Thank you.
It's a great honour for me to be here with you today. I speak behalf of Genocide Watch and the World Hazara Council, which approved my statement.
The Hazaras are the Jews of Afghanistan. The Taliban and ISIS have marked them for extermination. The Hazara people are among the most persecuted peoples in the world. The Hazara are an ethnic and religious minority who have been facing systematic persecution and genocide in Afghanistan for over 100 years.
The Hazara make up a quarter of the population of Afghanistan. Outside Afghanistan, Hazaras are one of the largest Afghan refugee groups in the world. UNHCR in Afghanistan favours Sunni Muslims, so very few Hazaras have been sponsored for resettlement in nations that rely on the UN refugee system, including Canada and the U.S.
Afghanistan is a country of minorities with none of its ethnic groups making a majority. However, the Hazara people, predominantly Shia Muslims, are a religious minority in a Sunni Muslim majority country. The Hazara have faced for many years—at least a century—relentless, systematic, genocidal massacres based on their ethnic and religious identity.
In the late 19th century, as one of our previous speakers mentioned, the Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman, who united Afghanistan, also waged a brutal war against the Hazaras that killed 62% of Afghanistan's Hazara population. That is called genocide.
The persecution of the Hazaras continued into the 20th century. In the 1970s, the Afghan government did not allow Hazara people any access to higher education, especially in universities that trained candidates for army and government jobs. The killing of the Hazara people has been preached as a key to paradise by some Sunni Muslim clerics.
In the 1990s, there were at least nine genocidal massacres of Hazaras by the Taliban government and al Qaeda. Taliban commanders publicly proclaimed this slogan: “Tajiks to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan and Hazaras to goristan”.Goristan is the Afghan Dari word for “graveyard”.
In August 1998, in just a few days, the Taliban massacred 8,000 Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif.
In 2002, the Hazara people of Afghanistan suffered over 300 targeted massacres. Since 2015, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, ISKP, affiliated with the Haqqani Network, and it has claimed responsibility for some of these massacres, giving the Taliban a way to deny responsibility, even though the Haqqani Network is part of the Taliban government. To date, none of these crimes carried out against the Hazara people have been investigated.
These massacres have all of the elements of the crime of genocide in article II of the 1948 genocide convention. They include killings of members of the group, creating serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and creating conditions of life calculated to destroy the group. Under Taliban rule since August 2021, genocidal attacks against Hazaras have increased significantly. Hazaras have been attacked in educational centres, places of worship, maternity hospitals, sporting facilities, public gatherings and wedding halls. There was a genocidal attack on a Hazara girls school that murdered 58 Hazara girl students, yet the UN and the international press nearly always refuse to identify the victims as Hazaras and fail to note the ethnically and religiously targeted nature of this genocide. This is called genocide denial.
The Hazara people are enduring a continuous slow-motion genocide by attrition in Afghanistan. Urgent Canadian and international action is needed to protect the Hazaras of Afghanistan.
I conclude with the following recommendations: the UN, U.S., EU, U.K, journalists and human rights organizations must recognize that these systematically targeted attacks against the Hazara people in Afghanistan meet the definition of genocide—the intentional destruction of a substantial part of an ethnic and religious group as such.
The UN and national governments should initiate urgent consultations with Hazara organizations for the protection on the Hazara people. The UN Human Rights Council should establish an independent fact-finding mission to investigate the ongoing systematic attacks on Hazara people. The International Criminal Court should expand the scope of its authorized investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan to include cases of crimes against humanity and genocide against the Hazara people.
Finally, and this is the most important recommendation of all for the Canadian Parliament, we urge all refugee resettling countries, especially Canada, the United States and Australia, to prioritize Hazara refugees for asylum and resettlement. Canada must increase the number of visas for asylum seekers for Hazara people, specifically.
Thank you.