Christina Lamb - The Sewing Circles of Herat - My Afghan Years

The Hazaras had grown to expect a rough time from Pashtun rulers. In 1838 Alexander ‘Bokhara’ Burnes, a young Scot whose book Travels into Bokhara had been a bestseller, was sent as British emissary to the court of Dost Mohammed supposedly on a trade mission but in fact part of a network of British agents in Central Asia gathering intelligence about Russian plans to secure warmwater ports to the south which they had coveted since the time of Peter the Great. In his subsequent account Cabool , he wrote of the Hazaras as ‘oppressed by all the neighbouring nations whom they serve as hewers of wood and drawers of water’, adding that ‘many are sold into slavery and there is little doubt that they barter their children for cloth’. Worse was to come in the 1890s when the British-backed king Abdur Rahman massacred thousands and took thousands more to Kabul as slaves. When the Tajiks took power in Kabul, a minority themselves, they too did not spare the Hazaras. In 1993 Ahmad Shah Massoud’s men swept through the capital’s Hazara suburbs, killing an estimated 1000 civilians, beheading old men, women and children and stuffing the bodies down wells, cutting off hands and throwing them to dogs, and raping the women.

But the Taliban took this discrimination to new extremes. Not only did they see them as heretics – at almost five million people the Hazara make up Afghanistan’s largest Shia community – but they also resented the active role of women in Hazara society and the way they dressed, provocatively as the Taliban saw it, wearing bright full skirts and boots as well as lots of silver bangles and earrings and not covering their faces.

In August 1997, having captured Kabul but failed to take Mazar-i-Sharif, Taliban forces blockaded Hazarajat, cutting off all four access roads in an attempt to starve the one million Hazaras living just below the peaks of the Hindu Kush. No notice was taken of outraged protests from foreign aid organizations such as Oxfam that these people in the provinces of Bamiyan, Ghor, Wardak and Ghazni would die because their crops had failed in the continuing drought and they had already slaughtered all their animals and eaten all the grass.

Then, after finally capturing Mazar-i-Sharif in August 1998 when General Dostum fled to Uzbekistan and several of his commanders switched sides, the Taliban launched what witnesses described as ‘a killing frenzy’ in retaliation for the heavy casualties suffered when they had tried to take the city the previous year. Driving through the streets with white Taliban flags flying from their Datsun jeeps and machine guns mounted on the roofs, they peppered the streets with bullets. One witness described seeing them mow down a group of women on their way to a wedding, a small boy pushing a cart of bread and an old man grinding wheat. After one day of indiscriminate killing, they focused on the Hazaras, carrying out a house-to-house search for anyone of fighting age in the Hazara areas and shooting them on the spot, usually in the face or testicles. 4

The new Governor of Mazar-i-Sharif, Mullah Manon Niazi, who had distinguished himself as Governor of Kabul by stepping up the number of public executions, announced: ‘Hazaras are not Muslim, they are Shia. They are kofr (infidel)’. This was taken as official licence both to rape and kill. Shia patients were dragged from hospitals and shot and Mullah Niazi forbade their relatives from removing the bodies from the street for five days until wild dogs had eaten them, as Dostum’s men had done the same to the Taliban the previous year. Thousands more were imprisoned in metal shipping containers twenty to forty feet long that had been used to bring in Cold War arms supplies, and then were either left to asphyxiate or shifted to prisons in the south.

Some of these containers arrived in Herat where they came under the guard of Khalil Hassani and his men. Describing what happened as ‘among the worst of so many bad things’, he recalled: ‘One day when I was in Herat several old Russian trucks were brought from Mazar-i-Sharif on the way to Kandahar. They were carrying metal shipping containers inside which were Hazara prisoners. There were about 450 of them and they were all women and children – I suppose the men had been killed. It was still summer and the trucks were left in the square for two days in the baking heat and the children were crying for food and water but our instructions were to give them nothing and we refused to let them out of the containers for toilet or anything. I can still hear the noise, the desperate banging on the metal and the muffled cries that gradually grew softer. It was more than 40°C outside and must have been like a furnace inside. The old and the babies must have been dead.’

Coincidentally, that afternoon before meeting Khalil, I had wandered around the suburb of Kirani on the outskirts of Quetta, a labyrinth of mud-walled houses and tiny stores, which is mostly home to Hazara refugees. In a small dirt-floored mosque with no roof I came across a huddle of about thirty hungry and frightened Hazara women and children in vividly coloured but very dirty clothes, and a few old men. They told me they had travelled twenty days to come to Pakistan by truck then foot, from a village near Bamiyan, the town famous for the giant Buddhas carved into its mountains, which the Taliban had blown up earlier in the year in defiance of worldwide protest. Having got all the way to Pakistan, they had discovered they could not enter the refugee camps as the borders were officially closed so they could get no aid and would have to keep moving around or risk being picked up by police and dumped back at the border.

‘We left because we had nothing to eat,’ explained Asma Rosaman, a woman in a bright cerise dress with a red-rose patterned shawl, her three sons and three daughters clutching at her wide skirts. Usually refugees at least manage to bring out a quilt to sleep under and a kettle and pot. These had absolutely nothing with them beyond the clothes on their backs and stories of being forced to watch their men-folk burnt alive as the Taliban rampaged through their villages, demolishing their houses, raping women and killing the men.

‘My husband was killed when we escaped,’ said Asma in a voice too tired of tragedy to be emotional. ‘The Taliban followed us on horses. He was carrying our household goods so he was behind and they shot him. He was a wheat farmer but we had not had wheat for a long time because there was no rain. One lady in the village was pregnant and they locked her in her house and set fire to it with her children screaming. They killed children with steel rods and plucked out eyes. I saw them dynamite a cave where 200 people had taken shelter. I closed my childrens’ mouths so that no one would hear them. They killed 3000 people in one month.’

This was probably not an exaggeration. The details took a long while to come out in the world, only when the first refugees started to arrive in Pakistan, but testimony collected by human rights organizations suggests that between four thousand and six thousand people were massacred in Bamiyan after its surrender that August of 1998.

Another woman called Peri Gul with eyes like black olive pits tugged at my arm. ‘There were 300 killed in my village,’ she said. ‘They locked my husband in our house and set fire to it and beat me when I tried to run inside. Afterwards I had to beg bread for my three sons and daughters. Every house was burnt and they sprayed the fields with chemicals and set fire to them so no one had food. Mostly we just scraped moss from rocks. I even thought about selling one of my children but who would buy? Nobody had anything.’ I guessed she was in her mid-20s, ten years younger than me, but she looked old enough to be my mother. Clutching my hand with her calloused dirt-encrusted fingers, she sobbed, ‘We were innocent people just trying to survive. First they starved us then they murdered us. Why didn’t anyone do anything?’