. 

Meena’s life was cut short, but the movement she risked her life creating has lived on. The demise of the pro-Soviet government did not bring with it a newfound liberty for Afghan women, and instead the following decade would see the Afghan women’s movement confronted with new extremities.

The years of 1992-’96 were followed by Taliban rule, which demanded new levels of commitment in RAWA. As the world slept through the siege of Kabul, the organisation’s frontline work was more important than ever. Working in Kabul and Islamabad as well as in areas surrounding major cities, their operations became increasingly dangerous. As women were prohibited from leaving the house without a male chaperone, RAWA’s work was forced even further underground.

In her weekly address in November 2001, former American first lady Laura Bush said that ‘the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the dignity of women.’ As the US launched their ‘War on Terror’ in the aftermath of 9/11, the lives of Afghan women were catapulted into the Western media. Ostensibly providing a moral justification for the American invasion of Afghanistan, the notion of the ‘liberation’ of the Afghan woman dominated headlines across the world.  

Two months after the invasion, Time magazine reported that ‘now the Taliban has fled the city, only a few brave women have shed the burka – the head-to-toe garment, to Western eyes a kind of body bag for the living.’ The assumption being widely pushed by the media was that the removal of the burqa, the chaddari, equated liberation, freedom, autonomy. Embedded in the American discourse of liberation was the implication that Afghan women had no agency. It also ignored the work undertaken by groups like RAWA, who were steadfast opponents of US interference in Afghanistan. 

Despite the rhetoric, the invasion did little more than propagate fear and anxiety amongst Afghan women. ‘Sharpening the daggers’ of the Northern Alliance, the US invasion triggered flashbacks of the 1992 infighting and allowed for the return to prominence of many warlords who had been at the forefront of the Afghan Civil War.

Throughout this period, RAWA did not just offer its members escapism and a sense of something better to come. It remained active in providing care and education for women throughout three decades of war and occupation. From one women’s dream for a better livelihood, RAWA would become the basis of female resistance in Afghanistan.

Nearly 30 years on from the first Mujahideen Victory Day, RAWA is still one of the most important stories of contemporary Afghan history. The organisation’s legacy across Afghanistan and Pakistan has been profound. While women have obtained a greater presence in Afghan politics, they still have some way to go before they can be protagonists in the negotiations over Afghanistan’s future.

Afghan women’s livelihoods should be at the forefront of the agenda in any ‘peace talks.’ Once referred to as the ‘graveyard of empires,’ Afghanistan has continued to be the victim of both internal and external warfare. Women’s lives have been endangered as a result, but the relentless minimisation and victimisation of Afghan women throughout the Western press, and within international aid forums, serves little purpose. 

As time progresses, it is fundamental to learn from RAWA and their struggle to permit Afghan women to navigate their own freedom. The project to impose a Western-style ‘democracy’ on Afghanistan has ignored the experiences of the country’s women. Subverting such processes is a prerequisite for the survival of the Afghan women’s resistance. RAWA’s mission to ‘give voice to the deprived and silenced women of Afghanistan’ holds true today.