Afghan Hazaras look to polls, Iran

After a 40-minute climb to this farming village in central Bamiyan Province, a young candidate in Afghanistan's upcoming elections explains the nuts and bolts of parliamentary politics, and why she deserves the villagers' votes.

"There are no good roads in Bamiyan, no electricity, no water," Fatima Kazemian tells a cramped classroom full of men and women. "The important thing when you select a representative is this: You shouldn't ask, 'What will you do?' We should take our officials by the collar and say, 'What are you doing now?' Your leaders should listen to you, and not hide themselves like a mouse in a hole."

Men murmur appreciatively at the tough words. Women smile silently.

When American troops helped oust the Taliban regime, it was the Hazaras of Bamiyan who may have cheered the loudest. As the homeland of Afghanistan's most oppressed group - Hazaras are Shiite Muslims in a Sunni majority nation - Bamiyan is a province that stood to benefit the most from a modern, secular, Western-supported democracy that boosted minority rights.

But in three years, Bamiyan's citizens have received very little development aid, and next month's parliamentary elections could become a referendum of sorts for a well-behaved minority whose patience with the government of President Hamid Karzai is wearing thin. Out of frustration, some Hazaras may look to Iran for support, an unwelcome possibility in a country recovering from decades of conflict fueled by neighboring nations.

"Discrimination against the Hazaras continues even now," says Mohammad Musa Mahmudi, a senior political analyst for the National Democratic Institute, an American democracy-building organization in Kabul.

Hazaras have Mongoloid features that visibly set them apart and have led to the belief that they are descendants of Genghis Khan's invading armies. For centuries, Hazaras have been limited by low wage jobs and isolated in the mountainous center of Afghanistan. Their struggles have become more familiar in the West due to the recent best-selling novel, "The Kite Runner."

Despite the Karzai government's official policy of promoting minority rights - and the presence of six Hazaras on his cabinet - much of the government's and international community's funding is diverted toward more powerful ethnic groups, such as the Pashtuns and Tajiks, or to more accessible cities like Kabul, Kandahar, Mazar-e Sharif, and Herat.

"Hazaras are not able to make a noise," says Mahmudi, himself a Hazara and a former human rights activist in Bamiyan. "They can't create conflict. They are not geopolitically located to be important to the government, so they will be neglected." But if Hazaras continue to be ignored, he warns, they may turn to the Shiite-cleric run nation of Iran. "They'll say, 'We went to the US and the West, but they didn't help us. You were right.' "

Bamiyan's first-ever female governor, Habeeba Sarabi - an ethnic Hazara and Shiite - insists that Iran's influence is slight in her province.

Page: 1 | 2