Fieldnotes on Humanity

During the chaotic withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, thousands of people stormed the Kabul airport. In a desperate attempt to escape the Taliban, some climbed onto a moving military cargo aircraft on the runway. At least two individuals fell from the sky, and one became trapped in the plane's wheel. A video taken by a cellphone from inside the plane shows a lifeless body and its limbs swaying violently in the wind at a high altitude. It was later reported that human remains were found lodged within the aircraft's wheels. Just days later, a gun store in Auckland, New Zealand, began selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words "Kabul Skydiving Club." Beneath the text was an image of two people who had fallen from the plane, captured in their fatal descent. At the same time, these same T-shirts were sold on the Etsy website in America. Today, I came across the picture of those shirts again, so I looked them up online to see if they still exis...

Yesterday, I saw Amir my newphew's homework. The title of one of his readings was "Needs and Wants." He had answered one of the questions incorrectly. The question was, "What did you learn in paragraph 4?" It was a multiple-choice question. Amir chose, "Life is hard without a phone."  But the correct answer was: "Wants can make life easier and more fun." Implicitly what it says is that your personal desires (wants) are a legitimate pathway to happiness and an easy life. This is the textbook example of cultivating a culture of greed. It is deliberate conditioning of children towards perpetual wanting. The entire edifice of capitalism is built on this very foundation: to become an endless consumer, fulfilling desires.  Now, think about it. a 10-year-old boy, who understands very little about wanting and having, implicitly being told/taught that happiness and enjoyment are synonymous with possessions. This is how the seeds of greed are planted. ...

For the past few days, I have not been able to talk to my family members, and like me, thousands of diaspora Afghanistanis have not been able to speak to their loved ones. Two days ago, the Taliban, an ethno-religious fascist group, imposed a wholesale internet blackout in Afghanistan. First, they severed the fiber-optic internet connection, and then yesterday, they shut down the telecommunication. So, why did the Taliban shut down the internet in the entire country? This act of digital authoritarianism is clearly linked to the core tenets of historical fascism. To grasp it, let's do an autodidactic practice. Copy and paste the following questions one by one on Google and press enter, and see what comes up. What constitutes the core of fascism? What is fascism, anyway? What is the goal of a fascist system? Whatever answer you get, you will learn that one of the key features of fascist regimes is relying on controlling information to suppress citizens and cement their centralized co...

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...

Afghanistan's modern history is shaped by significant violent events, wars, coups, and foreign invasions. One such event took place on August 15, 2021. On this day, Ashraf Ghani fled the country without notifying his cabinet and security apparatus, and so, he let the Taliban take over without any fight. Today marks the 4th year of the fall of Kabul to the hands of the Taliban. Though outwardly bloodless in its first hours, what followed in the coming days was nothing but a bloody, violent takeover.   It is a dark day by any measure. The fall of Afghanistan brought an abrupt end to the Hazara's liberation, a period that brought a brief respite to their relentless persecution and genocide. Today, Hazaras are being completely excluded from politics, barred from participating in government programs, contracts, and barred even from occupying menial jobs in their own districts and principalities. Thousands of Hazara families are being evicted from their villages and homes; instead, ...

American anthropologist Louis Dupree, in the early 1980s, coined the term "migratory genocide" in reference to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent displacement of hundreds of thousands of Afghanistani refugees to neighboring countries. His point was that the Soviet invasion had caused the forced displacement of the local population. In other words, Soviet forces deliberately employed military tactics to make people abandon their homes.  Now, the Taliban are doing precisely what the Soviets did, even worse than that but they are doing it against the Hazaras people. Recently, in the Panjab district in Bamiyan province, the Taliban forcibly evicted 25 Hazara families from their homes , essentially imposing forced displacement. Since August 2021, more than a thousand families in different regions of Hazaristan (or Hazarajat) have been forcibly displaced from their homes and villages. This is a clear example of the same "migratory genocide" or what coul...

My early education began with poetry recitation. And so goes the answer when people have asked me, so far, what made me interested in poetry. There is a grain of truth in it but that is a whole different story that I need to write later. But now, an Iraqi poem. I first heard this poem in Farsi, not Arabic, a long time ago in Iran. I was a refugee. I was attending a poetry gathering when a young Hazara poet stepped up to the podium and said, “Today I’d like to read a poem by an Iraqi poet.” I don’t remember if he mentioned the poet’s name, or whether it was even his own composition, but what he said stayed with me. I listened intently. The poem deeply resonated with the Hazara people, those who have been driven from their homeland, Hazaristan. It captured the sorrow of exile and the search for a meaningful way to express that longing. The version he read had already been translated into Farsi. As he recited it, something about the rhythm and emotion drew me in more and more, and before...

It seems Voice of America is finally close to being completely dismantled . Two days ago, a federal court in Washington, D.C., declared it would not intervene with presidential decisions. This means the court case that the Voice of America filed is no longer relevant. It is sad to see that VOA is going entirely, but it is probably good if the network is reshuffled and rebuilt, say, if it happens to return in four or so years from now.  The Afghanistan section was a total propaganda, the network did not have a good reputation in the past either, but in the aftermath of the US troop withdrawal and subsequent takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban, VOA both Dari and Pashto sections shifted their narratives and ways of covering the news to cater the Taliban's ideology. In other words, VOA was sliding towards becoming the mouthpiece of the extreme ideology of the Taliban from afar with the US taxpayers' money. During my fieldwork, I talked to two employees, both females, and both co...

There is an "Afghan" restaurant in Saskatoon, Canada. It is called "Kabuli Authentic Afghan Cuisine & Café" or " Kabuli Cafe ". It is located at 325 3rd Ave N, Saskatoon. My sister worked in this restaurant for a few months. She was underpaid, $12 an hour, while others were paid $15 and above. She was told that a trial was needed, and then she would be on payroll, which never happened. The owner still owes $450 and refused to pay my sister's salary, and she could not file a complaint because the restaurant owner refused to provide paperwork. I looked at a few transactions in my sister's bank account. To my surprise, the payment was accompanied by slurs and curses, which my sister did not understand because her English is not very good. One transaction with an optional message goes “here is your money, stupid woman.” When I told her what her boss wrote to her, she felt sorry about her and her situation. "Maybe her malicious comments had to...

Recently, I became aware that some individuals whose names appeared as authors of a notorious submission , one laden with falsehoods, accusations, and hatred against the Hazara community in Australia, have expressed remorse. Some even claim they were unaware that their names had been used at all. Assuming, for the sake of speculation, that some individuals were indeed unaware of their names being used, there are legal venues resolving the issue. I looked online and realized that if a person's name is used in a document (any) without knowing or giving consent, serious concerns might be raised regarding misrepresentation and harm.   Let's approach this issue with a few questions:  What can a person do when their name is used in a document, online or offline, without their knowledge or consent? What legal options are available, and who might be held accountable? In this case, Arezo Zoe Safi, a registered solicitor, and her cousin Atal Zahid Safi appear to be central figures in t...

In my earlier post , I forgot to mention an important point: Arezo Zoe Safi is actively spreading hatred and hostility toward the Hazara community in Australia. Arezo, who was born and raised in Australia and has likely only visited Afghanistan briefly, has no direct lived experience of the country’s ethnic tensions, yet she chooses to vilify Hazara advocates speaking out against systemic violence. She is the niece of Mohammad Masoom Stanekzai , a prominent Afghan politician who formerly led the National Directorate of Security (NDS) and later served as the acting Minister of Defense.  On her  Facebook page  in 2023, she, while unemotionally controlled, launched a disturbing attack against Sitarah Mohammadi, a respected Hazara lawyer and activist, questioning why Sitarah should be allowed to speak about the ongoing genocidal violence targeting the Hazara people. Arezo appears particularly outraged at any suggestion that Pashtun groups, among others, bear responsibili...

The guy got trounced. I’m talking about Zahid Safi, the same man who attempted to enter the Australian Parliament under false pretenses. He allegedly faked his MA degree , misled people about his business record , and has a troubling history of hostility toward the Hazara community. Most recently, he tried to win support from Bruce through fear and intimidation . But the residents saw through the facade and rejected him, sending a clear message: he is dangerous and unfit for public office. Earlier, I unintentionally predicted the outcome of the election in the Division of Bruce in one of my blog posts titled “ Fake it to break it ,” referring to a candidate whose credibility was questionable due to a pattern of deception. The Liberal Party's decision to endorse him was flawed from the beginning. Now, some within the party are calling for a “ serious review ” of what went wrong. But the core issue is already clear: you didn’t listen to the people. Members of the Hazara community in ...

In my previous post, when I wrote that Afghans brought the persecution of the Hazaras to Australia, there was a reason. Clear signs of this persecution have emerged. Just yesterday, The Guardian Australia reported that Zahid Safi's campaign team has escalated their tactics. According to journalist Henry Belot, the team is now pressuring members of the Hazara diaspora, claiming that voting for anyone other than the Liberal Party constitutes a betrayal of Abdur Rahman Khan, often referred to as "Afghanistan's Hitler." Zahid campaign volunteers, mostly made up of Pashtuns, have told the Hazaras that we have to resurrect Abdur Rahman Khan.  Labor alleges the volunteer told people that a vote for anyone other than the Liberals would betray Khan, and called for him to be “brought back”. Khan is linked to the Hazara genocide in the late 1800s. “I am concerned that the reason Liberal volunteers are invoking Abdur Rahman Khan’s name is to harass and intimidate members of the ...

Afghans, and more precisely, in this case, a small number of Pashtuns residents of Bruce, are now rallying to support Zahid Safi. His campaign has already taken a hit: the manager has stepped down following backlash over offensive online remarks, and notably, there’s no Australian presence within Safi's team. In Bruce, the Safi clan, a large network of families sharing the same last names, has stepped in. Wearing matching blue, round-necked T-shirts and covering their paunches with bold “SAFI” lettering, they pose with forced smiles for the cameras. It may look like a campaign gaining momentum, but beyond appearances, what’s missing is substance, brain power, integrity, and a genuine understanding of basic responsibilities, such as not lying, not discriminating against people based on their ethnicity or race. Someone should tell this guy to go to the community and apologize for your blatant racism and take down the submission. Learn some decency. Someone needs to say it plainly: d...

In my previous post , I wrote: “The rotten stench is rising from the corpse of the Australian Liberal Party’s pitch for the division of Bruce in the upcoming federal election.” There was a reason for that choice of words. The Liberal candidate, Zahid Safi, has now been revealed as a university dropout. It reminds me of George Santos, who successfully made his debut in the US Congress for a brief period but was recently sentenced to seven years in a New York federal court for a slew of deceptions. So how did someone like Zahid slip into the ranks of the Liberal Party? The answer is clear: fake it to make it but now, it ironically translates as fake it to break it. The candidate has become a laughingstock. Touted as a wildly successful businessman, Safi’s record tells a very different story: businesses that were de-registered because of being unable to pay the fees, listed under a fake address, peppered with phony reviews, and littered with stock images. The most successful part in h...

The rotten stench is rising from the corpse of the Australian Liberal Party’s pitch for the division of Bruce for the upcoming federal election. In a recent exposé for The Age , journalist Charlotte Grieve uncovers a disturbing truth: Zahi Safi, the man being paraded as a "successful businessman" by the party, is little more than a fraud. Many of Safi’s businesses appear to exist only on paper, at best. Take Willow Support Services, an NDIS provider supposedly owned by Safi. When Grieve visited its listed address, she found not an office or facility, but a private residence. It gets worse: multiple Safi-affiliated businesses have been deregistered since March for failing to pay basic fees. His websites are padded with fake reviews, featuring photos recycled across countless unrelated pages. The so-called reviewers? Their LinkedIn profiles list them as being overseas and spread across hundreds of pages on the web. Faced with this mountain of fakery, Grieve wonders the obvious:...

Here are the six individuals, along with some background, who co-authored the 2021 parliamentary submission (see page 3, document number 43) targeting the Hazara community—an inquiry widely criticized for its blatant racism, distortions, and falsehoods. The submission resurfaced recently after The Guardian Australia revealed that one of its authors is none other than Atal Zahid Safi, also known as Zahid Safi, the current Liberal candidate for Bruce, an electorate with one of Australia's largest Hazara populations. The irony is hard to miss. In their submission, the authors attempt to frame Hazaras as a national security threat to Australia (see page 14). At one point, they even write: “The Australian Government should work closely with key stakeholders from the Afghan Diaspora, including the authors of these submissions.” In other words, they’re positioning themselves as the authoritative voices of the community, people to be consulted, reconciled with, and trusted. The implica...

In my previous posts , I discussed corruption within the RFE/RL bureau, specifically Radio Azadi, in Kabul. I also alluded to another serious issue: sexual harassment. In this post, I want to share a few specific examples to shed light on what occurred during the bureau’s early years. At the time, and still, Radio Azadi broadcast its programs in two major languages: Farsi/Dari and Pashto. Each language section operated under a separate editor, and every report or segment created by journalists had to pass through these editors before being sent to Prague for broadcast. While the editorial review process was intended to ensure quality and consistency, it was frequently misused by certain opportunistic men to exploit their female colleagues. Many of these men were married, yet that didn’t stop them from making inappropriate advances toward the women they worked with. One of the more insidious methods of control was the misuse of editorial authority. Let me explain how this played out. Ea...