Hazara Nation

Haji Muhammad Mohaqiq, a Hazara MP, is on hunger strike. By all accounts, eight days into it, he is weakening.
Mohaqiq is protesting the recent violent incursion of Kuchi nomads into Hazara areas in the Behsud district of Wardak province. Reportedly, upwards of four Hazara were killed during the incursion. This is an old conflict—the Economist wrote of it last year, but it has roots going back at least into the Taliban’s rule. Many Hazara claim the Kuchi are “Taliban,” or at least Taliban-loving, because during the 90s they worked with the Taliban, who granted them access to Hazara (and Tajik) land. Naturally the Hazara are angry over this imbalance.

Here’s the rub. As a predominantly Pashtun force, the Taliban were rather notorious for their appalling treatment of all other minorities within Afghanistan, including (or perhaps especially) the Hazara. In fact, the imposed famine on the Hazarajat was particularly brutal and generally unreported in the media in the West.

Wardak is about half Pashtun, with most of the rest (somewhere around 40%, according to unreliable official statistics) Hazara. This is an area where corruption is so bad many Pashtun villagers eagerly open their arms to Taliban entreaties, whose promises to end corruption and establish justice seem to meet eager ears in many areas, and whose courts have willing participants.

This places the Hazara in a bit of a quandry. While the Taliban claim not to recognize ethnicity, they clearly hate the Hazara as Shiite apostates. Meanwhile, the Kuchi, who are Sunni, might be able to get some Taliban support in their quest to find grazing land. But both groups—Hazara and Kuchi—can quite correctly claim to have been marginalized for centuries, and claim to have been ignored in Afghanistan’s post-Taliban politics. This last complaint is a bit of a stretch: the 3 million Kuchi have a guaranteed 10 seats in Parliament, a courtesy not given the Uzbeks or Balochi. The Hazara have one of the country’s two co-vice presidencies in the man of Karim Khalili. (Neither of these facts guarantee any sort of co-equal voice in the government.)

Khalili claimed in a recent press conference that President Karzai ordered an evacuation of the Kuchi from Behsud district. Meanwhile, Hazara representatives claim several thousand have fled the violence.

The danger is that the Kuchi will reach out to the Taliban for support. While there is scant evidence this has actually happened, given the general negligence of Hazara areas—they tend to be quiet, so the troops with all those CERP funds rarely give them focus—the only way for the Hazara to draw attention to their conflict to cry “Taliban,” and maybe let slip the dogs of war. There is the possibility of armed conflict between the two groups beyond the limited skirmishes so far.

But Mohaqiq’s hunger strike is peaceful. And so far the Hazara community seems to be holding its breath to see what kind of reaction they can get from Kabul and NATO (there is a protest scheduled in Kabul for Tuesday, July 22). They shouldn’t hold it too long: the Turks, who run the Wardak PRT, pretty much never leave their compound. Similarly, a 2007 commission Hamid Karzai set up to discover a solution to the Hazara-Kuchi conflict has yet to reveal anything about its proceedings.

The unfortunate angle to this conflict is that not only is it in a generally ignored area just to the west of Kabul, it also has nothing to do with the Coalition/Taliban conflict raging further south and east. It is, in brief, a fairly standard nomad/settler conflict, with the consequent disputes over land used both for agriculture and grazing. These types of conflicts become especially acute during times of drought or shortage, and the current squeeze over food prices, and a looming drought in the south, have probably exacerbated the conflict.

Despite the constant cries of Taliban, however, very few seem to take the Hazara complaint seriously. And here is where it could backfire: just like crying wolf, it might fall on deaf ears next time there is a real, and serious, Taliban incursion in Wardak beyond setting up a few shadow institutions. Similarly, if the Hazara succeed in painting the Kuchi as Taliban sympathizers, this might push them into seeking support from the Taliabn to gain advantage in their struggle.

In other words, Wardak right now is a tinderbox… one that is still almost entirely ignored by the West. They would do well to pay attention to the trouble brewing at Kabuls’ gates.