Hazarajat

Bamyan Province of Afghanistan

The Hazarajat lies in the central highlands of Afghanistan, among the Koh-i Baba mountains and the western extremities of the Hindu Kush. "Its boundaries have historically been inexact and shifting, and in some respects Hazārajāt denotes an ethnic and religious zone. Its physical boundaries, however, are roughly marked by the Bā-miān Basin (see BĀMIĀN ii.) to the north, the headwaters of the Helmand River (q.v.) to the south, Firuzkuh to the west, and the Unai Pass to the east. The regional terrain is very mountainous and extends to the Safid Kuh and the Siāh Kuh mountains, where the highest peaks are between 15,000 to 17,000 feet. Both sides of the Kuh-e Bābā range contain a succession of valleys. The north face of the range descends steeply, merging into low foothills and short semi-arid plains, while the south face stretches towards the Helmand Valley and the mountainous district of Behsud.[3][10]

The northeastern part of the Hazarajat, is the site of ancient Bamyan, a center of Buddhism and a key caravanserai on the Silk Road. The town is situated at a height of 7,500 feet and surrounded by the Hindu Kush to the north and Koh-i Baba to the south.[3]

Hazarajat is mountainous,[11] and a series of mountain passes extend along its eastern edge. One of them, Salang Pass, is blocked by snow six months out of the year. Another, Shibar Pass, at a lower elevation, is blocked by snow only two months out of the year.[12] Bamyan is the colder part of the region; winters there are severe.[13]

Hazarajat is the source of the rivers that run through Kabul, Arghandab, Helmand, Hari, Murghab, Balkh, and Kunduz, and during the spring and summer months, it has some of the greenest pastures in Afghanistan.[14] Natural lakes, green valleys and caves are found in Bamyan.[15]

In the 18th and 19th centuries developed among the Hazara tribes and the Pashtun tribes, began to coalesce.[20] It has been suggested that in the 19th century there was an emerging awareness of ethnic and religious differences among the population of Kabul. This brought about divisions along "confessional lines" that became reflected in new "spatial boundaries".[21] During the reign of Dost Mohammad Khan, Mir Yazdanbakhsh, a diligent chief of the Behsud Hazaras, consolidated many of the districts they controlled. Mir Yazdanbakhsh collected revenues and safeguarded caravans traveling on the Hajigak route through Bamyan to Kabul through Shaikh Ali and Besud areas. The consolidation of the Hazarajat thus increasingly made the region and its inhabitants a threat to the Durrani state.[22]

Behsudi Hazara chieftains in 1879.

Until the late 19th century, the Hazarajat remained as a small part of Afghanistan and local chieftains obeyed from central government.[23] Joseph Pierre Ferrier, a French author who supposedly traveled through the region in the mid-19th century, described the inhabitants settled in the mountains near the rivers Balkh and Kholm "The Hazara population is very less but ungovernable, and has no occupation but pillage; they will pillage and pillage only, and plunder from camp to camp".[24] Only Pashtun rulers would control the area as they controlled it for centureis.[25]

Later in the early 1890s, the tribes of the Hazara were more noticed. Their population was about hundred thousand and were living in the central Afghanistan areas.[26]

During the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Colonel T. H. Holdich of the Indian Survey Department referred to the Hazarajat as "great unknown highlands".[27] And for the next few years, neither the Survey nor the Indian Intelligence Department succeeded in obtaining any trustworthy information on the routes between Herat and Kabul through the Hazarajat.[28]

Various members of the Afghan Boundary Commission were able to gather information that brought the geography of remote regions such as the Hazarajat further under state surveillance. In November 1884, the Commission crossed over the Koh-i Baba mountains by the Chashma Sabz Pass. General Peter Lumsden and Major C. E. Yate, who surveyed the tracts between Herat and the Oxus, visited the Qala-e Naw Pashtuns in the Paropamisus mountain range, to the east of the Jamshidis of Kushk. Noting surviving evidence of terraced cultivation in times past, both described the northern Pashtuns as semi-nomadic with large flocks of sheep and black cattle. They possessed an "inexhaustible supply of grass, the hills around being covered knee-deep with a luxuriant crop of pure rye".[29] Yate noted clusters of kebetkas, or the summer dwellings of the Qala-e Naw Pashtuns on the hillsides, and described "flocks and herds grazing in all directions".[30][31]

The geographical reach of the authority of the Afghan state was extended into the Hazarajat during the reign of Abdul Rahman Khan. Caught between the strategic interests of foreign powers and disappointed by the demarcation of the Durand Line in southern Afghanistan, which cut into Pashtun territory, he set out to bring the northern peripheries of the country more firmly under his control. This policy had disastrous consequences for the Hazarajat, whose inhabitants were singled out by Abdur Rahman Khan's regime.[32]

Two farmers tend to a potato field near the town of Bamyan

In the 1920s the ancient Shibar Pass road which leads through Bamyan and east to the Panjshir Valley was paved for lorries, and it remained the busiest road across the Hindu Kush until the building of the Salang tunnel in 1964 and the opening of a winter route. Hazaras migrated to cities and to surrounding countries, where they became laborers and undertook the hardest and lowest-paid work.[3]

In 1979, there were reportedly less than half million Hazaras in the Hazarajat and Kabul.[33] As the Afghan state weakened, uprisings broke out in the Hazarajat, freeing the region from state rule by the summer of 1979 for the first time since the death of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan some Hazara resistance groups were formed in Iran, including Nasr and Sipah-i Pasdaran, with some being "committed to the idea of a separate Hazara national identity".[34] During the war with the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, most of the Hazarajat was unoccupied and free of Soviet or state presence. The region became ruled once again by local leaders, or mirs, and a new stratum of young radical Shiʿi commanders. Economic conditions are reported to have decreased in the Hazarajat during the war.[35]

The group ruling Hazarajat was the Revolutionary Council of Islamic Unity of Afghanistan or Shura-i Ettefaq, led by Sayyid Ali Beheshti, who created a de facto proto-state. The region's geographic nature and un-strategic location meant that the government and Soviets ignored it as they fought rebels elsewhere. This effectively allowed the Shura-i Ettefaq administration to rule over the region and give autonomy to the Hazaras. Their politically opposing groups were the pro-Iran Nasr and the Khans, who were mostly educated, secular and left-wing.[36][37] The Shura wanted a return to the 19th century status quo whiereas the Nasr wanted an Iranian-style government of clerics. Between 1982 and 1984, an internal civil war caused the Shura to be overthrown by the Sazman-i Nasr and Sepah-i Pasdaran groups. However inter-factional rivalry continued thereafter. Most of the Hazara groups united in 1987 and in 1989 formed the Hizb-i-Wahdat.[37]

During the rule of Taliban, once again violence struck Hazarajat. In 1997, a revolt broke out among Hazara people in Mazar-i-Sharif when refused to be disarmed by Taliban; 600 Taliban were killed in subsequent fighting.[38] In retaliation, the genocidal policies of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan's era was adopted by Taliban. In 1998, six hundred Hazaras were killed in the north; the intention was ethnic cleansing of Hazara.[39] At that stage, Hazarajat did not exist as an official region; the area was divided between the administrative provinces of Bamyan, Ghor, Wardak, Ghazni, Oruzgan, Juzjan, and Samangan.[35]

The Hazaras constitute the majority of the Hazarajat population, with sizable Tajiks, Aimaqs and Pashtuns minorities.

Dari language is the official language in Hazarajat.