Hazara

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Hazara in Afghanistan (2012)

The Hazara ( Persian هزاره Hazara ; also Hasara or - outdated - Hesors ) are an ethnic group in Afghanistan and surrounding regions, whose main settlement area is in the central Afghan region of Hazāradschāt (هزارجات) or Hazāristān (هزار‌ستان) is located in the Bamiyan Valley . More Hazara live in Pakistan . They are the third largest officially recognized ethnic group in Afghanistan after the Pashtuns and Tajiks , and their number is between five and ten million, depending on the estimates. The Hazara are Persian-speaking and, unlike the Sunni majority in the country, predominantly belong to the Shiite denomination. In Hazāradschāt , they speak a Persian dialect called Hazaragi .

Settlement areas

Ethnic map of Afghanistan, the Hazara area is dark green

The main settlement areas of the Hazara are the Afghan provinces of Bamiyan , Daikondi (formerly the northernmost district of Oruzgan ), Ghazni , Logar , Wardak and Kabul as well as other cities outside the Hazarajat. Another settlement focus is the Pakistani region of Hazara .

In addition, around 1.567 million of them live in Iran (1993, estimated) and around 956,000 in Pakistan, where they make up the majority of the population in Hazara Town, New Hazara Town, Hazara Colony and Mari Abad in Quetta . The settlement of the Hazaras in Pakistan began as a result of the genocide by Abdur Rahman Khan , so that many Hazaras in Pakistan now often see themselves as Pakistani and not as Afghans. Nevertheless, the Hazaras mostly learn Hazaragi as their mother tongue, whereby the local dialect of Hazaragi contains many words from Pakistani Urdu, English and Pashtun, its pronunciation has come close to Urdu and is known as Quettagi. In addition, a particularly large number (30,000) of Hazaras live in Australia. In Europe there is a noticeable number of Hazaras living in Scandinavia and Vienna. In Germany, on the other hand, there are relatively few Hazaras, although their share among the refugees arriving since 2015 is high.

Origin and descent

There are different views on the ancestry of the Hazara. The word hazāra is associated with the Persian word for "thousand" and is the Persian equivalent of the Mongolian myangat (мянгат), "thousand", as the name for the thousand of the Mongol army under Genghis Khan . At least a partial (Turkic) Mongolian ancestry is undisputed in the professional world, also due to the "Mongolian" appearance of most Hazara; this is largely confirmed by genetic tests on the Y chromosome . However, the name Hazara has been used for many heterogeneous groups throughout history. In the specialist literature, the consensus is apparently emerging that the Hazara are a mixed people who formed in the course of the Chagatai-Mongolian penetration in Khorasan from Turkic and Mongolian- speaking groups and their intermingling with the native, Iranian- speaking population .

The earliest known written mention of the word Hazara can be found in the early 16th century in the Baburnama , Babur's autobiography .

language

The Hazara are the second largest Persian-speaking group in the country after the Tajiks . In rural areas, especially in Hazāradschāt , which is named after them, they speak a peculiar and distinctive Persian dialect with many Turkish and Mongolian words, which is referred to as Hazaragi . In urban communities such as Kabul or Herat, the Hazara largely speak Dari, a local dialect of Standard Persian. It seems that Persian has only fully established itself among the Hazara since the 18th century.

Up until the end of the 20th century, a handful of Hazara spoke the ancient Moghol language near Herat , a largely unadulterated Mongolian that otherwise disappeared everywhere and may now be extinct. Without it being noticeable in the spelling, in phonology, in addition to the voiceless alveolar plosive , the voiceless retroflex plosive (e.g.موتر moʈaɾ ). Characteristic word endings are "ai" and "o". For example, “bač a ” (Dari for “boy”) becomes “bač ai ” (Hazaragi for “boy”).

religion

Most of the Hazara belong to the Twelve Shia within Shiite Islam . To this day they form an isolated and significant Shiite community in traditionally Sunni Central Asia .

Political situation and discrimination

Besudi tribal leader (1879)

After the fall of the Shiite Safavids and the establishment of modern Afghanistan, where they are both an ethnic and a denominational minority, the Hazara have repeatedly been victims of discrimination, especially by the Pashtun elite. Following the forcible capture of the Hazarajat, Abdur Rahman Khan committed genocide against the Hazara in the 1890s, and thousands of them were enslaved.

In the Afghan civil war , the Hizb-i Wahdat ("Party of Unity") emerged as a Shiite political-militant group that was dominated by the Hazara. Her spiritual and ideological father, Abdul Ali Mazari , was captured while fighting the Taliban in 1995 and murdered or died in a shootout. During the war there were repeated attacks on the Hazara civilian population. In 1993, in the attacks of the Jamiat-i Islāmi under Ahmad Shah Massoud and the Ittihād-i Islāmi under Abdul Rasul Sayyaf on positions of the Hizb-i Wahdat in Kabul, members of the Hazara population there were killed for the first time. The worst abuses were the massacres committed by the Taliban in 1997 when they retook Mazar-i Sharif and in 2001 after the recapture of Hazarajat. This was preceded, however, by mass executions of the Taliban by Hazara troops after their unsuccessful attack on Mazar-i Sharif in 1996.

In 2006 the Indian film Kabul Express by the Pashtun director Kabir Khan came under fire in connection with the discrimination against the Hazara; he was accused of racist insults against the Hazara. In literary terms, the Hazara discrimination was also discussed in the bestselling novel The Kite Runner by the author Khaled Hosseini .

Since the fall of the Taliban regime, Hazarajat has been regarded as a comparatively safe region until today (2015), where attacks and the cultivation of opium poppies for opium production are hardly widespread. If Hazaras move outside the Hazarajat, they must still expect to become victims of targeted terrorist attacks, especially because of their outwardly recognizable ethnic and religious affiliation. This applies in particular to attacks by the Taliban, but increasingly also to those of the radical Islamist terrorist organization Islamic State .

There have been very great advances in school education - including among girls - which are sometimes even referred to as educational miracles. Only because of a regional quota regulation of the Afghan government, which affects the discriminated Hazara minority, the proportion of Hazara in the student body has decreased. Women have more freedom with the Hazara than with other ethnic groups in Afghanistan. As governor of Bamiyan Province, Hazara Habiba Sarabi is the only woman in the country to hold this office. Another well-known Hazara is the doctor and politician Sima Samar .

In Quetta, the Hazara are particularly persecuted by the radical Islamist terrorist organization Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. For example, on October 4, 2011, 15 people were killed in a raid on a bus mostly occupied by Hazara in Quetta . Twelve of them were members of the Hazara. As a result, 400 relatives demonstrated in front of the treating hospital against discrimination against their people and accused the Pakistani government of failing to protect them. Between 2008 and mid-2014 alone, more than 500 Hazaras were killed. On July 23, 2016, an explosion caused by a suicide bomber occurred in the midst of a Hazara march in Deh Mazang Square in Kabul. The demonstration was directed against the routing of a new high-voltage line, which, according to the demonstrators, did not supply the Hazara settlement area. About 80 people were killed and 230 injured in the bomb attack. The so-called " Islamic State " claimed responsibility for the attack . The Taliban condemned him.

music

Hazara's music is based on singing, which is only occasionally accompanied by the long-necked dambura (similar to the Central Asian dombra ). The Jew's harp chang play exclusively women. Singing styles are categorized according to gender: women sing lullabies and men sing love songs. Daido is a special form of Ghazel and is sung without any instrumental accompaniment. The main occasions to perform music are weddings and Islamic holidays.

kitchen

The Hazara kitchen has some special dishes such as quruti (slices of bread in yoghurt sauce), nan- buta (thick flatbread), bosragh (cookies baked for holidays) and pirki (dumplings filled with spinach or potatoes).

tourism

The Bamiyan Valley where the Buddha statues of Bamiyan stood (2012)

Before the civil war and the Soviet invasion, up to 100,000 tourists visited Hazarajat annually to see the Buddha statues of Bamiyan , which were the greatest tourist attraction in Afghanistan before they were destroyed. For several years, donations from the Aga Khan have been trying to revive tourism in the region at great expense. In addition to folk festivals, various sports competitions are held and larger and more individualistic hotel complexes have been built.

Known Hazaras

Web links

Commons : Hazara  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g A. Khazeni / A. Monsutti / Ch.M. Kieffer, HAZĀRA , in Encyclopaedia Iranica , online ed. 2009
  2. ↑ T. Zerjal et al. a .: The Genetic Legacy of the Mongols. In: American Journal of Human Genetics (AJHG). Chicago 72. pp. 717-721. PMC 1180246 (free full text)
  3. ^ Franz Schurmann: Mongols of Afghanistan: An Ethnography of the Moghôls and Related Peoples of Afghanistan. (Central Asiatic Studies 4) Mouton, Den Haag 1962, p. 17
  4. ↑ Michael Weiers: Moghol. In: Juha Janhunen (Ed.): The Mongolic Languages. Routledge Language Family Series 5. Routledge, London 2003, p. 248
  5. ↑ Afghanistan: Emergency Aid Under Extreme Conditions Focus Online, January 2009
  6. ↑ a b National Geographic: The Hazara , February 2009
  7. ↑ Biography: Abdul Ali Mazari. Afghanistan Online
  8. ↑ Ahmed Rashid: Taliban: Islam, Oil and the New Great Game in Central Asia . IB Tauris, London 2002, ISBN 1-86064-830-4 , pp. 77, 83, 139
  9. ^ Human Rights Watch: Massacres of Hazaras in Afghanistan
  10. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ↑ http://www.dradio.de/dlf/sendung/buechermarkt/256991/
  12. ↑ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/isis-reportedly-kidnaps-30-hazara-shiites-in-afghanistan-zabul-province/
  13. ↑ Zafar Shah Royee: educated citizens. In: FAZ.net . September 5, 2011, accessed October 13, 2018 .
  14. ↑ https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/06/29/we-are-walking-dead/killings-shia-hazara-balochistan-pakistan
  15. ↑ Extremists shoot bus passengers. In: Frankfurter Rundschau . October 4, 2011, accessed October 4, 2011 .
  16. ↑ https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/06/29/we-are-walking-dead/killings-shia-hazara-balochistan-pakistan
  17. ↑ Kabul explosion: Islamic State 'admits attack on Hazara protest'. BBC News, July 23, 2016, accessed July 23, 2016 .
  18. ↑ Hazaragi Foods. hazaragifoods.blogspot.de, August 13, 2010