Afghanistan's oppressed Hazaras dread Taliban return

By Emmanuel Duparcq (AFP) –

YAKAWLANG, Afghanistan — Ibrahim still has vivid nightmares about the slaughter on the morning of January 11, 2001 that he miraculously escaped.

Pumped up by victory after seizing control of Ibrahim's home district of Yakawlang, blood-thirsty Taliban fighters set upon Afghanistan's most oppressed ethnic group, the Hazaras, in typically ruthless fashion.

"They lined us up in two rows and started shooting us one by one," said Ibrahim, a Hazara who is 32 but looks 10 years older in his worn black tunic and brown jacket, topped off by a white turban.

"I couldn't stand the sight of all that blood, and I fainted," he told AFP.

Ibrahim was one of the lucky ones -- the United Nations and other rights organisations say the insurgents killed around 350 Hazaras on that day.

He and one other wounded survivor headed for the mountains, where they hid until the fall of the Taliban more than nine months later.

Ten years on, the central province of Bamiyan is one of the most peaceful in war-torn Afghanistan and for that reason is expected to be among the first to come under the control of Afghan security forces.

But Hazaras like Ibrahim fear that when NATO troops withdraw, the way will be open for the rebels they call "animals" to return.

As Shia Muslims, the Hazaras, who make up much of the population of central Afghanistan, were a prime target for the mainly Sunni Taliban.

The Taliban famously blew up Bamiyan's historic Buddha statues, but they also destroyed what little sense of security the Hazaras, who occupy the bottom rung of Afghan society, used to enjoy.

From the victims shot so many times their heads were left pulverised to the tribal elders who were cut to shreds with knives, accounts of Taliban brutality abound in this province, around 130 kilometres (80 miles) west of Kabul.

In the minds of Bamiyan's residents, the threat of the militants' return is ever-present.

"The Taliban are the worst creatures that God has ever created. We haven't heard from them for 10 years, but we are still afraid," said Sayed Zia of Koshkak village, high in the mountains that surround the provincial capital, also called Bamiyan.

"For us, the Taliban are just animals, or even worse," added his neighbour Afzal.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is due to announce on Monday which will be the first provinces to be handed over to Afghan security forces this summer, the first stage of a transition process that will see foreign troops pull out by 2014.

The Hazaras of Bamiyan do not believe the Taliban will return immediately if NATO forces leave the province.

"The Taliban are not active in the province because no one supports them," said 36-year-old Nasrullah Waezi, a young mullah from the provincial capital.

But they do fear that if NATO leaves Afghanistan altogether, the Taliban could surround Bamiyan and close in on the province, as they did in 2001.

"Once NATO leaves the country the Taliban will be here in a week," said Asif, 30, who fought against the insurgents in Yakawlang in 2001.

Bamiyan's deputy governor Hadji Qasim Kazemi echoed his fears, saying NATO must stay on if the fruits of a decade of peace, including new government buildings and the province's first proper roads, are to continue.

"We want NATO to stay," he told AFP. "Hazaras are peaceful people, but if intruders like Al-Qaeda or the Taliban come, they will fight."

In the centre of the provincial capital, Ali Zafar, the imposing head of the local anti-Taliban militia, still goes by the title "commander."

He now runs a hotel and says he has a comfortable life, but would not hesitate to take up arms again.

His friend, a tall, elegant man dressed in a traditional flat hat and a long grey coat, serves tea and smiles: "We have kept plenty of weapons, just in case."

But the fight appears to have gone out of Ibrahim, who had one son at the time of the slaughter but now has two more and two daughters.

"I am no longer as brave as I was," he said.

Source,

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5jDZQaM7FErxV6XAubD2gVrBAEyBA?docId=CNG.1411cd01df64d8f14a45e3962493fb9a.5f1

The Bamiyan Buddhas symbolised complexity of Afghan identity

Hamida Ghafour

Last Updated: Mar 19, 2011


Bamiyan is a place of promise and potential. It recalls an Afghanistan of young girls who skip to school, women who work in the potato fields without worry, tourists who hike in the mountains in the summers, and of the two giant Bamiyan Buddhas, who would watch benignly over the inhabitants of their valley as they have done for centuries.

But the idols carved into the Hindu Kush mountains 1,500 years ago no longer exist. The empty sandstone niches that housed them stand as silent, permanent reminders of Taliban savagery.

They were destroyed 10 years ago this month upon the orders of Mullah Mohammed Omar, who issued an edict explaining that because the idols were once worshipped they may be again and so must be torn down.

The destruction shocked the world and cemented Afghanistan's reputation as a place of barbarism inhabited by a people without respect for culture. A former cabinet minister in Kabul once told me he tried to reason with the moderates in the Taliban movement in 2000 but by then, Osama bin Laden's influence on Mullah Omar was so strong that any negotiations to save the Buddhas were useless.

For al Qa'eda's fighters, Afghanistan was, and is, cheap real estate to raise and train militants. Destroying the Buddhas was a taste of what they were capable of in their quest to establish a supposedly Islamic state.

For me, the Buddhas symbolised Afghanistan's identity in all its amazing complexity. Our intricate culture is not one of warring tribesmen harbouring ancient hatreds and practising medieval codes of honour. This is also the country of Behzad of Herat, famous for his school of miniature paintings, and of Kharwar, the sprawling Pompeii of Central Asia in the south. That the outside world does not know this is to be expected, but the greater tragedy is that Afghans are also forgetting who they are.



I have visited Bamiyan several times since 2001, often staying with some cool French kids who ran a small aid organisation. They listened to electronica music, hiked in the demined hills and taught their Afghan cook how to make creamy scrambled eggs and a divine salad dressing.

It was idyllic and indeed Bamiyan can be said to represent Afghanistan's struggle to find peace.

One summer I met Zemaryalai Tarzi, a French-trained Afghan archaeologist and one of the world's experts in pre-Islamic Afghanistan. Guided by the memoirs of a 7th century Chinese monk who travelled in Bamiyan, Mr Tarzi has been carrying out excavations at the foot of the destroyed statues convinced that a third Buddha, perhaps 300 metres long, was buried here in a reclining position, representing the last earthly moments of the Buddha's life before entering the state of nirvana.

"I want to tell people our grandfathers were not smugglers. They were artists. They had honour," he told me.

Bamiyan was a wealthy trading post in the ancient world, the "Manhattan of the Silk Road" as Mr Tarzi liked to call it. The great Afghan Buddhist king, Kanishka, who had grown wealthy from the trade, wanted to popularise the Buddhist religion by giving it a human form. Until then Buddha had been represented by footprints or a Bodhi tree. Kanishka invited artists from Rome who merged their skills with eastern philosophy and the human form of the Buddha was created in Bamiyan for the first time in the second century CE.



The statues were built between 544 and 644CE.

The residents of the valley, the Hazaras, have traditionally been at the bottom of Afghan society but have benefited from post-Taliban rule. They are equal before the law, vote in great numbers (particularly the women), send their girls to school and many stand for public office. The governor of the province is a woman. Not surprisingly, they refuse to give the insurgents refuge. They have already lost much - but still have much to lose.

Bamiyan, then, is an inspiring place. It is also a land of extraordinary, unearthly beauty. The entrance to the lush green valley is framed by steep black- and ruby-coloured mountains rich in iron-ore deposits. The light is like nowhere else, a thin, golden veil that saturates every surface.

The Buddha statues stood at the end of an avenue lined with poplar trees. The leaves flash silver and green when the wind blows and Afghans say during a full moon the pale outline of the Buddhas' figures are still visible. For hundreds of years, Buddhist faithful from all over the world came to pray and meditate in the hive of 600 cells and monasteries carved into the cliffs.

I once climbed up the cliffs to the top of the smaller Buddha. A warm earthy smell lingered in the passages connecting assembly halls with vaulted ceilings, cells, balconies. I tried to imagine yellow-robed monks praying and meditating. My guidebook described paintings that were a fusion of Indian, Iranian and Sassanian style.

But barely anything remains. They have been chipped or torn away. There was no Buddha wearing a maroon-coloured robe walking in fields of flowers, no white horses drawing the Sun God's chariot across a blue sky. The silken canopies, the fluttering robes and the flowering fields have disappeared in the black soot of the fires lit by cave squatters.

I reached the very top and walked across a platform held up by scaffolding above the Buddha's head and gazed across the valley. The light passed through the afternoon sky, glowing warm and flooding the fields and the mountains in gold, caramel and pink. Below, a column of boys walked home from school. Women in blue and red dresses bent over their wheat harvests in the green and gold fields.

"Bamiyan is a purified place and when we are in Bamiyan we should have pure hearts." Mr Tarzi's words echoed in my head. "It is a place of meditation. It is not for lying, crime or killing."

Hamida Ghafour is a former senior reporter for The National and author of The Sleeping Buddha: The Story of Afghanistan Through the Eyes of One Family.

Source,

http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/middle-east/the-bamiyan-buddhas-symbolised-complexity-of-afghan-identity?pageCount=0

UNESCO bid to rebuild Afghanistan's Bamiyan Buddhas falters

Erin Cunningham

Last Updated: Mar 19, 2011

A Hazara Afghan woman walks past the ruins of the ancient Buddha statues that once stood in the city of Bamiyan. Shah Marai / AFP

Top, Taliban soldiers begin destroying one of the Bamiyan Buddhas in early March 2001. Jean Claude-Chapon / AFP Below, a solider guards their handiwork. Amir Shah / AP Photo

BAMIYAN // The sun is setting over the Bamiyan Valley cradled deep in central Afghanistan's Hindu Kush range, and Said Talib, a 26-year-old guard with unkempt hair and an ill-fitting uniform, stumbles barefoot out of a makeshift encampment and into the warm, twilight glow next to where the area's famed, twin Buddha statues once stood.

"I am responsible for guarding these Buddhas," he says, reaching back inside the hut for his cup of green tea. "What do you want to know?"

Mr Talib is one of eight local guards hired by the United Nations Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (Unesco) to protect the massive, hollow caverns that once housed Bamiyan's 2,000-year-old Buddhas, before the Taliban destroyed them with dynamite and rocket-propelled grenades in a fundamentalist frenzy 10 years ago this month.

On the tenth anniversary of their destruction, Unesco, which is spearheading the effort to preserve the remains, held a meeting in its Paris headquarters between Afghan, German, Italian and Japanese experts to decide on the future of the site.

Museums should be built in Bamiyan and a feasibility study undertaken to determine if partial reassembly of the smaller Buddha, which stood 37 metres tall, is possible, the Unesco group said in its March 2-4 conference. For now, total reconstruction of either Buddha, the larger of which was 55 metres high, would not be considered. The site remains on the list of official Unesco World Heritage sites, however.

But here in Bamiyan, an isolated hamlet where life now ebbs and flows as gently as the modest river that cuts through the valley, the ragtag facilities of Mr Talib and his colleagues at the ministry of culture and youth affairs are - quite literally - a world away from Unesco's pristine Paris headquarters.



The residents of Bamiyan province, about 400,000 mainly Shiite Hazaras who trace their roots to Mongolian invaders and who suffered greatly under the Sunni fundamentalist Taliban regime, say they feel marginalised by the foreign-led process to preserve and make use of their stunning heritage. Locals say they have watched millions of dollars in aid money pour in over the years, only to be siphoned off by corrupt provincial and central government officials.

"Everyone is deciding outside of Bamiyan what do to with the Buddhas and nobody has ever asked the people of Bamiyan: do you want to rebuild or keep the Buddhas - what do you want?" says Sher Ali Samimi, a professor of history at Bamiyan University.

"Here in Bamiyan, we are all in the dark. Is there money to rebuild the Buddhas? Is there a lack of budget? Nobody knows."

According to Unesco, since 2004 donor governments have spent US$4 million (Dh14.7m) on a three-phase project to map a strategy to preserve the Buddhas, but the human poverty that continues to surround the majestic ruins is glaring.

Clinging to the site where the Buddhas once stood are jobless squatters living in ancient, monastic caves. Outside the Buddha complex, just two wooden signs, painted with the Unesco logo and covered in dust, announce the Buddhas' "unique importance to humankind".



"We don't have enough funding to take care of the site properly; right now we are just passing the time," says Abdul Jalia Hamad, head of the department for the restoration and preservation of historic monuments in Bamiyan.

"My monthly salary is just $80," he says. "And the ministry of culture's budget for all of Bamiyan is just $7,000 per year. People are living in the caves here and destroying some of the historical site, but how can we tell them to leave when we don't have a plan?"

Indeed, the government office selling tickets to visit the site runs solely on a diesel-fuelled generator, while a single Afghan national police officer naps in the shade nearby.

On a tour of the Buddha complex with Mohammed, another young guard who says he has yet to be trained on how to handle or care for the site, large fragments of the Buddhas can be seen strewn about.

Exposed to the elements of Bamiyan's harsh winters and searingly hot summers - and closed-off by a simple, wire-mesh fence - artefacts have either been damaged or looted by local smugglers for sale on the black market, officials believe.

Other pieces are locked up in wooden sheds built by the International Council on Monuments and Sites, a non-governmental organisation dedicated to the conservation of some of the world's most historic monuments. Local people have even collected and saved fragments of the rockets and dynamite used by the Taliban to bring the Buddhas down.

Mr Hamad says about 800 foreigners and 1,000 Afghans visit the site of the Buddhas each year. Bamiyan reigns as one of the safest places in Afghanistan as a Taliban insurgency rages elsewhere in the country, but there are currently no commercial flights to the region and portions of the bone-jarring road from Kabul to Bamiyan are laced with road bombs and watched by active Taliban insurgents.

And while the story of the Buddhas - both their history and untimely destruction - has captured the attention of historians and scholars worldwide, Bamiyan residents view the Buddhas with a degree of passive indifference.

"I heard the government wants to rebuild the Buddhas; our grandfathers and elders told us they are important for Bamiyan," says Sifat Ali, a day labourer who lives with his wife and eight children in a cave near the Buddhas. "If tourists come, and it is good for Bamiyan, then we support this. But right now, we just want to improve our lives."

In sharp contrast to the Taliban's austere interpretation of Islamic law, which the group said compelled them to destroy the Buddhist-inspired statues, Bamiyan natives fail to see the Buddhas as an affront to their Muslim faith. Rather, the Buddhas are a testament to area's rich, diverse history as a crossroads of religions, cultures and empires along the ancient Silk Road, they say.

In the remote district of Yakawlang, an area where, according to Human Rights Watch, the Taliban massacred 300 civilians in January 2001, 55-year-old Mohammed, a local mullah, ruminates on how Islam has guided him to accept and support the Buddhas. "The Buddhas were built hundreds of years before Islam came to Afghanistan. Why should we destroy this history? Who are we to make this decision?" he asks.

Hours from anything that remotely resembles a road, Mohammed reaches inside his jacket pocket to retrieve a small leather notebook in which, after having learnt to read under the Soviet-backed communist regime in the 1970s, he has jotted down numerous notes on the history of Islam in Afghanistan.

"I tell the faithful at my mosque: the Buddhas are symbols of a strong Bamiyan and an even stronger Afghanistan," Mohammed says, reading from his tattered notebook.

"Six hundred and forty-one years after Islam, Genghis Khan destroyed some of our most important cities, and we do not praise him. We should rebuild the Buddhas for our economy, but also because we should be the keepers of our own history."

Source,
http://www.thenational.ae/news/worldwide/unesco-bid-to-rebuild-afghanistans-bamiyan-buddhas-falters?pageCount=0

Why not Incentive for Peace in Daikundi?

Tuesday, 15 March 2011 20:47
Written by Wazhma Frogh

"It would be the luckiest days of the week, if we have our boiled potatoes, and each of us getting one of them" Amina, 9 year old living in Nilli, Centre of Daikundi.

I have been following Daikundi since 2008 after the deployment of Afghanistan's first female mayor in Nilli. Many of us in civil society and women groups struggled hard to get her required resources to prove her as the right choice, but we failed to receive tangible international support in the form of concrete projects.

I went to Daikundi for the first time in early March 2011. Though, the trip was for work purposes, the realities I witnessed there should be communicated to the society at large and especially to those who are engaged in the ‘community development' and ‘poverty reduction' projects in Afghanistan with millions of dollars.

While planning for the trip, I was advised to take food from Kabul since there are no markets in Nili, nor there are any stocks of food so in case the chopper doesn't come as planned, one should have some food to survive. Initially, I did not trust the advice, and questioned how thousands of Afghans living there survive on daily basis. The response from some of the ‘development practitioners' was very simple. Daikundi is basically a secure place and there is no insurgency and one of the two provinces in the country that does not have any PRTs (Provincial Reconstruction Teams). Therefore, it doesn't get aid as does its border province, Uruzgan for its insurgency and armed conflict ongoing.

After landing in Nilli, the mountain-locked district of Daikundi, I couldn't witness the presence of human beings around so thought maybe it's a very small community of around a hundred people. But as made my way through the snow and mud towards the city, saw small houses on peaks of the hills and spotted human heads around those houses. I don't know if it would be fair to call those mud shells as houses, made of four walls and covered by snow. According to the Provincial Governor's Office and its members of parliament, Daikundi has around 800,000 population.

They have no water, as the water level is too low and some people with better access use grenades to dig wells for water. It would be interesting to find out how those 'some' get grenades while there is'nt any obvious form of insurgency there. Daikundi is bordered by Uruzgan, and used to be a district of Uruzgan until it was delcared as a province recently.

People almost dream of electricity and a market of 5 shops for thousands of Nilli residents would be lucky if the shopkeepers can travel for days to get to a larger market in surrounding provinces for basic survival stuff.

While on my way to Department of Women's Affairs, saw small children around age of 4 or 5 stuck in the snow and mud while another child of 7 or 8 was pulling him/her out of the mud. This is the main road of the Nilli city, which is the centre. But it shouldn't be called a road, it's only a direction and if any adult can take themselves out of the mud , they should be awarded for courage and dedication- why to even think about small children?

Inside the Department of Women's Affairs, met a young girl around 9, crying so badly that couldn't help but to go to her and ask why. This was Amina, whose mother had passed away a couple of days before while delivering her 8th child. I asked Amina whether her mother died in the clinic. She suddenly stopped crying and stared as if I had asked her a puzzle. The elder girl who had accompanied Amina laughed out of sarcasm and didn't even respond. After asking a couple of other women, found out that there is a clinic but with almost no female staff, forget about female doctor- and they said in this mud and snow, a pregnant woman would anyway die on the way to clinic which takes around 8 hours from her village.

These are some of the very basic miseries, I won't even detail out the lack of access to education and other basic services as they become secondary to the dire need of struggling to remain alive in Daikundi.

The politics of international development aid in Afghanistan becomes clearer when one visits the most remote and most vulnerable communities of the country - aid for insurgency or insurgency for aid. What are the incentives for peace? While millions of dollars are poured into provinces plagued with violence and conflict, why don't provinces like Daikundi get attention to prove itself a real model for development and reducing poverty? And the Afghanistan Peace and Re-integration Programme with millions of dollars from foreign aid provides incentives of war to insurgents, is another certification of a policy that would eventually drive the young men from Daikundi to join insurgents and militants fighting in its surrounding provinces of Uruzgan, Ghazni, Zabul and Helmand.

"If the international aid is another parallel to counter-insurgency, then why to even name it international development aid", said a couple of young graduates who returned to Daikundi after completing their graduation at Kabul University. They said, "When we returned back, we used to encourage young boys and girls to study and get educated. But having been lost in poverty, we forget about education. It's only about a struggle to be able to remain alive each day, what happens tomorrow, we don't know".

Source,

http://www.tolonews.com/en/wazhma-frogh/2151

Afghans show solidarity with Japan: UNAMA

14 March 2011- Leaders and ordinary citizens throughout Afghanistan have stepped forward to pledge assistance and demonstrate their solidarity with the people of Japan. On Monday, the mayor of Kandahar pledged $50,000 to the government of Japan and in Bamyan and Dai Kundi residents and politicians organized vigils and issued statements to express their sympathy. On Friday northern Japan was rocked by a 9-magnitude earthquake that spawned a killer tsunami. Thousands of people are feared to be dead.


A group of Bamyan youth gathered Monday with a banner stating, “We are poor but are rich in our willingness to offer assistance to the people of Japan during your time of need.”

The Bamyan youth also announced their readiness to be called upon “for any possible help and support… as the government and people of Japan have contributed a lot in the reconstruction process of Afghanistan.”

“We ask the Government of Afghanistan to support and help the victims of the recent catastrophe (in Japan) based on its capacity," read their statement.

On Sunday Alhaj Qurban Ali Urozgani, the Governor of the Province of Dai Kundi, said “At this hour of grief and mourning in your country, I want to assure you that the thoughts and solidarity of Dai Kundi province officials and people will accompany the government and people of Japan.”

Source,

http://unama.unmissions.org/Default.aspx?ctl=Details&tabid=1741&mid=1882&ItemID=12667

Quetta Shazia Batool ki Report www.rahitube.com

Sympathy From Bamiyan to the People of Japan

Youth in Bamiyan took out a sympathy rally for the victims of Japan quake today in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Many youth marched to the top hill in front of the destroyed Buddha statues and held banners with words of condolence and sympathy messages for the people of Japan and silence for the victims earthquake and tsunami.

Source,
http://hazaristantimes.wordpress.com/2011/03/14/sympathy-from-bamiyan-to-the-people-of-japan/