Afghanistan's first national park aims to attract tourists

Five Civilians Gunned Down In East Afghanistan

October 27, 2012
Reports from Afghanistan say five civilians travelling in a bus in the eastern province of Ghazni have been shot dead.

Provincial officials said Taliban militants stopped the bus on October 26 in the Andar district, pulled out five people, and killed them on the spot.

Police recovered the bodies on October 27 from the roadside.

Deputy Governor Mohammad Ali Ahmadi said the five dead were from the ethnic Hazara minority.

Radio Free Europe 

ہزارہ برادری کی مشکلات

ہزارہ برادری سے تعلق رکھنے والے ہزاروں افراد اپنی جان کو لاحق خطروں کے پیش نظر سمندر کے خطروں کا سامنا کرتے ہوئے دیگر ممالک میں سیاسی پناہ لینے کی کوشش کرتے ہیں۔

 پچیش اکتوبر کو تقریباً ایک سو بیس ہزارہ برادری سے تعلق رکھنے افراد کو انڈونیشیا کی پولیس نے غیر قانونی طور پر ملک میں داخل ہونے پر حراست میں لے لیا ہے جو ایک کشتی کے ذریعے آسٹریلیا جارہے تھے۔ ان میں سے زیادہ تر کا تعلق پاکستان سے ہے۔

 گزشتہ سال سے لیکر اب تک کوئٹہ اور بلوچستان کے دیگر علاقوں میں ہزارہ برادری سے تعلق رکھنے والے کئی افراد کو قتل کیا جا چکا ہے۔ رائٹرز فوٹو۔

DAWN

Pakistan: Now or Never?

Perspectives on Pakistan

The killers of Quetta

By Matthew Green
OCTOBER 25, 2012

Cut-out cardboard hearts, stars and a slogan that cheerfully declares “The Earth Laughs In Flowers” adorn the classrooms of the Ummat Public School in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

The bright images cannot dispel the sense of foreboding shared by dozens of teenage girls seated at their desks, all members of the town’s Hazara community.

Soon they will finish their exams and expect to go to college. Only these young women will stay at home. A killer is on the loose in Quetta, and their parents are terrified.

Amina, 15, raises a hand.

“I wanted to go to the best college; my dad says ‘It’s not important.’ In our family everybody is frightened,” she said, as pupils in white headscarfs nodded glum-faced assent.

“I don’t want to live that life where I can’t get education,” she said. “I don’t want to be an ignorant person.”

In Pakistan, it’s not unusual to meet people who have suffered unfathomable grief at the hands of men who have arrogated the right to take another’s life in the name of religion.

But there is something uniquely dispiriting about seeing the ambitions of articulate young women being snuffed out by a systematic and preventable campaign of targeted killing.

The capacity of Pakistan’s militants to persuade themselves of their own moral authority was made clear this month when the Taliban issued a lengthy justification for its decision to shoot Malala Yousufzai, a 14-year-old schoolgirl who had championed female education.

The killer at large in Quetta is Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni extremist group whose adherents see members of Pakistan’s Shi’ite minority as infidels deserving of capital punishment.

Hazaras make particularly attractive targets. Not only are they Shi’ites, but they are also descendants of émigrés who escaped a previous wave of persecution in Afghanistan in the 19thcentury. Such “otherness” was not an issue in Pakistan in the past. Now, it is a death mark.

Attacks on Hazaras have been escalating since 1999, but this year the militants have beaten their previous personal bests, killing more than 100 in the first eight months of the year alone....Continue Reading... 

BBC; Protecting Afghanistan’s environment and tourist futureBy Andrew NorthBBC News, Bamiyan

Bamiyan and its fledgling tourism industry is under threat

If the high mountain lakes of Band-e Amir were not in a country in its fourth decade of war they would be world famous.

Outsiders lucky enough to see them today are often lost for words when they first set eyes on the ethereal blue of their waters and the Martian-orange and red cliffs surrounding them.

The lakes, in Bamiyan province, are Afghanistan's first-ever national park, and draw thousands of local visitors every year. The government hopes foreign tourists will one day come too.

If that sounds quixotic now, so too may the UN and the government's launch here of the country's first-ever environmental protection plan - with a solar-powered kettle one of its signature initiatives.

But for those living in Bamiyan's isolated mountain valleys, the most immediate threat is not the Taliban but drought, partly induced by human activity.

Climate change is making things worse and the lakes could be at risk too.

Glaciers in the province's Koh-e Baba mountains, the western end of the Hindu Kush, recede further each year.

The climate adaptation programme, as it's known, "is not luxury, it's life", says Bamiyan Governor Habiba Sarabi after climbing up to Qazan, one of 18 mountain farming communities involved in the $6m (£3.75m) scheme.


The high mountain lakes of Band-e Amir draw thousands of local visitors every year'Disaster-prone'

Some 3,000m (9,800ft) above sea level, this is always going to be a tough place to live and farm.

But it's got tougher as trees and vegetation have been cut down for fuel - creating the beginnings of a high-altitude dust bowl.

In an Afghan version of the Grapes of Wrath, more families are being forced to leave every year.

Like shaved heads, most of the hillsides are bare, with just the occasional stubble of green.

It also means villages are more exposed to "flash-flooding in spring and summer and avalanches in winter", says Andrew Scanlon of the UN Environment Programme.

But he is now overseeing the planting of new trees and turf along Qazan's valley.

Against the repetitive clanging of hammer on metal, workers in Bamiyan city are building scores of cleaner, more-efficient stoves....Continue Reading.... 

Insight: Pakistani death squads spur desperate voyage to Australia

By Matthew Bigg, Matthew Green and James Grubel

QUETTA, Pakistan/PUNCAK,Indonesia | Wed Oct 24, 2012 6:29pm EDT

(Reuters) - It was 3 a.m. when Abid Warasi and his friend clambered into an Indonesian fishing boat, joining 300 other migrants packed into the hold. Only a few days away by sea, Australia seemed tantalizingly close.

Six hours into the voyage, the craft overturned. The two teenagers clung to the upturned hull. One by one, survivors lost purchase and drifted away, their dreams swallowed by the warm waters of the Java Sea.

"When the boat capsized, the dead bodies came floating above the water," Warasi said, recounting his ordeal in the Indonesian hill town of Puncak, just south of Jakarta. "Our hearts were so sad for them and we were waiting for our own time when we would die."

The heroism that would ensure the pair survived 48 hours in the water is not merely testament to the bond of friendship that has united Warasi and Muhammad Muntaziri since their childhoods in the Pakistani city of Quetta.

Their determination is also a reflection of the ferocity of the persecution unleashed upon their ethnic Hazara community, who are almost all members of Pakistan's Shi'ite minority.

In the past year, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a Sunni extremist group, has turned Quetta into a hunting ground. Gunmen shoot Hazaras every few days while leaflets shoved under doorways warn they are infidels deserving of death.

Thousands choose to face the ocean's terrors rather than risk an encounter with the death squads stalking their city's streets.

"Mothers are selling their jewelry so that their sons can leave Quetta for abroad," said Khaliq Hazara, chairman of the Hazara Democratic Party, a Quetta-based political party. "We are under siege."

DETENTION CAMPS

The 10,000-km (6,000 miles) route from Quetta to established Hazara communities in the more genteel environs of Adelaide, Melbourne or Sydney is just one strand in an ever-shifting web of global migration.

But there are few starker examples of the impact troubles in faraway lands can have on domestic politics than Australia, where a growing influx of refugee boats has reignited a polarizing debate over immigration.

The government passed a law in August to revive a scheme to send asylum seekers rescued at sea to detention centers on far-flung Pacific islands.

Human rights groups condemned the move, saying people could be left languishing in malarial camps for years, isolated from relatives and unable to work.

Warasi and Muntaziri's sheer desperation raises questions over how far the measures will discourage men and women whose quest for a new life has echoes of the voyages of European settlers to Australia in the late 18th century.

"Every day there were killings," said Warasi, recalling life in Quetta. "We got chicken-hearted, like we were in a cage."

A CITY DIVIDED

Overshadowed by the forbidding hills that define the wild geography of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan, Quetta was once a town where ethnic groups and sects mingled freely. Today, LeJ is offering Hazaras a choice: leave or die.

In the neatly swept lanes of the Hazara enclave of Mehrabad, the fear is palpable. LeJ has turned swathes of Quetta into virtual no-go zones for Hazaras, who number perhaps 500,000 of the city's population of about two million.

As members of both an ethnic minority and Shi'ites, Hazaras make particularly attractive targets for extremists.

"If you went out in the morning you cannot be sure that you'd come back home," said Muhammad Mehdi, who closed his children's' clothing shop in an ethnically mixed market after gunmen went on a shooting spree in April. Like many Hazaras, he is now reluctant to set foot outside Mehrabad.

In the cheerfully decorated classrooms of the district's Ummat Public School, ambitious teenage girls fear their terrified parents will not allow them to venture into the city to attend college.

"We can be like Mark Zuckerberg, we can be like Bill Gates," said Farheen, 15. "We can show the world that we are talented."

A few minutes' drive away, grave-diggers have had to open a new section in the century-old Hazara cemetery to accommodate the rapidly growing number of gunshot and blast victims.

Activists say at least 800-1,000 Hazaras have been killed since 1999 and the pace is quickening. More than one hundred have been murdered in and around Quetta since January, according to Human Rights Watch.

The state's failure to protect them has fuelled Hazaras's suspicions that elements within the security forces still support LeJ, which was nurtured by intelligence agencies in the 1990s as a proxy force.

There are no official figures for the number of Hazaras who have left for Australia, but community leaders say thousands of people like Warasi and Muntaziri have paid people smugglers $10,000-$15,000 to attempt the do-or-die trip....Continue Reading.... 

Test of Afghan Pullout Leaves Residents Fearful

By YAROSLAV TROFIMOV

BAMIYAN, Afghanistan—Taliban checkpoints have mushroomed on the main roads leading here as the insurgency spreads into Bamiyan—the province selected last year to kick off the U.S.-led coalition's handover to Afghan security control because it was deemed the country's safest.

With insurgents and bandits openly roaming Bamiyan's remote districts and the Taliban blowing up food and fuel trucks on the road to Kabul, many residents here increasingly fear they will be overrun once the last coalition base in the province closes in April.

"Right over these mountains, they are waiting to launch rockets at us as soon as the foreign forces leave," said Ali Hekmat, dean of Bamiyan University's Education Department, pointing at the pink-hued cliffs ringing the provincial capital. "It is very easy to destabilize this province."

What happens here is a portent of things to come in the rest of Afghanistan, as the U.S. winds down its longest foreign war. The U.S.-led coalition began transferring security responsibility over provinces and districts to Afghan security forces in mid-2011. The entire country is slated to be handed over by 2014, the year when the coalition's military mandate ends.

President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney, when asked during Monday's presidential debate what they would do if the Afghans were unable to handle their own security by then, both reiterated their commitment to a 2014 withdrawal.

The coalition says the transition is progressing well, with three-quarters of the country's population already living under Afghan security control. The handover continues though the Taliban-led insurgency shows no sign of being defeated. In September, according to coalition statistics released Tuesday, the number of insurgents attacks was 1% higher than in September 2011....Continue Reading...