Hazara Nation

By the BBC's Peter Greste in Kabul

The market in the Karti-si district in west Kabul is a vibrant place, filled with the usual collection of spice traders, fruit and vegetable merchants, butchers and bakers.

But this area also has a particular interest in the negotiations due to take place in Germany next week.

It's the home of the city's Hazara community, an ethnic group, the legend says, which is directly descended from Genghis Khan's Mongol army.

They are a fiercely proud people but they've also been the most oppressed minority in the country.
Commuters cycle home on their pushbikes through an extraordinary vision of hell around the fringes of the Hazara district.

This is an old frontline area that separated the Hazaras down here in the suburbs from the government troops up in the hills.

Every single building is a wreck.

There is nothing but a pile of crumbling mud-brick walls with a few girders poking through here and there.

These are the skeletal remains of a community, yet the forces that created this are now standing side by side in the Northern Alliance.

Shaky coalition

The only reason they came together in the first place was to fight the common enemy - the Taleban. Now that they have all but gone, there is a genuine fear that the Alliance may not last.

Through all the diplomatic crowing about recent political breakthroughs and talks in Germany, the locals are taking a much more pragmatic line. Amid the clacking of the prayer beads, a group of ageing local Hazara leaders convenes in a community house to weigh the prospects for their people.

They are here to meet a delegate from the leadership of their own Hezb-e-Wahdat faction, a Mr Saburi.

Wahdat is supposed to be an integral part of the Northern Alliance.

But the only troops patrolling the neighbourhood are those belonging to Jamiat-i-Islami, the main group within the Alliance.

They are the same ones who fought the Hazaras from the hills several years ago.

For Mr Saburi that's unacceptable:
"Jamiat troops are controlling territory all over Kabul and we demand that our troops share the patrolling duties. This government is only a few days old but already they are making it difficult. It should be our privilege to take part in this".

There are real fears amongst the Hazara community that in next week's conference their voices may simply not be heard.

So they have organised their own delegation.

"We will be there as part of the Northern Alliance but we will have our own people to make sure things are okay. We won't need the umbrella of the Northern Alliance and they must include us as well", says Mr Saburi.

The story is similar elsewhere in the Northern Alliance.

Lack of confidence

Armed factions are happy to be a part of the winning side but distrustful of its ability to work as a political force.

Even on the streets confidence is shaky, and many people believe that more fighting is still possible - "there's a 60% chance maybe", one man told me.

Across the Hazara traders a traditional song can be heard - it is an old familiar tune to most of the people here.

It speaks of the Hazara's plight and it prays to God for deliverance for Afghanistan's most troubled people.

It is a song they fear they may be playing for a good while longer. Read the full story

Sarah Stephen
Green Left Weekly

Malyar and Sayar Dehsabzi are migration agents and interpreters, a lucrative business which attracts many money-hungry carpet-baggers who want to make an easy buck out of people's desperation and their ignorance of the law.

In a article in the September 25 Australian Financial Review, Julie Macken revealed some damning information about these Afghan-Australian brothers, who are from Afghanistan's Pashtun majority. Members of Australia's Afghan community told Macken that in New Delhi in the mid-1980s the brothers worked for Afghan warlord and Osama bin Laden supporter Ghulbuddin Hekmatyar. The AFR was told of the brothers' expressed hostility to Hazaras.Despite his background, Malyar Dehsabzi was employed by the immigration department as an interpreter at Australia's refugee detention centre on Nauru, handling appeals for asylum by Afghan Hazaras. An International Organisation for Migration officer who worked on Nauru at the time told the AFR: “Interpreters were assigned 15 or so cases at a time. Malyar would regularly declare 10 out of his 15 to be Pakistani. Other interpreters found either none or one at most.”

Macken pointed out: “The consequences of a declaration of ethnicity could prove fatal to an asylum seeker's chances of finding protection in Australia, because these remarks would become part of the application process.”

The Dehsabzi brothers did far more than just interpret. In the second half of 2002, with the government's launch of its plan to voluntarily repatriate Afghan asylum seekers with the lure of $2000, “Malyar began sending emails from Afghanistan to various people on Nauru telling them how peaceful and safe the country was”.

Green Left Weekly spoke to Hazara refugee Riz Wakil, who had Malyar as his interpreter when he was detained in Curtin detention centre in 1999. “Malyar was very helpful for me, but later on he contacted one of my friends and told him: `Any Afghan from Afghanistan is okay, but any who have lived in Pakistan, I would never help them'.”

In Wakil's view, when the government cranked up its propaganda that refugees were not genuine or were not from Afghanistan, the Dehsabzi brothers started trying to convince the government that many refugees weren't from Afghanistan.

“They did their best to try to create hurdles and make it as hard as possible for Hazaras to get refugee status”, said Wakil. “Now they see that we're getting visas, that they can't stop it, they're trying to cash in on it.”

Starting in February this year, when the government began reviewing temporary protection visas, Wakil thinks the Dehsabzi brothers realised it was a good time to make money. They began offering their services to the Hazara community again, charging $3500 to help submit a new application. Wakil recalled that some of his friends came to him and said they had handed over $1000 or $2000, only to realise that “this guy doesn't know anything”.

The Dehsabzi brothers rate as perhaps the most outrageous example of making money out of the suffering of migrants and refugees, but they are not alone. Wakil recounted an example of a Hazara translator who charges asylum seekers $200-$350 for each typed page. Read the full story

BBC
By Kate Clark in Kabul

The Taleban authorities in Afghanistan have banned journalists from going to Yakawlang in the centre of the country.

The United Nations and human rights groups say Taleban soldiers massacred civilians there earlier this month.
The Taleban had previously said journalists could visit the site.
But now, their supreme leader, Mullah Omar, has accused reporters of bias and said they will not be allowed to go.
Under Taleban regulations, journalists have to get permission to travel outside Kabul.

We had asked to go to Yakawlang to check reports that Taleban soldiers had killed local men, including teenagers and the elderly, in revenge for Taleban losses suffered during fighting with the opposition.
'Hostile' journalists

In an interview with the BBC, the Taleban supreme leader, Mullah Omar, accused journalists and human rights groups of concentrating on allegations that the Taleban had carried out massacres while ignoring the mass killing of Taleban prisoners of war by the opposition almost four years ago.He asked why reporters did not go to Kandahar where the Taleban dead were reburied, instead of going to Yakawlang for what he called gossip and corruption.

Mullah Omar said journalists were biased and hostile and there was no evidence of a civilian massacre.

But to the rest of the world, the travel ban will only make it seem that the Taleban have secrets in Yakawlang they want to try to keep hidden.

'Massacre' of Taleban

The 1997 mass killing of Taleban prisoners of war in Mazar-e-Sharif and Dashti Laili referred to by Mullah Omar was actually one of the most widely reported massacres.

Journalists were able to see the graves after General Malik's rival, General Dostum, took over the area.

He allowed access to the site in order to discredit his predecessor.

The Taleban were accused of killing thousands of civilians in revenge when they eventually captured Mazur a year later.

Alleged civilian killings

Since then, there have been several similar allegations that Taleban forces have killed unarmed civilians in Bamiyan, Samangan and now Yakawlang.

Each time after the opposition captured territory from the Taleban and then lost it.

These areas have remained under Taleban control, making independent investigation much more difficult.

A few days ago, the opposition made new allegations against the Taleban.

They said they had uncovered fresh mass graves in the Khojah Ghar district of Takhar province in north-eastern Afghanistan.

They said they had found about 70 bodies, including those of women and children.
Read the full story

1- The Hazara make up about 20% of the population of Afghanistan. Their Asian (Mongolian) features immediately distinguish them from other peoples of Afghanistan. The Hazara are visually, linguistically and religiously different from all the other peoples around them. Because of these differences, they have long been despised and persecuted by majority groups. Persecution of the Hazara continues today.

2- The Hazara's identity as a people is largely defined by their Islamic faith. Most Hazara believe that to be Hazara is to be Muslim—they cannot imagine any other alternative. Moreover, they are surrounded by Muslim peoples in every direction. Geographically, they are almost in the very center of the Muslim world. While 85% of all Muslims, and virtually all the other major people groups of Afghanistan, are Sunni, the Hazaras are predominantly Shia. As Shia Muslims, they are inspired by their historical leader Hussein, who was martyred. Many Hazara identify with Hussein in their suffering and persecution. The rift between Sunni and Shia dates back to the 8th Century. Today there is still serious tension between Sunni and Shia Muslims, occasionally erupting in violence.

3- The Hazara are of predominantly Mongolian ethnic stock. They look like Mongolians and East Asians, but they share a cultural heritage with many of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia. Some scholars speculate that the Hazara are descendants of the warriors that flooded into Central Asia under the command of the infamous and brilliant leader, Ghengis Khan.
Download Politics and Modren History of Hazara

4- Most Hazara speak Hazaragi, a variant of the more widely used trade langauge, Dari.
5-The Hazara are from the mountains of central Afghanistan. These mountains are among the most rugged, least traveled mountains in the world. Consequently, the Hazara have been geographically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. As a result of this isolation, they remain a predominantly tribal people, relating to one another through family and clan groupsThere are approximately 2.8 million Hazaras in Afghanistan (CIA World Factbook 2007). They were once the largest Afghan ethnic group constituting nearly 67% of the total population of the state before the 19th century. More than half were massacred in 1893 when their autonomy was lost as a result of political action. Today they constitute approximately 9% of the Afghan population. The origin of Hazara are much debated, the word Hazara means "thousand" in Persian but given the Hazaras features, current theory supports their decent from Mongol soldiers left behind by Genghis Kahn in the 13th century.

The majority of Hazaras live in Hazarajat (or Hazarestan), land of the Hazara, which is situated in the rugged central mountainous core of Afghanistan with an area of approximately 50,000 sq. km, with others living in the Badakhshan mountains. In the aftermath of Kabul's campaign against them in the late 19th century, many Hazaras settled in western Turkestan, in JauzJan and Badghis provinces. Ismaili Hazaras, a smaller religiously differentiated group of Hazaras live in the Hindu Kush mountains. The most recent two decades of war have driven many Hazaras away from their traditional heartland to live on the fringes of the state in close proximity to Iran and Pakistan. There is also a large cross-border community of Hazaras who make up an influential ethnic group in the Pakistani border city of Quetta.

Language and sect

The Hazaras speak a dialect of Dari (Persian Dialect) called Hazaragi and the vast majority of them follow the Shi'a sect (twelver Imami). A significant number are also followers of the Ismaili sect while a small number are Sunni Muslim. Within Afghani culture the Hazaras are famous for their music and poetry and the proverbs from which their poetry stems. The poetry and music are mainly folkloric having been passed down orally through the generations. In 1880 the Hazara community constituted of landed nobility, peasants and artisan. The social class was that of the ruling and the ruled classes, which itself was based on ownership of the means of production (animals, land and water).

The gradual descent of the standing of the Hazaras has seen them plunge to the very depths of the social hierarchy in modern Afghanistan. Their engagement mainly in providing the unskilled labour required by society has resulted in further stigmatization, with a good indicator of this being the low rate of inter-ethnic marriages with the Hazara. Perhaps as a consequence of this, the Hazaras have been relatively isolated from the influence of the other ethnic cultures of Afghanistan, and their identity has remained relatively static.

The Hazaras are reported to have nuclear families with the husband considered the head of the family except in the case of husband's death, when the woman becomes the head. In the latter case the older wife in polygamous marriages succeeds the deceased husband until the eldest sun reaches maturity. At national level Hazaras tend to be more progressive concerning women's rights to education and public activities. Educated Hazara women, in particular ones who returned from exile in Iran are as active as men in civic and political arenas. Hazara families are eager to educate their daughters. U.N. officials in Bamian, 20 miles to the east, said that since the collapse of Taliban rule in late 2001, aid agencies have scrambled to build schools and have succeeded in attracting qualified female teachers to meet the demand.

Historical context

The Hazaras are believed to have settled in Afghanistan at least as far back as the thirteenth century. The Shi'a Hazaras are historically the most repressed ethnic minority group in the state, and have seen little improvement in their situation despite the changed being rung in modern Afghanistan. While President Karzai did appoint six Hazaras to his cabinet, there appears to be no less discrimination against the majority of the Hazara population of Afghanistan. Forced to migrate to Kabul in the second half of the 20th century due to persecution, their low socio-economic status has created a class as well as ethnic division between them and the rest of urban Afghan society.

Economic pressures and social and political repression have resulted in Hazaras combining with other Shi'a minority groups during the 1960s and 1970s and playing a prominent role in the prolonged civil war for the past two decades. During the resistance in the mid-1980s Hazaras maintained their own resistance group, some of which had ties with Iran.

As an ethnic group, the Hazaras have always lived on the edge of economic survival in Afghanistan. The persecution of the Hazara was not instigated by the Taliban although more documented, but has existed for centuries where the Hazaras were driven out of their lands, sold as slaves and had a lack of access to services available to majority of the population. One of the main factors in Hazaras' continued persecution has their religious belief, as well as their having separate economic and political roots.

Historic discrimination

Historically, the minority Shi'a have faced long-term persecution from the majority Sunni population. From the 1880s onwards, and especially during the reign of Amir Abdul Rahman (1880-1901), they suffered severe political, social and economic repression, as Jihad was declared by Sunnis on all Shi'as of Afghanistan. As the Pashtun Rahman started to extend his influence from Kabul by force to other parts of the country, the Hazaras were the first ethnic group to revolt against his expansionism. Pashtun tribes were sent to the central highlands to crush the revolt. Thousands of Hazara men were killed, their women and children taken as slaves, and their land occupied. To strengthen the forces against the Hazara rebellion that followed, the Rahman played on Sunni religious sensibilities and even attracted Tajiks and Uzbeks (both Sunnis) to help the Pashtuns against the Shi'a Hazaras. Those who survived the initial period of the raids managed to escape to the north while a significant number fled to then British India. Apart from Pashtuns, Uzbeks are also thought to have conducted slave raids on the Hazaras in Bamian and elsewhere.

Abdul Rahman's suppression of Hazara ranged from issuing unwarranted taxes and to assaults on Hazara women, massacres, looting and pillaging of homes, enslavement of Hazara children, women and men and replacement of Shi'a mullas with their Sunni religious counterparts. Hazarajat was occupied by Rahman in 1893 and it is estimated that 60% of the Hazara Population was wiped out by him,

The persecution of Hazaras continued throughout the 19th century and during the Monarchy (1929 onwards) when during the process of "Pashunization" Hazaras were made to conceal their identities to obtain state identification. It is suggested that until the 1970s some Sunni religious teachers preached that killing of Hazaras was a key to paradise.

Hizb-e Wahdat

Economically Hazarajat was kept undeveloped with no roads, schools or clinics. The Hazaras have voiced their dissent to the policies of overt discrimination against them since the 1970s though a united political party of the Hazara opposition movement Hizb-e Wahdat (Party of Unity) was only established in 1988. In 1992 after the Mujahideen's succession to power, Burhanuddin Rabbani launched an offensive on Hizb-e Wahdat killing many. Amnesty International subsequently reported the killing of unarmed civilians and raping of Hazara women. In February 1993 hundreds of Hazara residents in the Afshar district of West Kabul were massacred by government forces under direction of Rabbani and his chief commander Ahmad Shah Massoud. (son-in-law of The former President Rabbani )

Between 1992-1995 Abdul Ali Mazari became the first political leader to speak out at international level for, and on behalf of Hazaras, putting their case to the UN and the international community. He unified the Hazara people by bringing together the many sections, forces and classes within Hazara and Shi'a society. Mazari signed an agreement with the Taliban leadership in 1993 but was brutally murdered by them in 1995. In the same year Hizb-e Wahdat joined the new anti-Taliban Shura-ye Ali-ye Difa under the leadership of Abdul Rahid Dostom. Under this guardianship schools (including a new girls school) were reopened in 1996, and the University of Bamian was established.

Current issues
Hazaras are one of the national ethnic minorities recognized in the new Afghan constitution and have been given full right to Afghan citizenship. Their main political party, Hizb-e Wahdat gained only one seat in the cabinet. Hazaras are concerned about the rising power of the warlords, who they feel pose a direct threat to their community. Also, given the suppression suffered by Hazaras under the Mujaheedin, the power of Northern Alliance (Mujaheedin leadership of 10 years ago) in the new leadership is a cause for worry. Read the full story