A shocking fact was admitted in a recent report from the UN Assistance Mission to Afghanistan (UNAMA) on the human rights situation in the country. It notes that the Taliban’s mass detention of Afghan girls and women has ethnic undertones.
The point is made in a report published in the Dari language on January 22. And touched on in an English article published February 2 on the UN website. The article states:
“The Taliban crackdown initially began in western Kabul, predominantly inhabited by the minority ethnic Hazara community – which has been the target of extremist violence for years – but swiftly expanded to other areas, including Tajik-populated regions and provinces such as Bamiyan, Baghlan, Balkh, Daykundi and Kunduz.”
Whether deliberate or inadvertent, the UN has raised a question of whether ethnicity is behind the Talibans most recent crackdown on women’s freedom in Afghanistan.
The Taliban claims it’s policing women’s clothing and only detaining those who it decides are immodestly dressed. But hiding ethnic oppression behind religious platitudes is not new to the human experience. And we know from multiple reports from girls and women who were detained that the abuse they receive is far more immoral and unethical than any doubts about their choice of Islamic veil. So what is the Taliban’s real aim here?
More pointedly, what is behind the ethnic bent to these detentions?
Violence against women in the Bosnian war
In April 1992, the Bosnian war broke out in the southeast European region of the Balkans. Leading up to the full-fledged violence, tensions has been rising in Bosnia and Herzegovina with nationalist Bosnian Serbs fomenting an anti-Muslim rhetoric that painted Bosnian Muslims as alien and a threat.
The three-year war became known for its indiscriminate killing of civilians. While these inhumane acts were committed by all warring parties, it is well-documented that the Serbs deliberately targeted non-military Bosniaks or Bosnian Muslims and Croats in areas under their control with a view to “ethnically cleanse” or eradicate them.
One of the most horrific practices to emerge from the Serbs ethnic cleansing goals was the mass rape of women. Military and civilian Serbs were said to participate, including raiding homes of Bosnian Muslims and pursuing systematic, violent rapes of the women and girls they found.
The use of rape as a weapon in the Bosnian war has been widely documented and numerous statistics on the number of victims have been verified and published, although there are varying estimates.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said it confirmed 12,000 girls and women were raped, while the European Union reported this figure to be as high as 20,000. Bosnian authorities claim nearly 50,000 girls and women suffered this violence. Experts argue the figure is likely higher as not all cases would have been reported.
Rape of women and girls was not a “side-effect”
While the number of victims vary, the studies agree on one thing – rape was used as a weapon on a large scale. Girls and women were systematically targeted on purely ethnic grounds to try and destroy their communities.
On October 6, 1992, the UN Security Council established a commission to investigate women’s rape in Bosnia. One of the findings was that not only was rape planned, but soldiers received orders to do so from their commanders.
It had ethnic cleansing motives with aims to impregnate women. As a tool of terror, it was also carried out with an instrument with attackers mutilating the girls’ and women’s genitals.
A number of soldiers told the commission that the purpose was also to create intimidation and fear so that residents would not dare to return to their communities and lands. [1]
A team of European researchers also reached a similar conclusion.
Simone Veil and Anna Warburton in their report published in 1993 also rejected any hypothesis that the culture of rape was a mere side-effect of war or an unwanted and arbitrary consequence.
Their study found in fact that rape was part of a planned policy of ethnic cleansing.
“Consciously and with the intention of degrading [Bosnians] and creating terror so that people leave their homes, thereby increasing the power of the invading forces.” [۲]
The widespread violence, including the destruction of houses, looting of property, and rape of girls and women was carried out not only with the intention to fight a war against another ethnic group, but ultimately the goal was that the Bosniaks would leave their lands forever and never return [3].
What happened in Bosnia in the 1990s was deeply shocking and rocked those who understood how deliberate it was.
The Taliban’s mass targeting of certain groups in Afghanistan
While there are many fundamental differences between the Bosnian conflict and the Taliban in Afghanistan, there are some similarities worth exploring.
Both the warring nationalist Serbs at the time and the Taliban are self-identified groups with an aim to establishing themselves as the dominant – if not the only – power in a region. In order to maintain this power, they identify all other groups that pose a threat. They implement a number of measures to physically expel the other groups or make life so untenable that it forces the other groups to fully acquiesce or leave by their own “choice”.
The recent UNAMA report on human rights in Afghanistan regarding the repression of ethnic groups reads in similar fashion to a 1992 UN report on Bosnia.
In particular, the treatment of Hazaras had until now been defined by UNAMA in terms of security concerns and religious differences. But in a recent report, the scope of this repression is stated in terms that express more of a purely ethnic motive. Moreso, the attacks on Hazara women and girls is linked to it.
Taken from the United Nations report
It’s the first time UNAMA has reported the oppression of Hazara women and girls as a distinct and separate fact, a separate action from other events such as the regular attacks on Hazara-majority residential areas and the targeted killing of Hazara clerics.
UNAMA has reported repeatedly on cases of Taliban forces creating an atmosphere of terror in remote areas against Hazaras, including killing Hazara clerics in Herat and Uruzgan.
Taken from the United Nations report
At first glance, these attacks may seem unrelated to the detention of Hazara women and girls in Kabul. Indeed, any attacks against Hazaras could be dismissed as simply part of the general insecurity Afghanistan is familiar with.
But a more serious look at these patterns should not be dismissed as circumstantial, especially in light of what has played out in other ethnically-driven conflicts.
The key components of the Taliban’s dogged pursuit of power are the same fundamental elements as what drove the ideologues in the Bosnian war: ethnicity + religion + territory.
Taken from the United Nations report
Long-standing ethno-religious divide
The conflicts between the Hazara and Pashtun tribes have a long history. For around a century and a half, bloody battles have played out between the two, and many painful tragedies have come to pass, including blatant land grabs, expulsion of families from homes, enslavement, and massacres.
As a sub-Pashtun group that basically considers Afghanistan their birthright, the Taliban regards the Hazaras as an “alien” ethnic group. During the last Taliban regime, Mullah Niazi, the Taliban governor in Mazar-e-Sharif, said in 1996 that the Hazaras had three options: become Sunni Muslims, leave Afghanistan, or die.
From the Taliban’s point of view, the majority Shi’ite Muslim Hazaras are all Rafizi or heretics. On page 174 of his book, the Taliban’s current Herat governor Noor Ahmad Islamjar calls Shii’tes a Takfiri sect or apostates, founded by a religious Jew.
Taken from the book of Noor Ahmad Islamjar, Taliban governor in Herat.
The ruling of Rafizi and Takfiri groups is clear in the Sharia [Islamic law] of Sunni Islam. According to many Sunni fundamentalists, Rafizis are worse than Christians and Jews and should be wiped out.
While Rafizi and Takfiri are theological concepts debated by religious scholars and Islamic faithful, the labels are harnessed as a code by which radical and fundamentalist groups find targets for their violence. In this case, these labels are used by the Taliban to identify the “other” group to fight, just as the Muslim “otherness” of Bosnians was key to the Serbs attacking them.
The recent UNAMA report shows that being Hazara brings an additional layer of oppression. In other words, the treatment of Hazara girls and women has an extra edge and should be a cause for concern on top of what is already happening to all Afghan girls and women.
The Taliban is playing the long game
Looking at current day Afghanistan through the lens of what happened in Bosnia, there are similar patterns of oppression deployed by the Taliban which suggest they have similar goals of ethnic cleansing.
The methods used in Bosnia may differ in intensity and application, but the parallels are clear. Attacks on ordinary people and seizure of lands, attacks on clerics and religious centers, and the violent targeting of girls and women are all methods used by the Serbs against the Bosniaks. And they are the key processes being implemented with consistency by the Taliban to terrorise and ultimately eradicate Hazaras.
The fact that the intensity is different in these two entirely separate historical experiences doesn’t change the fact that ethnic cleansing is in play. Whether it’s a short and sharp process, such as how the Serbs acted, or one that is gradually deployed over a long period of time makes no difference: the outcome is the same.
The terror being created by the Taliban in the Hazara communities is being silenced by the Taliban’s strict control of Afghanistan’s media and the self-censorship of terrified families that even worse might befall them if their wives, sisters and daughters expose what’s happening to them.
We need to refocus how we view the Taliban’s arbitrary mass detentions and assaults of girls and women in largely Hazara areas and provinces. It’s not simply an extension of their effort to restrict female freedoms across Afghanistan. But rather, it’s likely part of a much darker and sinister effort to ethnically cleanse the Hazara people into disappearing either through self-imposed exile or through Taliban-induced oblivion.
[۱] Allen, Beverly (1996), Rape warfare: the hidden genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis, P. 77.
[۲] Report on rape in Bosnia-Herzegovina to the EC foreign ministers by the EC Investigative Mission into the treatment of Muslim Women in the Former Yugoslavia (28, January, 1993).
[۳] Stiglmayer, Alexandra (1994), The rapees in Bosnia Heraegovina. In Stiglmayer, Alexandra (ed.) Mass Rape: the war against women in Bosnia-Herzegoina. Nebraska: University of Nebraska press. Pp. 85.
