Chemistry students at Kabul University, Afghanistan 1986 -- Daily LIFT #444
At the time the photo was taken 55% of the students at the university were women. "By 1988, women made up 40 percent of the doctors and 60 percent of the teachers at Kabul University; 440,000 female students were enrolled in different educational institutions and 80,000 more in literacy programs." This all ended with the defeat of the Saur Revolution.
Today marks the anniversary of the Saur Revolution in Afghanistan, April 27, 1978. After the revolution Afghanistan had a government dedicated to a sweeping agenda that "included land reforms, ending feudal customs, equality for women, literacy campaigns, equality of nationalities, freedom of religion".
Sadly most in the west have bought into the notion that the revolutionary Afghan regime of the Saur Revolution of 1978 were actually the "bad guys" opposed by the "freedom fighters" the US and west funded and supported to destroy it and who went on to coalesce into obscurantist and viciously reactionary forces like the Taliban.
Education is no longer the monopoly of a handful of the elite who were the most favoured persons in the past. Medical benefits and facilities which were the monopoly of a handful of exploiters in the past are now put at the service of he people. Women, the most oppressed section of the population hitherto, enjoy today equal rights and opportunities and now they are playing their fundamental due role in the building of new Afghan society.
Different nationalities in Afghan society of today enjoy equal rights and have the full opportunity to flourish -- an opportunity which they never dreamt of before. The Government of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan has taken fundamental and practical steps to eradicate oppression, poverty, hunger, illiteracy and exploitation by the handful of privileged of the old Afghan society.
A new society, a new social system, a new generation in the history of Afghanistan -- these are the fruits of the Saur Revolution.
The Saur Revolution also abolished such practices as forced marriages.
It is part-and-parcel of the imperialist agenda to back the forces of reaction and fascism against attempts to create or build a new society or social order, all while portraying these reactionary forces as actually on the side of "democracy" and "freedom".
Afghanistan is another of countless examples of how this fundamental lie plays out when these counter-revolutionary forces ultimately win and leftist or reform minded regimes and all of their accomplishments are swept away.