Fieldnotes on Humanity

A report dated 10/19/1893 records that Amir Abdul Rahman Khan sold 10,000 captive Hazaras as slaves. September 25 of each year marks the remembrance of the Hazara genocide. Social media platforms such as X (formerly known as Twitter) and Facebook are flooded with commemorative messages from Hazara users using #StopHazaraGenocide. Today marks September 25, 1893, when the blood thirsty Amir Abdul Rahman Khan issued a decree in which he announced the Hazaras as infidels to be annihilated entirely. In his book, Siraj-al Tawarikh , Faiz Muhammad Katib, the official historian of the court of Kabul and a Hazara himself, records that more than 60 percent of the Hazaras were killed, enslaved, and displaced. According to Katib, more than 400,000 Hazara households ( khanwar ) were killed, enslaved, and displaced. If we consider an average household of 6 people, 2.4 million Hazaras had vanished, and their lands were usurped by Pashtuns, as Amir called the bounty of war.  September 25 marks a d...

My nephew Amir is ten years old and in the sixth grade. Yesterday, during a WhatsApp call, he asked me what the meaning of "citizen" is. What does it mean to be a good citizen? I said it depends on the angle from which you look at the meaning of "citizen." Before we become citizens, we are human beings. Then, when governments want to subjugate people, they impose a series of submissive and controlling systems on people to make them obedient and docile. This means that not only do they have to pay their taxes on time, but if the government wants to resort to violence against its own citizens or wage war against another nation, it asks them to fight for the government. In short, they become a handy tool for the government because they serve the government's purpose. This is the meaning of a good citizen from the government's perspective. Since we are living in a capitalist world, there is another definition of a citizen that you need to know. From the perspect...

Below is an image that went viral on social media among Afghanistanis. It shows a group of Hazara doctors volunteers from Dasht-e Barchi, a Hazara neighborhood in the West of Kabul, on board a helicopter bound for Kunar. The yellow barrel in front of them is filled with donated blood of Hazaras to the earthquake victims in Kunar, who are all Pashtuns. This is just from one group of Hazara doctors. Looking at this photo and the faces of these Hazara doctors who are going to save the Pashtuns makes me ask, what drives them to such unbridled enthusiasm for Pashtuns who are hostile to them? This happens in the backdrop of the ongoing genocidal campaign against the Hazara people by the Taliban, who are the Pashtuns. How can one absorb this contradiction? There is more to it, though. image source: from social media Now, this selfless act of Hazara doctors is both paradoxical and sad. This week, the Taliban decided to transfer the equipment of the only hospital that remained functional in D...

A second earthquake brought more devastation to Afghanistanis in the Southern part of the country. Now the death toll has passed 1,400 , and nearly 4,000 or more are injured. On September 3rd, I wrote a blog post about how "Afghan" women -I mean Pashtun women - are buried twice, once by natural earthquake, a second time by Pashtun men. The next day, on September 4th, an article in the New York Times by Fatima Faizi detailed the same concerns I had expressed the day before.  The summary of the article is that women die under the rubble while men are saved.  The reason why women are still under the rubble or remain under the rubble is that their male  mahrams  (lawful individuals or members of close family)   are all lost and dead under the rubble, and there is no mahram left to save their women.  On the other hand, the male rescuers who come from the village and the surrounding areas are not mahrams and by Pashtun tradition are not allowed to get close to w...

According to Reuters , the estimated death toll of the earthquake in southeastern Afghanistan has exceeded 1,400, and more than 3,100 injuries. It is heartbreaking to see this much pain in an already afflicted country, stretched resources, on top of a political crisis that has been ravaging since the Taliban takeover. But the saddest part of this earthquake is that women, girls, and children are the immediate victims. While earthquakes don't discriminate between their victims, society does.  I observed dozens of videos and photos taken by people on the scene or journalists who had visited the disaster-stricken area. In all photographs, men are rushing to recover bodies of men from under rubble, from trapped alcoves, or men who are injured, and then they are rushed to the helicopter and vehicles, but women are nowhere to be seen in the photos. Perhaps, they are not photographed due to the Pashtun strict cultural tradition towards women, or perhaps, they are being helped but not phot...