Hazara Nation

The first job of the day is from a man who needs 20 bags of plaster moved to a work site. Pahlawan has wandered off, so Baba and Assadullah load the bags, 77 pounds each. Both men grasp the cart's bar, pulling roughly 1,500 pounds as cars and buses honk and spit fumes. Seven minutes and several hundred yards later, they turn into the mud-walled warrens of Kabul's backstreets. Breathing heavily, sweating profusely, they reach the site. They'll have to carry the bags the last 30 feet. Baba throws a bag over his shoulder and walks stooped over, head down, holding the bag with one hand, white powder spilling on his clothes. Another ten minutes and they're done. Baba and Assadullah get $1.20, to split."You see our situation, at my age," says Baba, turning his head so I see his good eye. He pulls out a snuff tin, puts a handful in his mouth before heading back to see if another job comes.

Some observers believe the discrimination Hazaras face in Kabul could be fueling a long-elusive sense of unity—and a desire for democracy. "I think there is a greater degree of Hazara nationalism in Kabul as compared with rural Hazarajat because people are experiencing this disparity between Hazara and non-Hazara in their day-to-day lives," says Ibrahimi. The director of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, Sima Samar, agrees: "The Hazaras are more adaptable to democracy, because they feel the pain more than the others. They feel the discrimination. They really want equality and social justice."

Were the Buddhas still standing last May, they would have gazed down on a young man walking Bamian's main street, a bumpy unpaved tract with shops on both sides selling cooking oil, medicines, and building materials. A large billboard depicting Mazari, the martyred Hazara leader, stands on a hillside.

Musa Shafaq is back in the Hazara heartland. He did not get the job at Kabul University he wanted. "If I am going to live in Afghanistan, it should be in Kabul," he says. His stellar academic record should have made that possible. "He was one of the brightest students. He should have been recruited," says Issa Rezai, an adviser at the Ministry of Higher Education. But prejudice against Hazaras remains high at the university. Fundamentalist Pashtun professors still predominate, including some hard-core fundamentalists who led factions accused of atrocities against Hazara civilians. Sayed Askar Mousavi, author of The Hazaras of Afghanistan, says such discrimination underscores how little has fundamentally changed. In Bamian, he says, "there are two changes. There were two Buddhas, and now there are none."
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