Abdul Rahman Pazhwak (; 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.
Early life 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.
Political career 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 Nations' 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.