Fieldnotes on Humanity

In my earlier blog post , I alluded to candle lighting, but I did not elaborate on it. The candle lighting is important specially at the night of 40th anniversary of t hose 80 (or more) people who lost their lives and more than 250 wounded on July 23, 2016 . In this post, I'm going to call your attention to some of its important aspects of lighting candles. I will explain why it is symbolically significant for Hazaras - and maybe others who sympathize with the cause - to simultaneously light candles in order to commemorate the lost ones' memories, while reemphasizing on their nonviolent movement against unjust and discriminatory policy of the central government. Symbolically, candle lighting is intrinsic to the quality of life, the very matter that the movement has based upon. It directly relates with the nature of our demands, and with our struggle against an autocratic management, which does not only listen to its citizens, but tacitly allows terrorists to kill our ...

Now, it is clear that we are battling with a government that is facing a crisis of legitimacy, that its leadership has lost its ethical credibility due to persistent lies and deceptions. What the  Enlightenment Movement, at this point, can do is to defiantly answer to government's demands and rules by using tools of civil disobedience. It does not have to be feigning illness to go to work, or resigning from a post; although these tactics are important, currently, it is unexpected and unacceptable for any Hazaras to resign from any government job in protest at its discriminatory policy. The Hazaras must stay in their posts in order to remain as a conduit of communication and information between people and government. Afghanistan has not experienced nonviolent movements before, therefore we have to look at other nonviolent movements in other countries. One of the most recent nonviolent movement took place in Iran in which the pro Green Movement  turned their demands and anger...

At this point, we all know what happened with the nonviolent Enlightenment Movement on July 23rd, 2016. The government is obstinately resistant to hear the movement's demands, not only that, but its security apparatus did not cooperate with peaceful protestors, and in some way, it showed a tacit green light to terrorist to kill the peaceful protesters. The numbers of casualties have increased, there are now over 90 dead and over 200 individuals fatally injured. Some are in critical condition and need to be flown to another country for better medical operation.  The movement's leadership has recently announced and warned the Afghan government that if there legitimate demands won't meet in near future, they are going to come back to the streets again. This time their tactics could be different than before, where government's tactic to block the streets with containers will not be enough.  While coming back to the streets is one of the options to raise our v...