Hazaras Hustle to Head of Class in Afghanistan

Image via Wikipedia

KABUL, Afghanistan — For much of this country’s history, the Hazara were typically servants, cleaners, porters and little else, a largely Shiite minority sidelined for generations, and in some instances massacred, by Pashtun rulers.

But increasingly they are people like Mustafa, a teenager who has traveled a rough road but whose future now looks as bright as any in this war-ravaged country. His course reflects the collective effort of the Hazara, who make up 10 to 15 percent of the population, to remake their circumstances so swiftly that by some measures they are beginning to overtake other groups.

Like many Hazaras of his generation, Mustafa, now 16, fled Afghanistan with his family in the mid-1990s. They settled in Quetta, Pakistan, living with other Hazara refugees outside the Taliban’s reach and getting a taste of opportunities long out of their grasp.

After the 2001 American invasion, his family returned, not to their home in impoverished Daykondi Province, but to Kabul, where his uneducated parents thought Mustafa and his siblings would get better schooling. “There was no opportunity for studying in Daykondi,” he said.

Mustafa is now a top student at Marefat High School in Dasht-i-Barchi, a vast, poor Shiite enclave in western Kabul of potholed dirt streets, unheated homes and tiny shops. Nearly every one of his graduating classmates will go on to college. Mustafa, an 11th grader who favors physics and mathematics, wants to study nuclear physics at a Western university.

“The Pashtun had the opportunities in the past, but now the Hazaras have these opportunities,” said Mustafa, whose school director asked that his last name not be published. “We can take our rights just by education.”

The Marefat school is a refuge for 2,500 Hazaras, many from families like Mustafa’s who fled their homeland in central Afghanistan for Pakistan and Iran in the 1990s and returned after the fall of the Taliban, which had massacred thousands of Hazaras, to make their lives in Kabul.

Since the 2001 invasion, an influx of Hazaras has changed the composition of the capital. More than a million Hazaras now live here, making up more than a quarter of the city’s population.

With a new generation of Hazaras attending school in relative security and motivated by their parents’ dispossession, their success could alter the country’s balance of ethnic power.

Image by Benjamin...B via Flickr

“The Hazara always wanted an open atmosphere to breathe, and now we have that,” said Mohammed Sarwar Jawadi, a Hazara member of Parliament from Bamian Province.

If there is a recent parallel it is the Kurds of northern Iraq. Once dispossessed and abused, they created a thriving new society after the imposition of no-fly zones in the 1990s and the ouster of Saddam Hussein almost seven years ago.

The Hazara resurgence is not so geographically concentrated. The principal Hazara provinces, while relatively safe, remain impoverished and, their leaders complain, are bypassed by the foreign aid sent to Pashtun areas as a carrot to lure people from the insurgency.

Instead, it is a revival built largely on education, an asset Hazaras could carry with them during their years as refugees.

“With education you can take everything you want,” says Qasim, one of Mustafa’s classmates, a 15-year-old Hazara who moved to Kabul, the Afghan capital, from the northern city of Kunduz five years ago because his parents wanted better-educated children.

The old Afghan rulers “wanted to exploit Hazara people, and they didn’t want us to become leaders in this country or to improve,” he said. But that will change. “By studying we can dictate our future.”

The Hazara gains have already been rapid. Two Hazara-dominated provinces, Bamian and Daykondi, have the highest passing rates on admissions exams for the country’s top rung of universities, according to officials from the Ministry of Higher Education. In the high school graduating class of 2008, three-fourths of students in Daykondi who took the test passed, and two-thirds in Bamian, compared with the national rate of 22 percent.

In a country that has one of the world’s lowest female literacy rates — just one in seven women over age 15 can read and write — the progress of Hazara women is even more stark, especially compared with Pashtun provinces.

Pashtuns, who are mostly Sunni, are the country’s largest ethnic group. While the Taliban insurgency rages in Pashtun regions, and many schools are attacked or forced to close, the enrollment of girls in Bamian schools rose by nearly one-third the past two years, to 46,500, as total school enrollment there grew 22 percent.

Total enrollment in Daykondi rose almost 40 percent to 156,000 over the past two years, and girls now make up 43 percent of students, said Mohammad Ali Wasiq, the Daykondi Province education director. More girls passed the entrance exam for the country’s top-rung universities from Bamian and Daykondi in 2008 than from 10 mainly Pashtun provinces combined.

The Hazaras’ emphasis on educating girls as assiduously as boys, along with a stronger belief in gender equity than is common here, belies the perception of Afghan Shiites left by the passage last spring of a law for Shiites that condones marital rape. Its passage was seen as an effort by President Hamid Karzai to win support from Shiite clerics before elections.

But many Hazara men opposed the law, including officials at the school. A powerful Shiite ayatollah in Kabul condemned the school for its opposition, leading to violent, rock-throwing demonstrations, but only 22 of Marefat’s students dropped out as a result of the pressure, administrators say.

College-educated Hazaras, including women clad in white head scarves, are a growing presence in Western offices in Kabul. And Hazaras have flooded the security forces, and now are a disproportionate fraction of soldiers, while Pashtun representation continues to lag.

Pashtun leaders worry about how their own students are faring even as Hazaras excel, and some even fret whether rising Hazara influence could lead to the largely Shiite Iran having greater sway within Afghanistan.

“The government should work hard to make the opportunity for other places in the country to also go forward,” said Khalid Pashtoon, a Parliament member from Kandahar. He said he had no problem with Hazara gains in education, but added, “The only fear I have is if countries like Iran use it politically in their favor.”

Continued Hazara gains, of course, depend on the Taliban never returning to official power. Aziz Royesh, director of the Marefat school, says he worries how groups that have long held power in Afghanistan will adapt as Hazaras fill more places within the government, military and other influential professions.

“It will be very difficult for them to see that a new generation is coming,” said Mr. Royesh, 40, who fought the Soviet occupiers and never made it past the fifth grade. “Now they cannot use the force of government to prevent specific people from getting their civil rights and their human rights.”

Related articles by Zemanta

• A Hazara Success Story (mydd.com)
• The law's the problem in Afghanistan | Carol Mann (guardian.co.uk)

Afghan Minority Savors Its Pivotal Role in Runoff - WSJ.com

The Hazaras, After Centuries of Discrimination and Religious Persecution, May Be Decisive Bloc in Determining Next President

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

KABUL -- Afghanistan's Hazara minority is enjoying a historic turnabout after centuries of oppression: It has become the kingmaker in the country's Nov. 7 presidential runoff.

The maverick Hazara candidate, Ramazan Bashardost, garnered 10.5% of the votes in August's first round, placing third after President Hamid Karzai and former Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah. The runoff between Mr. Karzai and Dr. Abdullah that will decide the next president now hinges, to a great extent, on Bashardost's largely Hazara supporters. Mr. Bashardost has endorsed neither contender.

"The Hazara vote is crucial: Whoever they support will become the winner," says Ali Akbar Kazemi, head of Eqtedar-e-Melli, a predominantly Hazara party backing Dr. Abdullah.

In the World of the Hazara

View Slideshow

Adam Ferguson/VII Mentor Program for The Wall Street Journal

A Hazara woman and her child left Kabul's Jafaria Mosque Friday.

• More photos and interactive graphics

While the Hazaras account for only one-tenth of Afghanistan's population, their voting power is much greater because central Afghanistan's Hazara heartland is almost untouched by the Taliban insurgency that kept voters at home in many other parts of the country. In August, the Hazaras accounted for an estimated one-quarter of ballots cast.

Espousing the Shiite sect of Islam in a predominantly Sunni country, the Hazaras -- who appear strikingly different from other Afghans because of their Mongol features -- have long been subjected to discrimination and worse. Thousands of Hazaras were massacred by Afghan kings in the late 19th century. In the late 1990s, the Taliban -- who consider the Shiites to be heretics -- carried out another round of slaughter.

"The Hazaras are the most deprived people in the whole country," Dr. Abdullah said in an interview, pledging to develop the impoverished Hazara districts if he wins the planned runoff.

(Earlier this week, Dr. Abdullah threatened to boycott the Nov. 7 vote unless Mr. Karzai dismissed election officials who Dr. Abdullah says were involved in fraud in the first round. Mr. Karzai declined to do so. Dr. Abdullah is expected to clarify his intentions over the weekend.)

Recent interviews with dozens of Hazaras of different ages and from all walks of life indicate that winning the Hazaras' support will be a challenge for Dr. Abdullah. Many of those who voted for Mr. Bashardost in the first round say they will either back Mr. Karzai in the runoff or stay home. Such behavior is likely to translate into a victory for Mr. Karzai -- who gained a significant part of the Hazara vote in the first round.

Mr. Karzai, a member of Afghanistan's biggest ethnic community, the Pashtuns, has long courted the Hazaras. He appointed a Hazara as one of his two vice presidents and named Hazaras to key government jobs. He also fulfilled a series of Hazara demands, giving official state recognition to Shiite Islamic jurisprudence and carving out a separate Hazara-majority province, Daykundi, from the Pashtun-dominated Uruzgan. Hazara leaders expect Mr. Karzai to create additional Hazara-majority provinces from parts of the provinces of Ghazni and Wardak, which adjoin the Hazara heartland.

"The vast majority of the Hazaras will vote for Karzai in the runoff. I wouldn't call his presidency a golden age, but he has certainly done a lot of good things for the Hazaras," says parliamentarian Mohammed Mohaqeq, a Hazara and a former warlord who placed third in the 2004 presidential elections, with 11.4% of the vote. Mr. Mohaqeq endorsed Mr. Karzai in the current race, saying "our community's leaders have told their people to vote for Karzai, and the people will follow their leaders."

After the fall of the Soviet-installed regime in 1992, Mr. Mohaqeq's Hazara militia vied for control of Kabul with the mainly ethnic Tajik forces of Ahmad Shah Masood, reducing much of the city to rubble. Dr. Abdullah was Mr. Masood's key aide at the time -- a fact still remembered in Kabul's Hazara neighborhoods, where ruins of once-stately buildings provide a daily reminder of the ethnic clashes.

"We had a really hard time during the civil war. Our homes were shelled every day and walking even 100 meters was impossible," says Amin Mohammed, a 60-year-old Hazara baker in Kabul's Chendawal neighborhood who voted for Mr. Bashardost in the first round and plans to vote for Mr. Karzai in the runoff.

In a nearby tea parlor, one among two dozen Hazara men expressed support for Dr. Abdullah; the rest praised Mr. Karzai. "Karzai treats all ethnicities -- Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara -- the same. When he came to power, he brought an end to discrimination," said the parlor's owner, 70-year-old Ali Ehsan Agha Jan.

Even Dr. Abdullah's backers among the Hazaras recognize the improvements in their community's status under Mr. Karzai. "It's true that Karzai has done many things for the Hazaras. But it doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to his mistakes," said Mr. Kazemi, the Eqtedar-e-Melli party chief who is backing Dr. Abdullah. The Hazaras, he said, should cast their ballots "putting the national interest ahead of the ethnic one."

Write to Yaroslav Trofimov at yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com

Quiet Goodwill In a Homeland The Writer Knows Too Well - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

The Author of "The Kite Runner" Returns, Incognito, to Afghanistan to Listen to Stories of Strife

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, September 20, 2009

KABUL -- A convoy of big white Land Cruisers roared into a dusty lane on the outskirts of Kabul last weekend. Chickens scattered, children gawked. A slight man in jeans stepped out, trailed by a film crew and several policemen with rifles. After hurried consultations, elders were produced and the visitor was ushered into a mud hut.

"Man namaindai shobe audat mohajirin astam," he said, politely but vaguely, in perfect Afghan Dari. "I am a representative from office of refugee assistance."

The elders did not know his name, but they knew an opportunity when they saw it, and they posed obligingly for the cameras as they poured out litanies of fear, frustration and despair.

They were mostly two-time refugees, Afghans who had returned after years of Soviet occupation and civil war only to find their villages ravaged by a new conflict involving Taliban insurgents, foreign troops and predatory ethnic militia bosses. Once more they had left their crops and flocks, this time fleeing to an impoverished capital that offered neither land nor work.

The elders complained to the visitor that American and NATO forces had barged into their homes, insulted their women, even bombed their villages. Yet they also begged him not to let the foreign troops leave. Their worst fear, they said, was that the law would collapse and their country would once more erupt into terrible ethnic conflict.

"Vale, vale, fomidam," the visitor said over and over, frowning sympathetically. "I understand. I understand."

All last weekend, he listened to families living in tents and huts and abandoned schools who expressed similar fears -- not of a foreign enemy, but of the bad blood and stubborn tribal enmities that still divide this multiethnic Muslim nation and could easily tear it apart.

What Khaled Hosseini could not tell the refugees was that he really did understand. He could not tell them that he had written a book called "The Kite Runner" about the historic ethnic tensions in Afghanistan, and had been excoriated for it by some as a sensationalistic slanderer of his native land. He could not tell them that the movie version of his book had been banned by the Kabul government last year as too sensitive to show to Afghan audiences, because it was too close to the truth.

Hosseini, a longtime California resident and best-selling author in the West, was here as the goodwill ambassador to Afghanistan from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. His mission was to raise awareness of the plight of Afghans among donors in Europe and the United States, to many of whom his name is a household word.

But precisely because of that high profile, Hosseini's U.N. hosts and handlers felt he was so vulnerable to attack here that his visit had to be virtually incognito. Each of his stops was unannounced, and he was never introduced by name. All trips outside the capital were nixed, and the Afghan news media was not notified of his visit. There were no literary gatherings, no receptions, no public events. It was not only the Taliban the U.N. group feared, it was public opinion.

If the goodwill envoy chafed at being kept under wraps, if the homecoming novelist winced at the sad irony of his position, Hosseini did not admit it. Instead, he played his anonymous assigned role with obliging graciousness, perhaps even a little relieved to be away from the international whirlwind.

"I have not come here as a writer from the West. I have come here to listen to the stories of voiceless people and to make sure they are not forgotten in the greater narrative of Afghanistan today, the narrative of drugs and elections and insurgency," Hosseini, 44, said during a break in the high-walled compound of the U.N. refugee agency here.

He was not especially eager to talk about "The Kite Runner" or the storm of controversy it aroused among Afghans here and abroad, with its dark theme of ethnic prejudice and its searing, pivotal scene of a boy from the subservient ethnic Hazara minority being raped in a Kabul alley by a group of ethnically Pashtun youths. "My book came out six years ago, and I have been talking about it ad nauseam ever since," Hosseini said a bit wearily. "I have moved beyond that, and I am wearing a different hat now that I hope can be meaningful. I am here to parlay a message to people outside, who read my work and who may want to help. I am not here to preach to the Afghans, and if they think I am an anonymous U.N. worker, that's fine with me."

And yet it seems clear that Hosseini has still not fully come to terms with his Afghan identity. He has lived abroad since he was 11, and he readily acknowledges that he leads a "charmed life" in a very different universe. He keeps coming back, keeps wanting to connect. But he has few friends here, and he compares himself to a character in "The Kite Runner" who says, "I feel like a tourist in my own country."

During his weekend tour, Hosseini grew increasingly depressed by the anguished stories he heard, the squalid conditions he encountered and the knowledge that the people pouring out their woes hoped that somehow, this stranger who had appeared with the Land Cruisers and the video crew could save them.

In one mud hut, a jobless returnee said he wished he could take his family back to Pakistan, but that it too was now overrun with insurgent violence. "We are trapped between two fires," he said helplessly. In a dusty ally, an elderly man told Hosseini that if the NATO forces left, he would have no choice but to pick up his gun and go back to war. In a tent colony, a nomad leader said the displaced families there would not survive the winter.

"He told me, 'If you do not help us and we die, our blood will be on your hands,' " Hosseini said grimly.

He was also taken aback by the marked deterioration in security since his last visit for the U.N. in 2007. At the time, he was able to travel by road to several other cities and stroll in refurbished shrines and parks. Today, with suicide bombers lurking, Kabul has become a maze of roadblocks and blast walls, and sightseeing would be an unthinkable risk for a foreign VIP -- even an émigré who speaks like a native.

The hardest part, though, is that Hosseini -- whose novels have humanized Afghanistan's problems to millions of readers abroad, and have tried to address the historical ethnic hatreds now bubbling up during a tense and fraud-plagued presidential election -- may not be safe among his own countrymen.

Even though DVDs of "The Kite Runner" film sell briskly at a few upscale city markets, the anger that swept through the global Afghan grapevine after its release in 2007 was so fierce that its child actors had to leave the country. If enough Afghans knew the author were in the capital, he could easily be torn apart by a mob.

"The purpose of a novel is precisely to talk about things that people don't want to talk about, to create a debate rather than to sweep unpleasant truths under a rug," Hosseini said. "I wish the Afghanistan of today were an open society where I could walk the streets and talk unhampered. I hope that day will come, but unfortunately it is not yet a reality."

Instead, the organizers of his visit manufactured a secure, controlled substitute for a public event: an invitation-only kite-flying contest on a hill overlooking the capital. U.N. workers handed out blue kites decorated with peace doves, and young boys whooped with glee as they ran them aloft. None knew the identity of the slim man in a U.N.-logo shirt who stood there, talking to a few foreign journalists with their video cameras aimed at the iconic blue objects swooping behind him.

"Khaled, could we have one more shot of you looking up at the kites?" a cameraman asked. Hosseini smiled, let a paper kite fly upward from his hands, and looked up dutifully as it trailed away into space.

Related articles by Zemanta

• The Kite Runner (slideshare.net)
• Dim 'jungle' (news.bbc.co.uk)

Long-Oppressed Hazara Minority May Play Key Role in Afghan Elections

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, July 26, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 25 -- For generations, Afghanistan's Hazara minority has occupied the humblest niche in the country's complex ethnic mosaic. The political power structure has been dominated by the large southern Pashtun tribes, followed by the slightly less numerous northern Tajiks.

During various periods in history, the Shiite Hazaras have been forced from their lands and slaughtered in bouts of ethnic or religious "cleansing." In more recent times, they have often been relegated to lowly jobs as cart-pullers or domestic servants. The abused boy in the novel and movie "The Kite Runner," which generated much controversy here, came from a family of Hazara servants.

But the group now stands poised to play a decisive role in the Aug. 20 presidential and provincial council elections. It has produced a popular presidential candidate, independent Ramazan Bashardost, who is an extremely long shot but has been traveling the country nonstop, preaching a message of government reform and social justice.

Meanwhile, President Hamid Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun who is seeking reelection, and his major challengers are aggressively courting the Hazara vote. The group makes up as much as 20 percent of the country's electorate and had high voter-registration and turnout rates in the last presidential election, in 2004.

"We have become kingmakers," said Mohammed Mohaqeq, a leader of the main Hazara political party, Wahdat-e-Islami, who agreed to support Karzai in return for pledges that Hazaras would be given control of several ministries and possibly a newly created province. "I cannot get elected, because my Pashtun brothers might not support me, but our people can make a big difference in deciding who wins," he said.

Mohaqeq has been campaigning in various provinces for Karzai, who has remained largely invisible during the run-up to the elections. Mohaqeq's party has organized an army of campaign workers and has fielded a slate of 14 candidates for the upper house of parliament and provincial councils, including one young man whose posters depict an old Hazara cart-puller bent under a load of goods.

Karzai, whose second vice presidential pick is a Hazara, took pains to appease conservative Hazara leaders in March by approving a controversial Shiite family law, even though it outraged human rights groups because it subjected Hazara women to the absolute control of their fathers and husbands.

Yet the political emancipation of Afghanistan's Hazaras, whose children are flocking to universities and office jobs, has created a generational and political split in a community that long fell in lockstep behind ethnic militia or religious leaders such as Mohaqeq as a matter of survival.

Many older or less educated Hazaras still express strong loyalty to such leaders and say they intend to follow their political instructions on voting day. But many others, including students and former refugees who have returned after years in Iran, said they value their political independence.

"I am Hazara, but we have rights now, and no one can tell me how to vote," said Farahmuz, 33, a laborer who joins dozens of men each morning at a traffic circle, hoping to obtain a few hours of work. "I don't want ethnic issues to come up in these elections, because they can destroy the country again," he said.

Many Hazaras said their sentimental favorite for president is Bashardost, 44, a reformist legislator and former planning minister whose office is in a tent across the street from parliament. He has been campaigning in much the same style, accepting government-provided planes to reach distant provinces but then mingling with voters in parks and markets.

"I like Mr. Bashardost because he understands our problems," said Jawad, 25, a Kabul resident who grew up in exile in Iran and now supports his elderly parents as a construction worker. "He doesn't campaign in luxury vehicles like the others. He came to Shar-i-Nau Park on foot and sat there in a tent and listened to the people."

Reached on his cellphone Saturday in a noisy market in Khost province, Bashardost said he had discovered "a big distance between the ordinary people and the politicians in Kabul," adding: "I am sure we are going to see a revolution on August 20." He also said he had received a surprisingly large amount of support from Pashtuns at home and abroad. "This is something very new for Afghanistan," he said.

As a minority group that has long faced economic exploitation and social oppression, Hazaras seem to be taking particular advantage of political freedoms that have opened up since the fall of extremist Sunni Taliban rule in late 2001.

At a new private Shiite college in Kabul, teachers and students said the elections are important for their community, no matter who wins, because they represent a step toward modern, democratic practices that can help overcome Afghan traditions of ethnic and tribal competition.

"We need to develop the values and practices of democracy," said Amin Ahmadi, the college director. "Unfortunately, ethnic issues still play a large role in our country, and people don't trust leaders from other ethnic groups. But if we can have fair, transparent and peaceful elections, that will matter more than if we get a good or a bad president."

In West Kabul, the rundown but bustling heart of the capital's Hazara community, every public surface is papered with campaign posters. Yet many cart-pullers, mechanics and other workers said they are fed up with both national and ethnic politics. They said that their community suffers from widespread unemployment and poverty, but that no one in power has done anything to help.

"We are not happy with our government, and we are not happy with our own leaders," said Imam Ali Rahmat, 61, who sells firewood. "To them, we are just made of grime and dust. To us, they are just made of false promises. We need a change and we need new leaders, because we have lost our way."