Afghanistan's success story: The liberated Hazara minority

Unlike US intervention in Iraq, the fall of the Taliban has helped assuage communal tension in Afghanistan.

By Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the August 6, 2007 edition

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BAMIYAN, AFGHANISTAN - The last thing Azi Zula Haideri saw as he climbed higher into the snow-choked passes of the Hindu Kush was the smoke, a signal in ash and soot that the Taliban were nearing, burning and killing as they came.

Less than a year later, in 2001, when the Taliban fell to forces supported by the United States, the world heralded it as a victory for freedom and for women oppressed by the burqa. But Mr. Haideri remembers it as something different: Salvation for himself and his people, the Hazaras.

Haideri had fled into the mountains to escape the Taliban, who butchered Hazaras by the thousands, killing them because they were Shiites and "foreigners" – descended from the Mongol hordes of Genghis Khan.

Now, however, Haideri sits at a tea stand in this predominately Hazara city and agrees that there has never been a better time for his people. In contrast with the American experience in Iraq, which has unleashed deep-seated sectarian violence, Western intervention here has ended one of the more brutal chapters in this nation's history of ethnic strife.

In post-Taliban Afghanistan, it is one of the few unequivocal, though often overlooked, successes. After centuries of discrimination, abuse, and even ethnic cleansing, the country's third-largest ethnic group has at last managed to find peace and even prosperity in the new Afghanistan.

"The interim administration [in 2001] was the start of a golden period for Hazaras," says Abdul Ahad Farzam, a human-rights activist in Bamiyan. "Doors opened for Hazaras."

At times, President Hamid Karzai has had as many as six Hazaras as cabinet ministers. The governors of Herat and Bamiyan provinces are Hazaras. And anecdotal information suggests that Hazaras are achieving in higher education: One unconfirmed report suggests that Kabul University accepted 600 students from one Hazara district alone, and a professor of law and political science at Herat University says half his students are Hazaras.

From a Western perspective, the change is welcome. Hazaras "will never be reconciled with the Taliban," says Mohammed Rafiq Shahir, the professor at Herat University. "That is why the international community is building them up."

Moreover, Hazaras are perhaps the most liberal of Afghanistan's Muslim sects. A local human-rights activist remembers trying to convince local Hazara clerics that the Western concept of human rights are in concert with Islam.

"At the beginning they were suspicious, since it was new and it coincided with the US toppling the Taliban – it was seen as a campaign to bring in Western culture," says Musa Sultani, regional director of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. Yet by the end of the discussion, Mr. Sultani had persuaded the clerics so thoroughly that they issued a written decree supporting every point.

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