AMANULLAH SAYS FAREWELL

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 562, 15 January 1929, Page 8

AMANULLAH SAYS FAREWELL

DENIED spectacular -triumph in an enterprise, the next best fate for a reformer is to be an interesting failure. Perhaps this is the thought that will bring a little ease to the bewildered mind of Amanullah, lately king of Afghanistan, who has been forced to abdicate, leaving the throne to his brother, Inayatullah Khan. Future developments will he watched by Amanullah at a distance; for he has fled from Kabul to Kandahar by airplane, and far from the murderous attentions of the Shinwari tribesmen who wrought his downfall, he will be brooding sadly on the fate of kings. Amanullah has been ruined by an impetuous desire to change the whole character of his subjects. There may have been some wisdom in the Western reforms which he sought to introcluce into his country; hut he ignored the fact that customs that have been handed down with piety from generation to generation cannot be blotted from memory in a few months. A journey to Europe last year fired Amanullah with a passionate dream of reform, and probably the courtesies he met with on the tour filled him with magnified notions of his royal importance. " He may have noted that some European countries had found dictatorship an effective method of revitalising an almost atrophied national spirit, and it may have been this, too, that inspired him to his fateful reforms. Had he been as good a judge of the temper of his subjects as he was of reforms, he would not be in his present melancholy situation. Amanullah has attempted radical reform in too short a time. It is not more than five months since he substituted a gallant standard for the old black flag of Afghanistan. Then he forced The members of the National Assembly to remove their patriarchal beards and climb into trousers. All ranks and titles were abolished, and the hitherto hereditary Legislature was made elective. Worse still, every State employee was obliged to pay one month’s salary each year into a special fund to be at the disposal of the king for any special purpose he might have in mind. Last, and most terrible of all to the Afghans, he instructed the Assembly to pass a Bill raising the marriageable age of females to 18. But the Assembly, for once, refused to be bulldozed. Amanullah fell too violently under the sway of Western ideas and the priests, whose scheming has inspired the Shinwari, have confounded him and liis reforms. He has been a colourful failure, and may well congratulate himself on not having had to share the violent fate of his assassinated father.