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| Professor William Maley vid Sverigebesöket 2018. |
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9 October 2021 |
Emeritus Professor William Maley |
On the Return of Hazaras to Afghanistan
1. I have
been asked to provide an expert opinion on the safety of return to Afghanistan for
members of the Hazara minority. I am an Emeritus Professor of The Australian
National University, where I served as Professor of Diplomacy from 2003-2021. I
have published extensively on Afghan politics for over three decades, and am
author of Rescuing Afghanistan
(London: Hurst & Co., 2006); The
Afghanistan Wars (London and New York: Macmillan, 2002, 2009, 2021); What is a Refugee? (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2016); Transition in
Afghanistan: Hope, Despair and the Limits of Statebuilding (New York:
Routledge, 2018); and Diplomacy,
Communication, and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2021). I
have also written studies of The Foreign
Policy of the Taliban (New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 2000) and Transitioning from military interventions to
long-term counter-terrorism policy: The case of Afghanistan (2001-2016)
(The Hague: The International Centre for Counter-Terrorism, 2016); co-authored Regime Change in Afghanistan: Foreign
Intervention and the Politics of Legitimacy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1991);
Political Order in Post-Communist
Afghanistan (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1992); and Afghanistan: Politics and Economics in a Globalising State (London:
Routledge, 2020); edited Fundamentalism
Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York: New York University Press,
1998, 2001); and co-edited The Soviet
Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Reconstructing Afghanistan: Civil-military
experiences in comparative perspective (New York: Routledge, 2015); and Afghanistan – Challenges and Prospects
(New York: Routledge, 2018), I authored the entry on Hazaras in John L.
Esposito (ed.), The Oxford Encyclopedia
of the Islamic World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) Vol.II, pp.385-386.
I visited Afghanistan most recently in October 2019.
2. The overarching development that has made it extraordinarily unsafe to return members
of the Hazara ethnic minority to Afghanistan was the fall of the Afghan
government to forces of the extremist Taliban movement on 15 August 2021. The violent
tactics of the Taliban comfortably fall within meaningful definitions of
terrorism (see William Maley, ‘Terrorism and insurgency in Afghanistan’,
in M. Raymond Izarali and Dalbir Ahlawat (eds), Terrorism, Security and Development in South Asia: National, Regional and
Global Implications (London: Routledge, 2021) pp.140-156); scarcely less
damning, but also accurate, is Peters’ description of the Taliban as a ‘multinational
criminal cartel’ (Gretchen S. Peters, ‘Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan raises
narcotics threat in the region’, Global
News, 9 September 2021). The Taliban have a long history of directing
extreme violence against Hazaras. Some 2,000 Hazaras were killed in just three
days in August 1998 in Mazar-e Sharif, in a massacre that the respected author Ahmed
Rashid described as ‘genocidal in its ferocity’ (Ahmed Rashid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and
Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000)
p.73). The Australian National University’s Atrocity Forecasting Project has
ranked Afghanistan in the top five countries in the world at risk of genocide
or politicide in 2021-23 (https://politicsir.cass.anu.edu.au/research/projects/atrocity-forecasting/forecasts).
It is a fundamental misconception to see the Taliban as a source of ‘security’;
as Ahmad Shuja, former Editor-in-Chief of the Georgetown Public Policy Review, rightly put it on social media on
8 October 2021, ‘Governments have monopoly of force. Talibs have monopoly of
violence. This informs their concept of security: There is to be no crime
except that by Talibs, no theft except that by Talibs, no killing except that
by Talibs.’ He described this as a model of ‘public administration through fear’.
3. There
is, of course, a long history of persecution of and discrimination against members
of the Hazara Shiite minority in Afghanistan (see Niamatullah Ibrahimi, The Hazaras and the Afghan State: Rebellion,
Exclusion and the Struggle for Recognition (London: Hurst & Co.,
2017).) In more recent times, the disposition of extremists to strike at them did
not disappear – and, importantly, it
preceded the emergence of ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS/ISKP). This was tragically demonstrated on 6 December 2011,
when a suicide bomber attacked Shiite Afghans, most of them Hazaras, at a place
of commemoration in downtown Kabul during the Ashura festival that marks the anniversary of the Battle of Karbala
in 680 AD. Almost simultaneously, a bomb in Mazar-e Sharif also killed Afghan
Shia. The Kabul bomb killed at least 55 people, and the Mazar bomb four more
(see Hashmat Baktash and Alex Rodrigues, ‘Two Afghanistan bombings aimed at
Shiites kill at least 59 people’, Los Angeles
Times, 7 December 2011). The Afghan photographer Massoud Hossaini was
awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his photograph of the aftermath of the
Kabul atrocity (see www.pulitzer.org/works/2012-Breaking-News-Photography).
A claim of responsibility was made by the Pakistani Sunni extremist group Lashkar-e Jhangvi, which has a long
history of sectarian violence against Shia (see Muhammad Qasim Zaman,
‘Sectarianism in Pakistan: The Radicalization of Shi’i and Sunni Identities’, Modern Asian Studies, vol.32, no.3,
1998, pp.689-716). The key point to note is that no one with any knowledge of
Afghanistan could seriously doubt that Hazara Shia were specifically targeted
on this occasion. Unfortunately, the targeting of Hazaras was not limited to
fringe or splinter groups.
4. From late October 2018, Taliban forces undertook coordinated attacks against Hazaras in Khas Uruzgan, Malestan and Jaghori. Many Hazara asylum seekers in western countries originate from these districts. The districts were, however, of no military significance, and the attacks made more sense as symbolic strikes designed to highlight the inability of the Afghan state effectively to protect members of a vulnerable ethnic and sectarian minority, and as punishment for the relatively tolerant and liberal lifestyle of these communities, far removed from the puritanical extremism of the Taliban (Rod Nordland, ‘Bodies Pile Up as Taliban Overrun Afghan Haven’, The New York Times, 13 November 2018). On 12 November 2018, as Hazara protestors gathered in Kabul to protest the relative inaction of the Afghan government in face of these attacks, a suicide bomber struck the protesters, killing at least six people (Sayed Salahuddin and Sharif Hassan, ‘Shiites protesting insecurity in Afghanistan hit by explosion in Kabul, killing 6’, The Washington Post, 12 November 2018). The targeting of these districts completely discredited the narrative that they constituted ‘safe’ areas to which Hazaras could reasonably be expected to return.
5. Since 15 August 2021, the Taliban have been involved in further massacres of Hazaras, prompting the Secretary-General of Amnesty International to warn that ‘These targeted killings are proof that ethnic and religious minorities remain at particular risk under Taliban rule in Afghanistan’ (Afghanistan: Taliban responsible for brutal massacre of Hazara men – new investigation (London: Amnesty International, 19 August 2021)). The Taliban have also been involved in ‘ethnic cleansing’ operations, most prominently in the provinces of Daikundi, where large numbers of Hazaras live, and in Uruzgan. The Taliban have sought to dress these up as ‘land disputes’, but forced evictions have occurred without any kind of legal basis or process, highlighting the essentially-political character of the exercise (see Sune Engel Rasmussen and Ehsanullah Amiri, ‘Taliban Evict Hazara Shiite Muslims From Villages, Rewarding Loyalists’, The Wall Street Journal, 30 September 2021).
6. When the Taliban regime announced the names of its key ministers, the list was carefully parsed for any signs of ‘inclusivity’. There were none. The ministry was overwhelmingly comprised of ethnic Pushtuns, and contained no women, no Hazaras, and no Shia. A number of members were on the ‘sanctions list’ compiled by the UN pursuant to UN Security Council Resolution 1988 of 17 June 2011; and the ‘Interior Minister’, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is leader of the terrorist ‘Haqqani Network’ (see Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, Fountainhead of Jihad: The Haqqani Nexus, 1973-2012 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), and appears on the FBI ‘Most Wanted’ list as a ‘specially-designated global terrorist’ with a reward of US$10 million on offer for information as to his whereabouts. Such a regime has no prospect of ruling with generalised normative support (‘legitimacy’); high levels of violence, directed either at known opponents or at symbolic targets such as Hazaras, to demonstrate the regime’s coercive capacity, are very likely.
7. With the Taliban asserting
a right to control the whole country, and in the light of the successful
military campaign that brought them to Kabul, there is now nowhere in Afghanistan that can be considered safe for Hazaras.
8. The
emergence in Afghanistan of the group known as ‘Islamic State’, ‘ISIS’, ‘ISKP’
or ‘Daesh’, which the former Australian prime minister routinely described as a
‘death cult’, has recently attracted considerable notice. Reports that depict
the Taliban and ISIS as intractable enemies are simplistic (see Niamatullah Ibrahimi
and Shahram Akbarzadeh, ‘Intra-Jihadist
Conflict and Cooperation: Islamic State–Khorasan Province and the Taliban in
Afghanistan’, Studies in Conflict and
Terrorism, vol.43, no.12, 2020, pp.1086-1107). ISIS is notoriously hostile
to Shiite Muslims (see Alissa J. Rubin, ‘Questions Rebels Use to Tell Sunni
from Shiite’, The New York Times, 24
June 2014), and for this reason, it is not surprising that Afghan Shia have
been profoundly disturbed to see metastases from ISIS appearing in Afghanistan.
This is a threat that should be treated very seriously. Afghanistan has a long
history, of which the Taliban movement is simply a recent manifestation, of
groups taking shape around ideas (or charismatic figures propounding them) that
have originated in other parts of the Muslim world. Wahhabi influences appeared
in the 19th century, and Deobandi ideas in the 20th.
Given the disruptions of the last four decades, Afghanistan’s soil is remarkably
fertile for implantations of this kind, and given the weaknesses of the state,
even groups that have only a relatively small number of supporters may be able
to cause mayhem for vulnerable elements of the population such as the Shia. This
was brutally demonstrated on 23 July 2016, when a peaceful demonstration by
Hazaras associated with the so-called ‘Enlightening Movement’ (Jumbesh-e Roshnayi) over the routing of a
proposed electricity system was struck by a suicide bombing. Some 85 people
were left dead, and 413 injured (‘UN Chief in Afghanistan renews Call for
Parties to Protect Civilians — UNAMA Releases Civilian Casualty Data for Third
Quarter of 2016’ (Kabul: UNAMA, 19 October 2016) p.2), ISIS claimed responsibility
for what it called ‘a “martyrdom attack” on Shiites’ (Mujib Mashal and Zahra
Nader, ‘ISIS Claims Suicide Bombing of Protest in Kabul, Killing at Least 80’, The New York Times, 24 July 2016, p.A6).
Attacks on Shia persisted following the Taliban takeover: on 8 October 2021, a blast
ripped through the Sayedabad Mosque in Kunduz, killing large numbers of Shia (‘Blast
hits mosque in northeastern Afghanistan, killing worshippers’, Reuters, 8 October 2021).
9. The implications of
these attacks are profound. They put on display a commitment to attack on the
basis of religious identity, plainly engaging one of the bases of refugee
status under Article 1.A(2) of the 1951 Convention
Relating to the Status of Refugees; and they highlight particular dangers
for Hazaras, who are overwhelmingly Shiite, are physically distinctive because
of their East Asian phenotypes, and make up the vast bulk of the Shiite
component of the Afghan population.
10. In September 2017,
the Department of Foreign Affairs claimed in a Thematic Report specifically
prepared for protection status determination purposes that ‘ordinary Hazaras
who reside in Hazara-majority areas of Kabul and do not have open affiliations
with the government or international community … are unlikely to face any
greater threat than are Afghans of other ethnicities’ (DFAT Thematic Report: Hazaras in Afghanistan, 18 September 2017, para.2.26).
Such conclusions are now completely untenable. On 27 June 2019, the Department
of Foreign Affairs, in a further Thematic Report that replaced its September 2017
report, stated that ‘Since mid-2016, however, militants have conducted an
ongoing series of major attacks against Shi’a targets, including political
demonstrations and religious gatherings’ (para.3.32). It went on to state that ‘DFAT
assesses that Shi’a face a high risk of being targeted by ISKP and other
militant groups for attack based on their religious affiliation when assembling
in large and identifiable groups, such as during demonstrations or when
attending mosques during major religious festivals. This risk increases for
those living in Shi’a majority or ethnic Hazara neighbourhoods in major cities
such as Kabul and Herat’ (para.3.35). This warning coincided with the conclusions
of scholarly analysis (see Melissa Kerr Chiovenda, ‘Discursive Placemaking and
Acts of Violence: The Dasht-e Barchi Neighborhood Of Kabul, Afghanistan’, Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural
Systems and World Economic Development, vol.48, nos.1-2, Spring-Summer
2019, pp.13-49). As Patricia Gossman, Senior Afghanistan Researcher at Human
Rights Watch has put it, ‘ISIS has stepped up its horrific and unlawful attacks
on Shia public gatherings, making no place safe’ (‘Afghanistan: Shia Bombing
Spotlights Need to Protect’ (Kabul: Human Rights Watch, 21 November 2016)).
11. It would be naïve to
think that groups such as the Taliban and ISIS would look at all kindly on
people from Afghanistan who have lived for any length of time in Western
countries. Such people are often recognisable from subtle changes in gesture
and language of which they themselves may be completely unaware, and which can
attract the derogatory label gharbzadeh,
the use of which can in turn activate a melange of prejudices and animosities
that can put people in real peril. The relatively-polished public relations of
the Taliban (see William Maley, ‘The Public Relations of the Taliban: Then and
Now’, Perspectives, International
Centre for Counter-Terrorism – The Hague, 17 September 2021) should not distract
attention from their fundamentally anti-Western orientation. Afghans who have
lived for years in Western countries such as Australia would likely be regarded
with deep suspicion on that basis alone, and this would be especially dangerous
for Shiite Hazaras.
Emeritus Professor
William Maley, AM FASSA FAIIA
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