Ethnic supremacy in Afghanistan
Iam reminded of my short and sturdylooking math teacher in a school built by Afghan refugees in Pakistan's capital Islamabad, where I had migrated with my family during the Taliban regime. A man of sharp acumen and snappishly honest temperament, we called him Ustad Nadir (Professor Nadir).
One day Nadir recounted how he had landed his job, a profession that is valued for the social good it can deliver but is largely considered deadend and lacking in ambition among Afghans. Usually other professions such as medicine, engineering, or law make a hit with aspiring youth. In his case, one reason he became a teacher and not a military officer, the career in which his heart lay originally, was that he was Hazara, a historically persecuted ethnic group in Afghanistan.
Back when Ustad Nadir was probably mapping his future life in mid-20th-century Afghanistan, becoming a military officer was for Pashtuns only, who held a monopoly on social privilege as the politically dominant ethnic group. Even though Afghanistan had signed the 1946 Universal Declaration for Human Rights, the "liberty, dignity and equality" promised in it refracted when adapted to Afghanistan's society and politics. Here, only one ethnic minority could enjoy those rights and be "more equal" than the rest.
Notwithstanding his career-related bad luck, if my teacher had been born a few decades earlier, his life could have taken a much more tragic turn. He could have been bought and sold in open markets like other members of his ethnic group as a slave.
As chronicled by the early-20th-century historian Faiz Mohammad Katib in his opus Siraj al-Tawarikh, appropriation and exchange of Hazaras as slaves intensified in the late 19th century after Afghan King Abdur Rahman Khan's bloody push to expand his reign in semi-autonomous central Afghanistan in a series of conquests that laid the foundations of the modern nation-state, ligaturing its birth with plunder and displacement for thousands of Hazaras. A big part of the ethnic group fled to neighboring Pakistan and Iran, where they continue to live after many generations.
Trading in Hazara slaves was officially banned in the 1920s by reformist King Amanullah Khan. However, the ban did not stall the Taliban regime who, nearly 80 years later, resorted to ethnic cleansing after entering Afghanistan's central highlands in the late 1990s, an area called Hazarajat ("land of Hazaras" in Persian). Hazaras' belonging predominantly to Shia Islam did not help in assuaging the zeal of the Sunni extremist Taliban in committing mass-scale persecution.
Their journey to normal citizenship in Afghanistan has been long and is far from complete. Saying their name is still widely adjoined with a patronizingly polite "brother" - as in, "Hazara brother" (beradar'e Hazara) - as if saying "Hazara" alone might sound inappropriate.
Ethnic supremacy has been central to Afghanistan's politics and was embodied in a program of Pashtun settlement in the fertile north and northeast, a policy that continued under Afghanistan's longest 20th-century ruler King Zahir Shah and was backed by his cousin Mohammad Daoud. As a young officer before becoming Afghanistan's prime minister, Daoud didn't hide his support for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi cause. History curricula written in those years and still taught to children in public schools in Afghanistan continue to preach the revolting racial fallacy that "Aryan" means najib (noble or superior), a race among whom Afghans include themselves.
The settlement policy, while not leaving Hazaras unharmed, came at the vast expense of Tajiks and Uzbeks, two other ethnic groups who, despite widespread neglect and deprivation that was common to all in impoverished Afghanistan, saw arable land around them given to Pashtun settlers. State-administered irrigation programs were implemented mostly by forcing the able-bodied among rural Tajiks and Uzbeks to build the canals.
Fast-forward to the present and one might witness some changes in the country mainly because four decades of war, beginning in the late 1970s, disrupted the structure of ethnic hierarchy. According to political scientist Mujib Rahman Rahimi, the wars in Afghanistan represented a moment of "dislocation" in its history. According to his doctoral thesis now published as a book, Afghanistan was a client state of British India, for which hegemonizing Pashtun rule over the country's ethnically diverse population was deemed necessary for functional bilateral relations.