Абдул Рахман Пажвак: Өмір және дипломатиялық қызметі

Abdul Rahman Pazhwak (عبدالرحمن پژواک; born 7 March 1919 – 8 June 1995) was an Afghan poet and diplomat. He was educated in Afghanistan and started his career as a journalist, later joining the foreign ministry. During the 1950s, he became ambassador to the United Nations and served as president of the UN General Assembly from 1966 to 1967. During the early 1970s, he served for short periods as Afghan ambassador to West Germany and India. In 1976, he became ambassador to the United Kingdom. He served in that position until the 1978 Saur Revolution. He then returned to Afghanistan and was put under house arrest. He was allowed to leave for medical treatment in 1982 and received asylum in the United States, where he lived until 1991, before moving to Peshawar, after Pakistan offered him sanctuary. Abdul Rahman Pazhwak died in Hayatabad in Peshawar on 8 June 1995. He was in Baghwani village off Surkh Road in Nangarhar Province, Afghanistan. Ustad (an honorific title) Abdur Rahman Pazhwak (1919–1995) came from a Pashtun household that was attached to tradition but nonetheless gave Pazhwak enough freedom to allow him to develop into a ‘free spirit’ already as a young adult. He grew up to become not only a famous poet and writer but also a successful diplomat who was respected in the highest international circles.

Abdur Rahman Pazhwak was born on 7 March 1919 in the historical city of Ghazni, south of Kabul, where his father, Qazi (Judge) Abdullah Khan served as the provincial judge. He spent his childhood years in a traditional family environment, living partly in his ancestral village of Baghbani, Nangarhar Province, and partly in the capital city of Kabul. The family moved from Ghazni to Kabul and from Kabul to Khogyani District of Nangarhar province in eastern Afghanistan near the family's ancestral village in Surkhrud district in accordance with his father's official appointments. Pazhwak's forefathers were descendants of a prominent Maroof Khel sub tribe, tracing its roots to Ahmadzai tribes of the Ghilzai Confederation. Pazhwak grew up in a traditional region inhabited by Pashtuns, where generations of Pazhwak's family were renowned as landowners, educators and public servants. Pazhwak's father and his older brother, Judge Hafizullah Khan, were major contributors to the development of Pazhwak's character, upbringing and education. While Pazhwak's late father Judge Abdullah Khan served as the Chief Justice of Afghanistan's Supreme Court, Habibullah Kalakni and his followers took control of the capital city, Kabul in 1929. Kalakani rejected any kind of innovation, forced the reformist Amanullah Khan to abdicate, usurping the throne for himself. Pazhwak's father, Judge Abdullah, joined the resistance against the usurper and amidst anarchy and chaos, Pazhwak's progressive older brother, Judge Hafizullah, was murdered in Shamali, where he had been appointed as the judge, at the hands of unknown anarchists. At the end of Habibullah Kalakani's interregnum, Pazhwak attended the Habibia High School, which was among the first famous modern schools in Afghanistan. The school trained a whole section of the country's open minded educated elite in the twentieth century. Among Pazhwak's teachers in Kabul were two prominent poet scholars: Sufi Abdulhaq Bitab (1887–1969) who taught at the Habibiya High School, and Ustad Khalilullah Khalili (1909–1985), who was Pazhwak's part time private tutor. As a result, a lifelong friendship was forged between Pazhwak and his ten years senior teacher, Ustad Khalili. At this time, the poet laureate Bitab and the equally learned poet and diplomat Khalili were widely and highly valued for their Dari literary prose. This was also the key reason explaining why Pazhwak, whose first language was Pashto, was able to stand out as a Dari writer whose work was testimony to the author's sensitivity to the subtleties of the Persian language. English was taught as a foreign language at the school and this in turn played a significant role in Pazhwak's subsequent career as a diplomat. His knowledge of English already came useful to him at a young age enabling him to read and translate into Dari the works of English language authors. Scattered pieces of Pazhwak's first poems and essays appeared in the Afghan press in the first half of the 1930s. At the time the young literati used various pen names: first Wafa, then Marlaw, and finally Armanjan. It was only towards the end of the 1930s that the aspiring young literati permanently settled for the pen name Pazhwak which means ‘echo’ in both Dari and Pashto. After high school, Pazhwak was designated to study medicine but felt compelled to interrupt his studies due to lack of interest in the field and the loss of his father who was the bread winner of the family. He decided to join the workforce, starting his career working as an English translator for the academic institution of the Kabul Literary Association, Anjuman i Adabi yi Kabul. Pazhwak subsequently made a career in Afghanistan's information and press sector taking on the challenges of producing serious press work of high standards. Meanwhile, Pazhwak and his colleagues coped with a series of intellectual restrictions that were triggered by state censorship. Pazhwak was particularly impressed by his superior, Allama Salahuddin Saljuqi (1895/97 1970). A scholar, philosopher, diplomat and literati known for his active patronage of young talent Saljuqi was the President of the Press and Information Office. He had recognized and cherished Pazhwak's independence of thinking and his self reliant and critical approach to all things which was very mature for his young age. In a private correspondence dating from the mid 1950s Saljuqi implodes Pazhwak "not to put aside the fearless writing that is pouring out of your pen!" Pazhwak was at the time the lead editor of the important newspaper Islah and then worked as the Director of the Afghan international news agency Bakhtar, before eventually occupying the post of the Director of the Pashto Academy, Pashtu Tulana. In 1943, Pazhwak became Director General of Publications, and took charge of the entire operational side of the Afghan press and information sector. Pazhwak resigned the post in the mid 1940s, most likely to express his firm opposition to the newly issued press law that restricted press and intellectual freedom.

Pazhwak first entered the world of diplomacy at the age of twenty seven. His initial job as a press attaché, but difference of opinion with the embassy's leadership, whose members all belonged to the ruling royal family, forced Pazhwak, who was a critical thinker, to find work outside of the Afghan government, landing a job with the International Labour Organization (ILO) in Montreal. The Afghan government soon reproached Pazhwak to join public service putting his political and literary skills at work at the Foreign Ministry in Kabul. On 19 November 1946, the Kingdom of Afghanistan joined the United Nations as a full member. Pazhwak for the first time attended the meetings of the United Nations General Assembly in 1947 and henceforth he became a regular participant of such meetings. Starting off as an ordinary member of the Afghan delegation, in 1958 he rose up to become Afghanistan's Ambassador to the United Nations. He occupied this prestigious position until 1972 with tremendous success and acclaim. During this tenure at the United Nations, Pazhwak contributed significantly to achieving United Nations organizational goals. Simultaneously, Pazhwak hard work and passion left significant marks at various political and diplomatic levels of the UN. As a result, Pazhwak was elected as the President of the nineteenth United Nations Human Rights Commission in 1963 in Geneva. In 1966; he was elected as President of the United Nation's General Assembly in New York. In tandem, Pazhwak headed multiple committees and was significantly involved in the elevation of the principle of self determination of nations and peoples to an internationally binding right enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As leader of various United Nations led fact finding and extraordinary missions he became familiar with important, politically delicate tasks and investigations. Pazhwak felt that the United Nations served as a conduit for realizing the world's best hope and sensed its significance in resolving conflict and injustice in the political processes on world stage. In 1968 Pazhwak was seen as having a solid chance to replace the hesitating U Thant – who spent a whole term dithering whether to run for another period – and occupy the high position of the UN Secretary General. In the 1950s and '60s, when the international political scene was marked by the dualism of Western powers versus the Eastern Bloc, the movement of the Non Aligned Movement states, emerged on the world stage as a third power. Afghanistan became one of the founding members of this movement. As his country's sole representative, Pazhwak regularly attended the movement's most important conferences from the early phase of its inception to its official founding to the period in which the movement became fully established. Known as a serious advocate of non alignment, Pazhwak is counted among the non alignment movement's veterans. In the 1950s and 60s, when Pazhwak himself lived in faraway places abroad working in the United States and in Switzerland, some of his important works were published in Kabul. The key collection of stories, Afsanaha yi Mardum (‘'Stories of the People'’), appeared in 1957. Two poetry collections crafted in the neo classical style, Chand Shi‘r az Pazhwak (‘Selection of Pazhwak’s Poems’) and Gulha yi Andisha ('‘Thought Flowers’') were published some years later, in 1963 and in 1965 respectively. Many of Pazhwak's writings are in Dari and were first printed only two decades later as part of a new wave of publication. In the decade of relative democratization between 1963 and 1973, internal political changes took place in Kabul including the nomination for the first time of a non royal prime minister. The Constitution of 1964 revealed traits of a Western style parliamentary system, promising democratic freedoms including free elections, a free parliament, freedom of opinion and freedom to set up political parties. Those who took advantage of the very slowly developing democratization were leftist factions and groups. On the streets of Kabul, it came to violent clashes particularly between leftist students and a small group of Islamists who had their own student followers. The government tried to take tough action against both sides. Afghan government leaders at the time preferred to see Pazhwak assigned abroad because of his brilliance and were quite reluctant to see him in Kabul because of his political independence and alternative perspective on Afghan domestic politics. While Pazhwak thrived on the international scene, he could only watch the turbulent years of democratization from a distance in New York in 1960s. Some of the poems that he crafted at the time were in the new style (sabk i jadid) and dealt with social and hence critical themes. Pazhwak was eager to contribute to Afghanistan's future, but his principled stands and strong willed personality were not palatable for either for the Afghan officials or the powers behind the throne. Pazhwak was kept outside of Afghanistan most of the time and never given the opportunity to actively play a role in shaping internal political conditions. Pazhwak's liberal and progressive mindset, his advocacy for freedom of opinion, his support for active political participation of citizens, and his championing of human rights had fallen on fertile grounds particularly among intelligentsia. It became apparent that Pazhwak's views represented danger to the ruling establishment. While the new Afghan constitution was being prepared in 1963, Pazhwak (at the time serving as the president of the United Nations’ Human Rights Commission in Geneva) was asked by King Zahir Shahto return to Kabul to share his views regarding the constitution. Later on, however, Pazhwak learned with disappointment from an insider that his written thoughts submitted for consideration did not even reach the committee set up to discuss the articles of the new constitution. In 1973, when Daoud Khan came to power through a bloodless coup d'état, which had considerable support among the leftist and pro Moscow elements of the Afghan army, he relied on Pazhwak as a special envoy to promote Afghanistan's national security interests in major international forums. Once again, Pazhwak was denied a leadership role in domestic Afghan affairs during the republican era of 1973 to 1978. The new republican constitution ratified established a one party system despite Pazhwak's best hopes. Pazhwak was kept outside of the country, spending the 1970s far away from Afghanistan taking charge of the Afghan embassies in Bonn, Delhi and London.

On 27 April 1978, a bloody coup took place, carried out by pro Moscow military officers and members of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA). The coup undermined Afghanistan's sovereignty and independence, allowing Kremlin to exercise influence in Afghanistan directly. Upon learning the nature of the coup in Kabul, Pazhwak resigned his post as Afghanistan's ambassador to London and voluntarily returned home where he was put under house arrest. Ordered by the new communist power holders, Nur Muhammad Taraki and Hafizullah Amin's purging campaigns were launched, turning into waves of terror throughout the country. Numerous Afghans, who had no relationship with the DPPA, lost their lives. Towards the end of 1979, Amin, who had murdered Taraki, was deposed by the Soviets, installing Babrak Karmal as the new ruler. Pazhwak expressed his thoughts about the Soviet troop's invasion in a poem called The Red Army. For Pazhwak it was evident that profound resentment was spreading among a broad spectrum of the population, triggered by the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan's violent dictatorship and the occupation of Afghanistan by the Red Army. He witnessed with his own eyes the protest demonstrations of male and female high school students. Deeply moved by the violent death on 9 April 1980 of Naheed Sahed, who was a student in her final year of high school, Pazhwak later crafted a volume of poetry dedicated to "The martyr Nahid Sa‘id, her sisters, and all those Afghan women who have stood up against the Red Army, inside or outside of the homeland.". Pazhwak, who from the beginning had distanced himself from the communists, first joined the resistance secretly, through writing shab nama political pamphlets distributed at nights, and later in exile where he started an open resistance against the communist rulers and the Soviet army's occupation of both of which acted against the principles of nations’ rights. The long years of exile, which Pazhwak spent were repeatedly affected by health related setbacks. Faraway from his homeland, Pazhwak's thoughts and feelings were about the present conditions and the future state of affairs of in his eyes; his imprisoned country and its inhabitants. He processed his pain and grief through literary activity. Even in his resistance Pazhwak did not join any political leader, party, or ideology and knew well how to avoid being monopolized for propaganda purposes. He formulated his goal for his homeland in the following manner: "For me the goal of this sacred jihad is total independence; freedom; human rights; and the inviolability of Afghanistan from the ruling or the threat of being ruled by foreign aggressors; the removal of communism, the strengthening of Islam and social justice; and the establishment of Afghanistan’s self determination in line with the wishes of the country’s Muslim population." Pazhwak's farsighted concept for, which he presented to the United Nations, provided for bringing together all the relevant Afghan groups, factions, parties and figures, conspiring to make them walk along a common path and gather together at the table of negotiation. Against this idea stood the lack of unity among Afghans which was in part directed by outside forces and in part a result of already existing internal disunity. Foreign interference, in particular the dubious role of Pakistan in questions of Afghanistan, as well as the absence of representatives of the Afghan resistance movement during the Geneva Accords (1988) were criticized by Pazhwak as the decisive flaws in attempting to create lasting peace in Afghanistan.

The final years of exile which Pazhwak spent in were particularly painful and disappointing. Following the withdrawal of the last contingent of the once 100,000 men strong red army soldiers on 15 February 1989, the Afghan's struggle for freedom turned into a civil war which in turn required a heavy blood price. Pazhwak's long lasting illness turned out to be cancer. He died in the morning of 8 June 1995, in the city of Peshawar, only a few months after his wife's death. His body was taken back to his beloved homeland where he found eternal peace buried in his ancestral village of Baghbani, Surkhrod district of Nangrahar province.

He is the uncle of Niamatullah Pazhwak, an Afghan politician who served as Ministry of Education under the government of Daoud Khan. Abdul Rahman's granddaughter is Afghan poet, Parween Pazhwak.

Pazhwak's prose writing is equally diverse and can be divided into the following categories: first, factual writing (non fiction texts) and second, esthetic writing (or fictional texts). The factual non fiction works produced by Pazhwak include a small series of general introductory works about Afghanistan and the issue of "Pashtunistan" such as "Afghanistan: Ancient Aryana and "The Question of Pashtunistan." These booklets  were published by the Afghan Information Bureau, the media wing of the Afghan Embassy in London, 1950s. The texts are in English and their purpose is to serve Western readers as sources of information about the two mentioned themes. A research text written by Pazhwak about Pashtunwali (the ancient code of conduct prevalent among Pashtuns until today) and some journalistic writings date to the period of the late 1930s and 1940s. Finally, we need to mention Pazhwak's reflections on the political situation in Afghanistan under the Soviet occupation which is contained in the work Muzakirat i Janiv (‘Geneva Talks’) which appeared in Afghanistan at the end of the 1980s. Pazhwak was an outstanding writer of prose. Some of his prose narratives have been published, such as the stories included in the key volume of his work, Afsanaha yi Mardum (, 1958), while other examples of his prose writing are still unpublished. A collection of Pazhwak's two short stories "Wanderer" and "A Woman" were published in Kabul in 2006. The booklet titled "A Woman" also offers the English translation of these short stories. [17] Included in Pazhwak's body of fiction writing are some dramas but most of the texts belong to the genre of storytelling including short stories and novelettes. The drams, short stories (dastan i kuta) and novelettes (nawil) stem from Western literature but are nowadays an established part of modern Afghan prose writing (nasr i adabi). The beginnings of this genre of literature in can be traced back to the early twentieth century when important literary impulses came from the journalistic and literary efforts of Mahmud Tarzi (1865–1933). Tarzi's regular elaborations in his influential newspaper Seraj al Akhbar on Western literature and its various genres and movements were not only noticed by Afghan literati but also greatly influenced their work. In this manner, the new forms of prose writing gradually entered the literature of Pazhwak's turning away from traditional style of prose writing, for example, his limited use of the picturesque metaphorical prose of the East and his turning to increasingly more realistic style of writing are in tune with what Tarzi defined as the important criteria for modern prose writing. In some of the stories, Pazhwak attends to the protagonist's deep thoughts, placing the human being and his inner life at the center of the narrative. Pazhwak was one of the first Afghan literati to write drama, short stories and novelettes. In recognition of his standing and contribution, Sayed Haschmatullah Hossaini described Pazhwak as a "pioneer of Afghan short story writing," in his research on modern Dari literature in Afghanistan. [18]

Many of Pazhwak's prose writings drew on the rich repertoire of Afghan folklore, revealing Pazhwak's preference for this genre. The austere landscape of often serves as the main backdrop in Pazhwak's stories while Iranian and Indian regions also occasionally appear as secondary backdrops. This latter aspect makes sense given that historically the borders between these countries have been shifting and fluid. Pazhwak's prose writing is almost entirely made up of short pieces in which the plot, often triggered by an unusual incident, follows an increasingly steep line of development. It is typical of the stories that romantic features are quite often added to them. The stories’ repertoire of themes includes historical, folkloric, socially critical and sometimes psychological and philosophical matters. A series of motifs, for example the bravery of Afghans, love for the homeland, the pathos of the Pashtuns, or the love between two young people from different social backgrounds run through the stories. Most of Pazhwak's prose in Pashto language remains unpublished, including half a dozen short stories and dramas. Pazhwak also translated foreign literature into Dari. He translated, frequently from English poetry, factual texts and fiction some of which were published in Afghanistan while others remain unpublished. Pazhwak translated the Psalms of King David (from Urdu) and the works of Khalil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Lord Byron, John Keats, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Reynold A. Nicholson, William Pitt Root and Jacques Prévert (from French). Additionally, Pazhwak  translated selected poems and fragments from the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and Victor Hugo. Among the translations that were published were Pishwa (‘The Prophet’) by Khalil Gibran and Baghban (‘The Gardener’) by the Indian author and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, Rabindranath Tagore.