As one of the largest ethnic groups in Afghanistan, the Hazara people have endured various forms of oppression from Pashtun rulers and governments, including slavery, systematic expulsion from ancestral homes and lands, and massacres. These experiences have led some to consider Hazaras to be one of the “most persecuted people in the world”.
In the late 19th century, Pashtun ruler Abdur Rahman Khan sought to bring the Hazara people in their homeland of Hazarajat under his rule. He waged a brutal war against the community, which resulted in bloody “massacres, looting and pillaging of homes, enslavement” and the transfer of Hazara land to Pashtun tribes. It is estimated that Hazarajat lost some 60 percent of its population to ethnic cleansing, which has led some scholars to term the carnage a genocide.
Over the following decades, Hazaras continued to face repression, discrimination and socio-economic marginalisation. Many were forced to “conceal their identities” to obtain state identification. Until the 1970s, a large percentage of the Hazara population could not access higher education, enrol in the army or secure higher-level government jobs.
After the withdrawal of Soviet troops in 1989, Afghanistan descended into civil war between various armed groups. In 1993, President Burhanuddin Rabbani, worried by the positions that Hazara armed groups had taken in Kabul’s Shia-majority areas, decided to launch an offensive against them. Intense shelling, arbitrary killings of civilians and targeting of Hazara men resulted in hundreds killed and forcibly disappeared.
After the Pashtun-centric, ultra-conservative Sunni Taliban group took over Kabul in 1996, atrocities against the Hazaras did not stop. “Tajiks to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan, and Hazaras to goristan [graveyard],” was the mantra of the Taliban at the time. And its fighters made good on such threats.
And lastly on September 30, 2022, a suicide bomb blew himself up at the Kaaj education center in Dashte Barchi, a Hazara neighbourhood in Kabul, according to the Associated press.The majority of the victims were young females students.
