Hello. Good morning. Thank you, Chair and members of the committee, all participants and my co-witnesses in this particular session of the Canadian House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights.
In my five minutes, I will make three main remarks based primarily on the written testimony I submitted to this committee, together with Dr. William Maley and Dr. Melissa Chiovenda, in May of this year. Let me highlight three of the points we were making in that particular written testimony. I would be quite happy to elaborate on any of those points in the questions and answers.
First, the Hazaras in Afghanistan are a distinct ethnic and religious group. They are one of several ethnocultural groups that constitute the population of Afghanistan. The Hazaras are identified by a shared belief in a common ancestry in association with an ancestral homeland called Hazarajat, or Hazaraistan. They are also generally identified by their central Asian phenotype, which distinguishes them from the rest of the population of Afghanistan. The Hazaras are also predominantly followers of Shia Islam. As a result, they are a religious minority in a country of predominantly Sunni Muslims. They also speak a distinctive dialect of Dari or Persian in Afghanistan.
All of these features constitute the Hazaras as a distinctive ethnic and religious group under international law, especially within the context of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
While these features distinguish the Hazaras from other ethnic and cultural groups in Afghanistan as a sociological reality, these features have also been the reasons that the Hazaras have been the target of genocide, systematic persecution and displacement over several decades in Afghanistan.
This brings me to the second point that I would like to bring to your attention, members of the committee. During the years of the formation of the modern Afghan state under the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan from 1880 to 1901, several wars and violence targeted different groups in Afghanistan. One of the major episodes of conflict in Afghanistan from 1891 to 1893 targeted the Hazaras. That war, known as the Hazaras War, resulted in what would be a textbook example of genocide under international law in Afghanistan.
I have documented and provided a detailed examination of that case in my book, which is entitled The Hazaras and the Afghan State: Rebellion, Exclusion and the Struggle for Recognition. It was published in 2017 by Hurst & Co. in London.
Let me quickly highlight some of the features of that genocide, that war on the Hazaras.
That war included a declaration of jihad, a holy war, on the Hazaras, which was officially sanctioned by the Government of Afghanistan under the leadership of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan. It was spread throughout Afghanistan by clerics and religious leaders who were also employed by the state. The war also involved a mass displacement of the Hazaras and slavery of the Hazaras. It resulted in the emergence of a flourishing trade in Hazaras slaves in Afghanistan.
More than a century later in Afghanistan, in recent years we have also seen a resurgence of similar patterns of persecution of the Hazaras in Afghanistan. We have seen in recent years a pattern of systematic attacks on Hazaras places of worship and educational centres and on cultural and religious figures in Afghanistan. Since August of 2021, with the return of the Taliban to power in Afghanistan, the Hazaras have been systematically marginalized and persecuted politically, culturally and economically.
In recent years we have seen a mass displacement of Hazaras from their ancestral homelands in several provinces of Afghanistan, including Daykundi, Ghazni, Balkh and several other parts of Afghanistan.