Azaranica is a non-biased news aggregator on Hazaras. The main aim is to promote understanding and respect for cultural identities by highlighting the realities they face on daily basis...Hazaras have been the victim of active persecution and discrimination and one of the reasons among many has been the lack of information, awareness, and disinformation.

Monday, October 8, 2012

A DESPERATE VOYAGE: HOW MUCH WOULD YOU RISK TO START A NEW LIFE IN AUSTRALIA?

"I could see the death in front of me" — listen to the hair-raising reality of seeking asylum in Australia. Two ship-wrecked asylum seekers cheat death, make a daring escape, and now face the wrenching choices of a life in limbo.

“ Hi Aubrey, it’s Barat Ali Batoor. I’ve escaped. I’m on the way to Jakarta. Where are you?”


FIRST DAY: HAZARA ASYLUM SEEKERS HUDDLING BELOW THE DECK OF THE BOAT ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE JOURNEY TO AUSTRALIA. MOST PASSENGERS WERE INSTRUCTED TO STAY OUT OF SIGHT TO AVOID DRAWING SUSPICION FROM OTHER VESSELS.

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“ Now I can feel how the death is, how you see the death. When you see it really close to you.”
“ The boat is not in a good condition to take you further. The water is also very bad. So if you go ahead, I will take you, but that is completely, 100 per cent death and you will be responsible for your lives.”
“ We can’t live in Afghanistan or Pakistan. If I got back to Afghanistan or Pakistan, I will be killed.”


It was 5am when I was woken by a phone call.


"Hi Aubrey, it's Barat Ali Batoor. I've escaped," he said, his voice buzzing with adrenaline. "I'm on the way to Jakarta. Where are you?"

Just the previous day, I had been talking to Batoor on the phone and he had been in despair. Despair because Batoor had made a break for Australia in a shoddy wooden boat with more than 90 other Hazara asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Pakistan. The boat had nearly sunk in rough seas, and had been forced to run ashore in a remote corner of western Java. After two days stranded in the jungle, they had been captured.

When Batoor had first called, he had been on his way to immigration... Continue Reading... 

Sunday, October 7, 2012

[David Ignatius] Beyond the Afghan dead end

WASHINGTON ― While the overlooked war in Afghanistan grinds on, a group of officials in Washington, Kabul and Islamabad are exploring a bare-bones strategy that would narrow each side’s demands to a set of minimum conditions for escaping the current diplomatic dead end.

The aim is to create a pathway for the withdrawal of U.S. and NATO troops from a war that almost nobody sees as “winnable” by military force alone. The goal is a framework for political transition where each side’s demands are boiled down to the irreducible essentials ― providing a better deal for each party than they could get from battling on.

U.S. officials involved in the informal discussions liken this approach to the 1993 Downing Street Declaration on Northern Ireland that narrowed Catholic and Protestant demands to the basic items that then created space to negotiate the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that ended the civil conflict there.

U.S. officials have explored such an approach with Gen. Ehsan Ul-Haq, a former chief of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate and a former chairman of the Pakistani joint chiefs of staff. He outlined his seven-point “road map” during a recent conversation at the Nixon Center in Washington. The aim of this exercise, he said, was to focus on political transition, rather than the military impasse.

Haq sees two baseline U.S. demands: No al-Qaida forces in Afghanistan, and no return to the Taliban’s oppressive policies toward women; the Taliban, according to Haq, has just one irreducible demand, for no more foreign forces in Afghanistan....Continue Reading.... 

Pakistan: Shia Man 'Mohammad Yaseen' Martyred in Quetta

Another Shia Muslim was gunned down by the Wahhabi terrorists in Quetta Balochistan on Sunday at Nechari Road. 

Quetta, Pakistan (Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Another Shia Muslim was gunned down by the Wahhabi terrorists in Quetta Balochistan on Sunday at Nechari Road.

Mohammad Yaseen son of Mohammad Yameen was martyred in the firing of Wahhabi militants of banned terrorist outfits of Lashkhar-e-Jhangvi and Taliban at Nechari Road Quetta. He belongs to Shiite Hazara Community of Quetta and residence of Zainabya Street of Nechari Road Quetta.

Shaheed Mohammad Yaseen was the motor mechanic. The enraged protestors staged sit-in protest outside the Balochistan High Court in Quetta along with the burial of martyr Mohammad Yaseen to condemn the role of Judiciary and Government over the genocide of Shiite Muslims in Balochistan.

About 14 Shiite Muslims were gunned down by the Wahhabi militants in Quetta in month of September but not a single terrorist was detained by the Government and law enforcement agencies.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Doubt Cast on Afghan Mining

U.S. Says High Cost of Railway May Quash a Pillar of Kabul's Economic Strategy

By DION NISSENBAUM

WASHINGTON—Afghanistan's hopes of transforming its $1 trillion in mineral deposits into an economic engine could be derailed by obstacles to the construction of a railway system needed to transport minerals out of the country, according to a draft report by the U.S. military.

Researchers working for the U.S. military have concluded that it could cost more than $54 billion to build and run a railway network across Afghanistan, a price the report says could make some large-scale mining economically unviable in one of the world's poorest countries.

The conclusions, found inside an 80-page draft report commissioned by the Department of Defense that was viewed by The Wall Street Journal raise major questions about Afghanistan's ambitious plans to convert its valuable mineral deposits into a reliable economic base.

Janan Mosazai, a spokesman for Afghanistan's Foreign Ministry, questioned the high price-tag and predicted that the benefits of a nationwide rail network would outweigh the costs in the long run.

"Connecting Afghanistan to the region's established railway networks is a critical component of realizing the vision of an economically integrated heart of Asia region, with Afghanistan at its center," Mr. Mosazai said.

U.S. officials declined to comment on the preliminary report.

As the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan winds down and billions of dollars in aid dwindles, American and Afghan leaders are working to fuel the South Asian nation's anemic economy with money from oil, natural gas, copper, iron and other mining deals.

Afghan officials hope to generate $300 million from mining projects—about 15% of the civilian budget—by 2016. Over the next 12 years, Afghan leaders hope mining revenue will make up half of the country's GDP. Afghanistan has no large-scale mining projects in operation yet.




Backed by U.S. Defense Department strategists, the Afghan government has been aggressively selling off its biggest mineral interests to companies from China, India, Canada and the U.S., from whom it hopes to collect licensing fees and royalties.

The U.S. began touting minerals as a possible economic savior for Afghanistan in 2010, when it trumpeted its estimate that the nation was home to nearly $1 trillion in potential resources.

But Afghanistan's mining prospects have been delayed by a series of complications—from bribery allegations that sidelined one mining minister to insurgent attacks that pose a security challenge to development.

One of the biggest evolving projects—plans by India's government and a private Canadian company to develop a massive iron-ore deposit in central Bamiyan province—will require a reliable railway system in a country with virtually no rail.

Chinese officials are conducting their own analysis of the country to determine if it makes sense for them to build a railway as part of their copper project at Mes Aynak, a site outside Kabul that Chinese state-owned companies have pledged to spend $3.5 billion to develop.

But the U.S. military's researchers, who warned that the new draft study was based on a variety of unpredictable measures that could alter the dim projections, outlined hurdles that will be difficult to overcome.

Getting iron ore out of the country would require construction of up to 3,000 miles of track through 16,000-foot mountain ranges that, in some places, would need a large number of bridges and tunnels, the report concluded.

Because of the daunting terrain between Bamiyan and Kabul, it would cost nearly $7.5 billion to build one 600-mile section of rail, including double tracking in mountainous areas.

The report concluded that there appeared to be no good rail route to transport iron ore out of Bamiyan, the remote province at 9,000-feet that was home to towering Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. "Neither the segments between Kunduz to Bamiyan or Bamiyan to Kabul showed grade profiles conducive to heavy-haul iron ore traffic," the draft study says.

The best alternative, the researchers found, would be a 2,260-mile rail network linked to Pakistan that would cost more than $45 billion by 2040. Even in that case, the study concluded, the project would cost $10 billion more than it was worth.

If investors were to build the rail to Pakistan, Western officials said that the neighboring nation's railroad system is so dysfunctional that linking Afghanistan's mineral routes to Pakistan would be a gamble in itself.

"I don't think it is very realistic to think about Pakistan as a railway route," said one Western official in Afghanistan who works on mining issues. "Pakistan is a mess."

Afghanistan is also constrained by the fact that neighboring nations use three different types of track, which complicates its own ability to build a rail route that could link to the adjacent countries.

Western officials familiar with the report's contents privately questioned the research estimates and said Afghanistan will be able to pursue some major projects—including the Chinese copper deal—that can use trucks rather than rail, to transport the minerals.

Researchers are considering other potential routes out of the country as the iron-ore project moves forward. The Indian-Canadian project developers are expected to spend at least three years exploring the 1.8-million ton iron deposit before they decide if it is worthwhile to extract the minerals and transport them out of the country.

While the Afghan government has been pushing China to complete its study and build the rail line, there is a growing consensus among Western officials involved in mining that China is unlikely to build rail in Afghanistan because it isn't essential to move its copper out of the country.

Moreover, no rail line in Afghanistan will be worth building, the military report concluded, unless it would transport the iron ore.

"A general-purpose railway is never going to be economic in Afghanistan," said the Western official in Afghanistan. "If the Afghan authorities are keen on that they are essentially saddling themselves with a liability."

Write to Dion Nissenbaum at dion.nissenbaum@wsj.com

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

کوئٹہ فائرنگ میں دو سرکاری ملازمین ہلاک



آخری وقت اشاعت: جمعرات 4 اکتوبر 2012 ,‭ 05:37 GMT 10:37 PST

پاکستان کے صوبہ بلوچستان کے دارالحکومت کوئٹہ میں نامعلوم افراد کی فائرنگ کے نتیجے میں دو سرکاری ملازمین ہلاک اور ایک زخمی ہو گیا ہے۔

حکام کے مطابق کوئٹہ سے پچیس کلومیٹر شمال کی جانب علاقے کچھلاک میں نامعلوم افراد نے ایک گاڑی پر فائرنگ کی۔

اس فائرنگ کے نتیجے میں محکمہ خزانہ کے دو اہلکار ہلاک اور ایک زخمی ہو گیا۔

ان تینوں افراد کا تعلق ہزارہ قبیلے سے ہے۔حکام کے مطابق یہ تینوں افراد کوئٹہ سے پشین جا رہے تھے جب ان کو نشانہ بنایا گیا


One killed, two injured in Quetta firing

October 04, 2012 - Updated 1033 PKT
From Web Edition




QUETTA: A man lost his life in a firing incident while two others were wounded in a suburban area of Quetta Thursday morning, Geo News reported.

According to police, the incident took place in the main market of Kachlak area where two unknown gunmen opened indiscriminate fire on a car on National Highway and fled from the scene.

As a result of firing, three passengers of the car were critically injured.

The injured were being shifted to Quetta when one of the injured men succumbed to his injuries. The three men were taken to Civil Hospital from where one victim was shifted to CMH.

Further investigation is underway.

کوئٹہ:کچلاک میں فائرنگ سے ایک شخص ہلاک،2زخمی




 کوئٹہ کے نواحی علاقے کچلاک میں نامعلوم افراد کی فائرنگ سے ایک شخص جاں بحق جبکہ دو زخمی ہوگئے۔ پولیس کے مطابق واقعہ کوئٹہ کے نواحی علاقے کچلاک کے مین بازار میں پیش آیا جب دو نامعلوم مسلح افراد نے قومی شاہراہ پر ایک گاڑی پر اچانک اندھادھند فائرنگ کردی اور موقع سے فرار ہوگئے۔ فائرنگ کے نتیجے میں گاڑی میں سوار تینوں افراد زخمی ہوگئے، انہیں طبی امداد کے لئے کوئٹہ منتقل کیاجارہا تھا کہ ایک شدید زخمی راستے میں ہی دم توڑ گیا، تاہم جاں بحق شخص اور دونوں زخمیوں کو سول اسپتال منتقل کردیاگیا،بعد میں ایک شدید زخمی کو سی  
 ایم ایچ منتقل کردیاگیا، واقعہ
  کی مزید تحقیقات جاری ہیں۔

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