The Forgotten People

 

From the main bazar of Bamiyan, we went west through the main square. A grey escarpment appeared in the distance above the buildings’ horizon line, mountains which appeared to me wounded. As I looked upon it, I thought to myself that one day this mountain had been home to thousands of statues, delicate paintings, to music and dance and works of art that celebrated Afghan culture. But now it is completely ruined, with lots of cuts in its heart and has become a symbol of loss, particularly for Hazara people who are native to this area of central Afghanistan. I’m close to tears. I don’t want to look too closely. I was in Iran when I heard of the collapse of the Buddhas. Everyone around me at the time had felt as though our home had been violated, destroyed, as though now more than ever there isn’t any hope or reason to go back. And actually seeing them gone, gaping holes in the mountain-side, feels like that all over again.^[1]

During my trip to the Hazara provinces of Bamiyan and Daikundi in Afghanistan I came to witness the hardship and impact of horrific events on Hazara people, and how they still suffer from prejudices against them today. During most of the twentieth century and until the present, the Hazara have faced severe social, economic and political discrimination.^[2] Hazaras have been persecuted in- and outside of Afghanistan over the last 150 years, especially during the last forty years of war and conflict; it has even been said that Afghanistan has originated partly from the slaughter of Hazaras.^[3]

Australian writer Denise Phillips describes the Hazaras’ suffering as a deep “wounded memory”. This term was first proposed by French philosopher Paul Ricoeur “as a type of memory born out of enduring injustice and characterised by remembering, forgetting and particular emphases.”^[6] Similarly, Hazara artist Khadim Ali believes that Hazara people carry a deep sense of trauma which is not only “individual but social where the collective memory of a society is wounded.”^[7] This wounded memory is the effect of experiencing long periods of displacement, discrimination, turmoil and injustice, being victim of massacres and considered as “the Other”, an insidious ethnic prejudice that started in the late-nineteenth century, under Amir Abdul Rahman, King of Afghanistan.

Hazaras have been cast at the bottom of Afghanistan’s ethnic hierarchy, with systematic exclusion from key government positions, access to education and other crucial opportunities by the Pashtun dominated governments.^[8] In the social sciences, such imbalances in rights and power are often used to “contrast the concepts of culture, ethnicity and race with the concept of other, in order to highlight unequal power relationships.”^[9] As Andrew Okolie states:

Power is implicated here, and because groups do not have equal powers to define both self and the other, the consequences reflect these power differentials. Often notions of superiority and inferiority are embedded in particular identities.^[10]

The mainstream Sunni Pashtuns in power denigrate the Hazaras, who are Shia Muslims. The former are considered to be born into power and connected to great historical heroes, with a right of ownership to Afghan identity while the Hazaras are positioned as non-Afghan and not deriving from “original stock”. The propaganda has been trying to convey that, because Hazaras have Mongolian roots, they should be perceived as warlike, brutal, and undeveloped technologically.^[11] In fact, contemporary Hazara people have on average a higher percentage of educated people than the mainstream population in Afghanistan.^[12] This induces a certain fear within the Pashtun majority, lest the Hazaras attempt to integrate themselves into mainstream Afghan society.^[13] This suggests that the Hazaras function as an “other” category that helps sustain the self-identity and claims to power of the Pashtun majority.

The Hazaras have more than 2,000 years of history in Afghanistan and previously had their own territory known as Hazarajat or Hazarestan (the land of Hazaras), which is mainly located in the mountainous centre of the country and had been independent throughout its history.^[14] This independence ended when Amir Abdul Rahman attacked Hazara tribes (backed by the British Empire) in 1882.^[15] One of the main causes of this conflict was precipitated by “opposite tendencies towards centralization and decentralization, which led to tensions between the central government and the Hazara tribal leaders.”^[16] The preeminent author Faiz Mohammad Katib, who devoted his life work to Hazara history, recorded the inhuman attacks on Hazaras under Amir Abdul Rahman’s rule between 1880 and 1901 in his significant book Siraj al-Tawarikh (1912). At the time, the Hazaras were persecuted and eliminated—especially in the southern and eastern part of the country—with royal decrees sanctioning mass murder.^[17] This massive mobilisation of force was made possible by extensive state propaganda, declaring a Jihad or holy war against the Shia Hazaras, ordered by Amir Abdul Rahman:

In order to extirpate these irreligious people so that not a trace of them remains in those places and throughout the mountains and their properties be distributed among the Ghiljai and Durrani tribes, the royal court has approved as policy that a triumphant army made up of regular and tribal forces from every part of the “kingdom of the God given government” should descend upon the soil of the rebel tribes of the Hazarahjat so that not a soul of those wayward tribes be safe nor escape and that the boys and girls be taken captive…^[18]

This appalling and horrific period has been captured in Hazara poetry, music and visual art. In his painting series Kala Manar—Head Minarets (2012), Hazara artist Mohsin Tasha refers to the symbolic and barbaric acts of Amir Abdul Rahman when he ordered the building of towers (minarets) made from human heads. Hazara author Askar Musavi describes this as follows:

Thousands of Hazara men, women, and children were sold as slaves in the markets of Kabul and Qandahar, while numerous towers of human heads were made from the defeated rebels as a warning to others who might challenge the rule of the Amir [King].^[19]

These head minarets were used as a symbol of the King’s power and absolute authority, and a dire warning to other Hazaras to not fight back.^[20] In repurposing such symbolic imagery, Tasha demonstrates that these severe discriminations and barbaric acts toward Hazara people are not forgotten and their effects endure. In one of the paintings in this series (Figure 3), several heads are displayed in the centre of the work and, in front of them, a dead body is covered in a traditional white cloth, a Kafan, a shroud used to wrap up the dead. The corpse’s head rests on the legs of one of two other figures, who are seated on a red surface that appears to be a red cloth, or a river of blood. The piled heads in the background appear not to scale and are featureless, aged, darkened, large and looming. Their presence seems more real and tangible than the other elements in the work, yet the dead body in a wrapped white shroud at the centre of the composition draws our eyes towards it, emanating a bodily presence as if to suggest a recent death, implying that injustices toward Hazaras are still continuing. Through the use of classical Persian miniature painting techniques, the sensitive material detail seems less confronting, yet the symbolism in this work—through such harsh elements as severed heads, blood and dead bodies—as well as its relationship to Hazara history, has caused controversy in Afghanistan. This series of work was “forbidden” to be exhibited and, by order of the Afghan government’s Ministry of Culture, was confiscated from an exhibition in Kabul in June 2012.^[21]

Askar Musavi believes that, during Abdul Rahman’s rule, more than half of the entire Hazara population was massacred or driven out of their place of origin.^[22] In consequence, a large number of Hazaras fled to neighbouring countries: mainly to Iran, concentrated in the city of Mashad, and to Pakistan, in Quetta.^[23] However, despite many decades of refugee settlement and the large contributions and sacrifices they made to their host countries, Hazara people have never been treated the same as others and have always been considered secondary citizens.^[24] This massive displacement of a people over a considerable amount of time has caused significant issues for the Hazaras. For those who have been displaced, being part of an ethnic group without a homeland, in between a place of origin where they are generally unsafe and discriminated against and host countries that have difficulty accepting them, questions of belonging become a crucial consideration. As a Hazara refugee I have myself long thought and asked “where is my homeland?”, and written about such feelings in my poetry and art:

The homeland, a wooden table

At which we drank tea

And breathed a sigh of relief

just before the immigration police caught us.

The homeland

An old boat

Adrift on the wild tresses of the Aegean Sea

“Pray that the sea calms down

The clouds calm down

The winds calm down!”

the old captain was saying

just before we danced among the waves.

The homeland

A detention camp in Torbat-e Jam

With high cement walls

With a high barbed wire fence

With long queues

Bread, a letter, shame.

Tall-e Siah, Quetta, Istanbul, Nauru

The homeland perhaps is a hole in al-Khalil

That waits hungrily for my thirsty lips

Where is the homeland?^[25]

Hazara artist Khadim Ali’s grandparents are among those who were forced to flee from Bamiyan to Quetta in Pakistan, where he was born in 1978.^[26] Ali is one of those significant Hazara artists who has devoted his practice to bringing to light the issues faced by his people, their challenges and difficulties. His paintings draw on classical literary narratives and poetry to reflect upon the Hazaras’ present situation.^[27] He believes that the experience of trauma and loss has made the Hazara community live in a state of physical melancholia:

The history of the Hazara is always related to “loss”. A loss of their loved ones and losing their motherland. We have lived in a state of mental and physical melancholia, which forces us to live in the memories of the past. We recall our memories in a highly poetic manner, in our visual art, our craft and our music.^[28]

Ali’s key inspiration is the great Persian epic Shahname, written in the late tenth century, which his father and grandfather read to him during his childhood.^[29] He was fascinated by the main character of the epic, Rustam, who was portrayed as valiant and honourable. Ali undertook a journey to his ancestors’ place of origin, Bamiyan in Afghanistan, for the first time in 2000, while the Taliban were in power. He discovered in his travels that Rustam, the character he had so cherished, had been appropriated by the Taliban when they began to call themselves “The Rustam of Islam”, claiming the hero as their own. Ali’s shock discovery was considerable as these fanatics, who were ready to kill so called “infidels”, including Hazaras, had turned this hero against his own people. He recalls seeing the Taliban as “demon-like characters (…) in black, with beards and sharp features and dirty”,^[30] and as a result the demon has become a very poignant symbol in Ali’s work.

After returning to Pakistan, he began a series of paintings under the title Rustam (Figure 4), which feature demon-like figures. These creatures are often framed by soft white wings to show that they have extraordinary power and access to eternal life. In one such painting, a demon is reclining comfortably and at ease upon a statue of a seated Buddha. Their bodies seem to merge, one showing through the other, while the demon sits on top of what seems to be a pile of intestines.

Ali has a particular interest in the Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley. These national cultural icons were made in the fifth century and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001. For him, the ruins of the Bamiyan Buddhas provided a site from which to examine the situation of the Hazara people.^[31] Ali calls Afghanistan his “home” but at the same time, as a Hazara person, it is not safe for him to return and live there. In his mind, his birthplace, Quetta, has become a horrific place for his people and some of his relatives and friends have been among hundreds of people killed during “target killings” and other atrocities.^[32] He says: “I am deeply affected by an identity crisis, I am Hazara, I have my homeland in Afghanistan, yet live in Pakistan as a Shia…” He adds that the Taliban consider Shia Hazaras as pro-Iranian, because Iran is known as a Shia country.

Interestingly, while safer there than in Pakistan, such personal struggle and sense of loss of identity can also be seen among Hazaras living in Iran, who are considered unwelcome outsiders, as Others, too. A 2014 video and performance work, titled Ordugah (Detention Camp), which I made while in Mashad city in Iran, is based on a public event that honours Hazara refugees and their experience, including my own, while living in the suburb of Sakhteman, an area that is home to thousands of Afghans of predominantly Hazara ethnicity (Figure 5). A portion of this diasporic population fled to Iran as far back as 150 years ago, after the Abdul Rahman massacres, settling in the city of Mashad where they were renamed Barbaris and Khavaris.^[33] Although they had been granted citizenship by the government at the time, because of their ethnicity and Mongolian features, they have never been fully accepted into Iranian society, and are still directly and indirectly downgraded and marginalised. Other waves of refugees having settled in this area are Hazaras who left Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation (1979-1989) and the following civil war, as well as those who have fled the Taliban uprising.^[34]

 

During my time in Iran, initially living there as a refugee and later visiting, I have witnessed the discrimination against Afghan refugees, and particularly Hazaras. It could be said that suburbs like Sakhteman (where I lived for fifteen years), are a kind of Ordugah, a detention camp where undocumented, and even documented, refugees live in constant fear of being caught at police check points when entering or leaving the area for work or travel. Travelling to other cities is not easy, even for documented refugees, who are required to obtain a ten-day permit to leave, available only once per year under strict regulations. All Afghans are forbidden to live or travel in 14 of Iran’s 28 provinces, with the threat of being sent to official camps and then suffering deportation.^[35]

In my performance/video work (Figure 5) I use the suggestion of confinement and geographical control over Afghan refugees in Iranian suburbs, of invisible wired fences and walls surrounding refugee communities living on the fringes of main cities, through the use of thread and string wrapped around trees, concrete columns, across roads and intersections along the edges of Sahkteman, in an attempt to make visible the walls of the ordugah. I used more than thirteen rolls of thread (estimate length of each roll 250m), unpicked by hand by my mother from garments and fabric gathered from the refugee community, joining them together. The use of this fragile reclaimed material links the domestic and the community to the space that surrounds them in an attempt to activate and reveal the invisible barriers that confine them. The performance took seven hours to complete in its entirety, from 12 noon until dusk at 7 pm, stretching from the entrance of the suburb to my parents’ home, where I had previously lived. The work’s title, Ordugah, also refers to the official detention camps specifically built for Afghan refugees, where many Afghan men have been detained, including myself and many of my friends and relatives. These camps were designed to detain illegal Afghan migrants, or those who were caught working without official permission.

However, legal and legitimate Afghan refugees, a majority of which are Hazara, have also been held there and horrific stories of torture, beatings, humiliation and murder in these camps abound.^[36] In one such horrific injustice, between 400 to 650 Afghan refugees who had escaped from Sefid Sang detention camp were killed by Iranian military forces on 22 July 1999. This incident was featured in a film, Neighbour (2009), by Afghan director Zobair Farghand.^[37] The word ordugah therefore carries for many Afghan refugees a hard and sad truth, and memories associated with the deportation and loss of their loved ones.

Other performance and video artists, such as Francis Alÿs and Wafa Bilal, have made works based on the idea of otherness through geographical separation and segregation. For example, in his performance piece Green Line (2004, Figure 6) Francis Alÿs used green paint spilling from the bottom of a paint tin to mark the ground as he walked along the armistice border in Jerusalem. This border, known as “the green line”, was “penciled on a map by (Israeli Defense Minister) Moshe Dayan at the end of the war between Israel and Jordan in 1948. (and) remained such until the Six Day War in 1967 after which Israel occupied Palestinian-inhabited territories east of the line.”^[38] Alys’s Green Line acts as a political commentary, a poetic gesture in a historical reality, of harsh limitations imposed on a people who have been marginalised and have no power.^[39]

Iraqi artist Wafa Bilal has experienced feelings of otherness first hand. Persecuted because of being a member of a Shia minority during Saddam’s regime in Iraq, Bilal was forced to leave his country and go to the US, where he again experienced injustice and was branded an outsider. In a provocative work, Dog or Iraqi (2008), he asked online participants to cast a vote that would decide who would be tortured by waterboarding: a dog named Buddy or an Iraqi, Bilal himself (Figure 7). Waterboarding is a form of extreme interrogation carried out by pouring water onto the face of a prisoner, and in this work Bilal was voted to be waterboarded.^[40] Thus, in his work, Bilal criticises how some groups feel no accountability or compassion towards others from a different race, background or culture.

In this essay I set out to investigate and visually represent the internal effects of exile and “otherness” among minority people, in particular the Hazaras. Drawing on the personal and the collective, I have attempted to relate—through a visual arts practice with a theoretical and historical focus—issues of displacement, using reflections on exile and memory based on the experiences of my family in Iran. I have considered the effects of loss and the dangers and hardships of everyday life in Afghanistan, and pondered on past and present histories of persecution and displacement of Hazara people inside and outside Afghanistan. Millions of displaced Hazara people live in an in-between state, an “exile land”, in which connections with their original homeland are maintained through the cultural and social bonds of memory, family, culture, art, ethnicity, history and the shared experiences of displacement. As Denise Phillips, writes: “The Hazara narrators share experiences of persecution and dispossession, flight and relocation, loss and hope, and their stories have a valuable role as positivist, archival sources^.”41 The sharing of such personal narratives of experience hold great value for the recording and transmission of the histories in the making of these “forgotten people”.