afghanistanwho were housed in temporary camps at Bagram, but as more and more
refugees flooded across the border the government, unable to provide for
thousands of starving and hungry migrants, closed the frontier and urged
them to return home. Thousands ended up stranded in no-man’s-land
until hunger, thirst, sickness and the rapacity of local tribes forced all but
a handful of them to return home penniless. The decision by the Amir to
close the frontier was a mortal blow not only to the Khilafat Movement,
but to ’Aman Allah Khan’s pan-Islamic credentials, both in India and in
the Muslim world.
The Basmachi Movement and Afghan-Soviet relationsWhile the government was overwhelmed by the unexpected migration
crisis in the southeast of the country, the Amir had to face the conse-
quences of the failure of negotiations with Britain. Once back in Kabul,
Tarzi began to discuss a treaty with Russia, encouraged by a personal
letter to the Amir from Lenin in which he held out the prospect of ‘a joint
struggle against the most rapacious imperialistic government on earth –
Great Britain’. 25 In September 1920 the Amir agreed to a draft treaty drawn
up by Suritz, which pledged substantial financial, military and technical aid
to Afghanistan in return for the opening of Soviet consulates in Ghazni,
Kandahar and other Afghan cities. Suritz’s draft treaty, however, had to be
approved by Moscow and, since he had made far more concessions than his
terms of reference allowed, the authorities in Moscow took several months
deciding whether the benefits of the Soviet-Afghan Treaty outweighed
the substantial financial and military commitments. While the Kremlin
debated the pros and cons of this treaty, Afghan relations with Russia came
under severe strain when the Amir decided to support a Muslim nationalist
uprising in Russian Turkistan.
The rebellion, which the Russians disparagingly referred to as the
Basmachi Movement (basmachi in Russian means ‘brigand’ or ‘robber’),
had its roots in Imperial Russia’s conquest of the Muslim-ruled Khanates
of Central Asia in the latter half of the nineteenth century. 26 The natural
resentment created by living under foreign, non-Muslim occupation was
exacerbated by the confiscation of vast tracts of irrigated land, which were
apportioned to Russian colonists from the north. The government then
shifted agricultural production from wheat, the main subsistence crop of the
region, to cotton. While this provided a substantial hard-currency revenue
for Moscow, it destroyed the economic self-sufficiency of indigenous farm-
ers and created a man-made famine. Discontent increased in 1916 after the