The Hazara of Central Afghanistan

Abstract

The last three decades of war and turmoil in Afghanistan have left the country in tatters, and despite five years of relative stability under the Karzai government, many tensions and conflicts still remain just below the surface. Among these tensions are the ethnolinguistic, religious, and sectarian conflicts that have always been a part of Afghanistan but that have been fundamentally altered by the decades of war, revolution, and insurgency. Although the status ranking of the groups appears on the surface to be relatively unchanged, in fact groups at the bottom of the pecking order-many of whom participated in the fighting to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in the 1980s and then to rid Afghanistan of the Taliban in 2001, and have suffered greatly from the years of war-are now emboldened and beginning to demand a greater role in the Afghan power structure. Among the ethnolinguistic groups demanding a new role in Afghanistan are the Hazara. This group has long suffered social, economic, and political discrimination and disenfranchisement in Afghanistan, but they vow that they will not go back to their subordinate status in a new Afghanistan. Time will tell.