| Hazarajat | |
|---|---|
| Area Approx: | 15,500 sq mi (40,145 km2) |
| Population | Approx: 3 million[1] |
| Density | 15 /km2 (39 /sq mi) |
| Provinces within Hazarajat (partly or as whole) | Baghlan Bamyan Daykundi Ghazni Ghor Orūzgān Parwan Samangan Sar-e Pol Wardak |
| Ethnicities | Hazara Tajik Pashtun |
| Languages Spoken | Hazaragi Persian (Dari) Pashto |
The Hazarajat (Persian: هزارهجات, Hazaragi: آزارهجات, also referred to as Hazarastan) is the original homeland of the Hazara people, and lies in the central highlands of Afghanistan, among the Koh-i-Baba mountains and the western extremities of the Hindu Kush. Its physical boundaries, however, are roughly marked by the Bamiyan Basin to the north, the headwaters of the Helmand River to the south, Firuzkuh to the west, and the Unai Pass to the east. Its boundaries have historically been inexact and shifting.[2] It is made up of the three central provinces of Bamyan and Daykundi and includes large areas of Maidan Wardak, Ghazni, Orūzgān, Sar-e Pol, Samangan, Ghowr and Parvan provinces.[3] The region has also been known as Paropamizan.
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Little information exists on the history of the region; however, at different times it has remained under Persian, Greek, Indian,[4] Mongol and Timurid dynasty rule. Archaeological finds can be traced back to the Greek empire of Bactria and Buddhist civilization.
The region has been identified by Witzel as the location of the Avestan Airyanəm Vaējah[5]
Subsequent rulers of the region include the Ghorids, Persians, Ghaznavids and Mongols. They were followed by Genghis Khan in 1220. It has been said that Genghis's grandson was killed in Bamian. Enraged, Genghis Khan ordered his forces total annihilation of the town and surrounding region, with the Mongols formally laying a curse on the site. Later the region remained a colony of the Ilkhanids, Chughtais, and others.
The subjugation of the Hazarajat, the mountain fortresses of Ghor in particular, proved difficult for the Mongols after their conquest of the region, and ultimately Mongol military detachments left behind in the region “adopted the language of the vanquished”.[6] In late 14th century, Timur's armies made expeditions into Hazarajat, but Hazarajat was once again free after his death.[7] During Mongolian era, majority of Hazara were pastoralists dwelling in yurts and spoke Moghol. They started inhabiting the fortified villages, adopted a Persian dialect, and farming in the high steppes in the early 16th century. However, they kept flocks and some, on the norther slopes of Koh-i-Baba, remained nomadic and continued migrating between highland summer pastures and lowland winter pastures.[8]
In 1720s when the Ghilzai Afghans were independent of Safavids, Pashtun began the migration into the pastures of Hazarajat and pushing Hazara people toward west.[9]
In the 18th and 19th centuries, as a sense of “Afghan-ness” developed among the Sunnite Pashtuns, the Shiʿite Hazara tribes began to cling together.[10] It has been suggested that in the 19th century there was an emerging awareness of ethnic and religious differences among the population of Kabul. This brought about divisions along “confessional lines” that became reflected in new “spatial boundaries”.[11] During the reign of Dost Mohammad Khan, Mir Yazdanbakhsh, a diligent chief of the Behsud Hazaras, consolidated many of the and the districts they controlled. Mir Yazdanbakhsh collected revenues and safeguarded caravans traveling on the Hajigak route through Bamyan to Kabul from Shaikh Ali and Besud bandits. The consolidation of the Hazarajat thus increasingly made the region and its inhabitants a threat to the Durrani state based in Kabul.[12] Until the late 19th century, the Hazarajat remained independent and only the authority of local leaders, khans or mirs, was obeyed.[13] Joseph Pierre Ferrier, a French author who supposedly traveled through the region in the mid-nineteenth century, described the inhabitants settled in the mountains near the rivers Balkh and Kholm in an orientalist vein, casting the Hazaras as savage criminals: “The Hazara population is ungovernable, and has no occupation but pillage; they will pillage and pillage only, and plunder from camp to camp”.[14] Subsequent British travelers doubted whether Ferrier had ever actually left Herat to venture into Afghanistan’s central mountains and have suggested that his accounts of the region were based on hearsay, especially since very few people dared then to enter the Hazarajat; even Pashtun nomads would not take their flocks to graze there, and few caravans would pass through.[15] Later in the early 1890s, the tribes of the Hazarajat were taxed and conscripted, while thousands were massacred. Pashtun nomads were moved into the Hazarajat, where they overran Hazara farmlands and pastures.[16] Increasingly during summers, Pashtun nomads would camp in large numbers in the Hazarajat highlands.
In the 1920s the ancient Shibar Pass road which leads through Bamyan and east to the Panjshir Valley was paved for lorries, and it remained the busiest road across the Hindu Kush until the building of the Salang tunnel in 1964 and the opening of a winter route. The Hazarajat became increasingly depopulated as Hazaras migrated to cities and to surrounding countries, where they became laborers and undertook the hardest and lowest-paid work.[2] In 1979, there were reportedly one and a half million Hazaras in the Hazarajat and Kabul.[17] As the Afghan state weakened, uprisings broke out in the Hazarajat, freeing the region from state rule for the first time since the death of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan. Under the inspiration of the Islamic Revolution, various Hazara-Shiʿi resistance groups were formed in Iran, including Nasr and Sipah Pasdaran, with some being “committed to the idea of a separate Hazara national identity".[18] During the war with the Soviets, most of the Hazarajat was unoccupied and free of Soviet or state presence. The region became ruled once again by local leaders, or mirs, and a new stratum of young radical Shiʿi commanders. Economic conditions are reported to have improved in the Hazarajat during the war, when Pashtun Kuchis stopped grazing their flocks in Hazara pastures and fields.[19]
During the regime of Taliban, once again, ethnic and sectarian violence struck Hazarajat. In 1997, a revolt broke out among Hazara people in Mazar-i-Sharif when refused to be disarmed by Taliban. 600 Taliban were killed in subsequent fighting.[20] In retaliation, genocidal policies of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan's era was adopted by Taliban. In 1998, six thousand Hazaras were slaughtered in the north, the intention was ethnic cleansing of Hazara.[21] At that stage, Hazarajat didn't exist on official map of Afghanistan, the area was divided between the administrative provinces of Bamyan, Ghor, Wardak, Ghazni, Oruzgan, Juzjan, and Samangan, with the Hazaras being a minority in each.[19]
The name Hazarajat is rarely used by the Hazara people.[22] This makes sense when one examines the word linguistically - it is compounded from the root Hazara and the suffix jat; jat is a suffix that otherwise is used to make root words associated with food and inanimate objects plural as is the case with sabzijat (سبزىجات) vegetables or herbs.[23] The association with inanimate objects can be seen as the reason that Hazaras rarely use the term.
In the book Shah Nameh by Ferdowsi Hazarajat is referred to as, an independent region in Turan, Barberistan. Maqdesi, an Arab geographer, named Hazarajat as Gharj Al-Shar-Gharj meaning “mountain” area ruled by chiefs. The region was known as Gharjistan in the late Middle Ages, though the exact locations of main cities still remain unidentified.[24][25]
Afghanistan is a multiethnic society with a variety of ethnolinguistic groups. Because of poor census exact figures about the size and composition of ethnic groups are not available.[26] In this regard, the Encyclopædia Britannica states:
No national census has been conducted in Afghanistan since a partial count in 1979, and years of war and population dislocation have made an accurate ethnic count impossible. Current population estimates are therefore rough approximations, which show that Pashtuns comprise somewhat less than two-fifths of the population. The two largest Pashtun tribal groups are the Durrānī and Ghilzay. Tajiks are likely to account for some one-fourth of Afghans and Ḥazāra nearly one-fifth. Uzbeks and Chahar Aimaks each account for slightly more than 5 percent of the population and Turkmen an even smaller portion.[27]
A research poll was conducted in Afghanistan in 2009, where 72% of the population labelled their identity as Afghan despite of being from different ethnic groups.[28] Within Hazarajat the majority is Hazara, with minority Tajiks, Pashtuns, Sayyids, and Qizilbash. A minority of Balochs and Tatars are also found in Hazarajat.[29]
The history of the language in Hazarajat has been an issue of debate. In 16th century, when Mongol king Babur came to Afghanistan, the Hazara spoke Mongolian language, writers like Bacon[30] and Schumann[31] believed the original language of Hazara people was Dari Persian since the beginning. On the other hand, Dulling wrote Hazaras' language was a mixture of Persian and Hindi in which Persian took over Hind in Middle Ages.[32] Hazara people spoke Mongolian until the late 18th century. In late 19th century Hazaragi, a distinct Persian dialect, began to emerge among the people of Hazarajat. It remains uncertain when Mongolian died out as living language. Dulling writes, "they ceased to be Mongol speakers by the end of eighteenth century at the latest, and were then speaking Tajik of a sort".[33] Dari is the official language in Hazarajat, and Pashto is also spoken in the region.
Even during the Islamic era in Greater Khurasan, when Islam was spread all across, Hazarajat was not practicing Islam as W. Barthold says “the only region surrounded on all sides by Islamic territories and yet inhabited by infidels”[34] was Hazarajat.In the 11th century, Islam was established in Bamyan, Ghor and other parts of Hazarajat, during the rule of Ghaznavid dynasty, though Buddhism, Hinduism and other polythestic customs being strong.[2] Probably, most of Hazarajat was Sunni and converted in Shi'ism in the Safavid ear. Some believe that traces of Shi'ism can be dated back to Ilkhanate period. Most are Twelver Shias, but there also exist Ismaʿili, Zaidi Hazaras, and Sunni Aimaks.[35]
The travels of Captains P. J. Maitland and M. G. Talbot from Herat, through Obeh and Bamyan, to Balkh, during the autumn and winter of 1885, explored the Hazarajat proper. Maitland and Talbot found the entire length of the road between Herat and Bamyan difficult to traverse.[36] As a result of the expedition, parts of the Hazarajat were surveyed on one-eighth inch scale and thus made to fit into the mapped order of modern nation-states.[37] More thought and attention was put into demarcating the definite borders of modern nations than ever before, which entailed great difficulties in frontier regions such as the Hazarajat. During the Second Anglo-Afghan War, Colonel T. H. Holdich of the Indian Survey Department referred to the Hazarajat as “great unknown highlands”.[38] And for the next few years, neither the Survey nor the Indian Intelligence Department succeeded in obtaining any trustworthy information on the routes between Herat and Kabul through the Hazarajat.[39] Various members of the Afghan Boundary Commission were able to gather information that brought the geography of remote regions such as the Hazarajat further under state surveillance. In November 1884, the Commission crossed over the Koh-i Baba Mountains by the Chashma Sabz Pass. General Peter Lumsden and Major C. E. Yate, who surveyed the tracts between Herat and the Oxus, visited the Qala-e Naw Hazaras in the Paropamisus mountain range, to the east of the Jamshidis of Kushk. Noting surviving evidence of terraced cultivation in times past, both described the northern Hazaras as semi-nomadic with large flocks of sheep and black cattle. They possessed an “inexhaustible supply of grass, the hills around being covered knee-deep with a luxuriant crop of pure rye”.[40] Yate noted clusters of kebetkas, or the summer dwellings of the Qala-e Naw Hazaras on the hillsides, and described “flocks and herds grazing in all directions”.[41][42] The geographical reach of the authority of the Afghan state was extended into the Hazarajat during the reign of Abdur Rahman Khan. Caught between the strategic interests of foreign powers and disappointed by the demarcation of the Durand Line in southern Afghanistan, which cut into Pashtun territory, he set out to bring the northern peripheries of the country more firmly under his control. This policy had disastrous consequences for the Hazarajat, whose inhabitants were singled out by Abdur Rahman Khan’s regime as particularly troublesome: “The Hazara people had been for centuries past the terror of the rulers of Kabul”.[43]
Hazarajat, the homeland of the Hazaras, lies in the central highlands of Afghanistan, among the Koh-i Baba Mountains and the western extremities of the Hindu Kush. Its boundaries have historically been inexact and shifting, and in some respects Hazarajat denotes an ethnic and religious zone rather than a geographical one–that of Afghanistan’s Turko-Mongol Shiʿites. Its physical boundaries, however, are roughly marked by the Bamiyan to the north, the headwaters of the Helmand River to the south, Firuz Koh to the west, and the Salang Pass to the east. The regional terrain is very mountainous and extends to the Safid Koh and the Siah Koh mountains, where the highest peaks are between 15,000 to 17,000 feet. Both sides of the Koh-i Baba range contain a succession of valleys. The north face of the range descends steeply, merging into low foothills and short semi-arid plains, while the south face stretches towards the Helmand Valley and the mountainous district of Besud.[44][45] Northwestern Hazarajat encompasses the district of Ghor, long known for its mountain fortresses. The 10th century geographer Estakhri wrote that mountainous Ghor was “the only region surrounded on all sides by Islamic territories and yet inhabited by infidels”.[46] The long resistance of the inhabitants of Ghor to the adoption of Islam provides an indication of the region’s inaccessibility; according to some travelers, the entire region is comparable to a fortress raised in the upper Central Asian highlands: from every approach, tall and steep mountains have to be traversed to reach there. The language of the inhabitants of Ghor differed so much from that of the people of the plains, that communication between the two required interpreters ”.[47] The northeastern part of the Hazarajat, is the site of ancient Bamyan, a center of Buddhism and a key caravanserai on the Silk Road. The town is situated at a height of 7,500 feet and surrounded by the Hindu Kush to the north and Koh-i Baba to the south.[2] The Hazarajat was considered part of the larger geographic region of Khurasan (Kushan), the porous boundaries of which encompassed the vast region between the Caspian Sea and the Oxus River, thus including much of what is today Northern Iran and Afghanistan.[2]
Hazarajat is mountainous,[48] a series of mountain passes extend along the eastern edge, where Salang Pass is blocked for half of the year due to snow while Shibar Pass, being at a lower elevation, is snowed for two months.[49] Bamyan, where winters are severe, is the cold part of the region.[50] The rivers of Helmand, Harirud, Kabul, Morghab, and Panjab flow from the Hazarajat and During the summer and spring, the area accounts for some of country's greenest pastures.[51] Natural lakes, green valleys and caves are found in Bamyan.[52]
Leprosy has been reported in the central Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan, including Hazarajat provinces such as Bamyan, Wardak, and Ghazni. The vast majority (80%) of the Afghan leprosy victims are Hazara.[53] In 1999, Leprosy Control stated that they were the only NGO providing anti-leprosy aid in the Hazarajat, and had been doing so since 1984.[54]
A 1989 report noted that common diseases in the Hazarajat included gastrointestinal infections, typhoid, whooping cough, measles, leprosy, tuberculosis, rheumatoid arthritis and malaria.[55]
| Province | Capital | ISO 3166-2:AF[58] | Provincial capital | Province population[59] | Province Area (km²) | Languages spoken | # of districts in province | U.N. Region |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Baghlan | 19 | AF-BGL | Puli Khumri | 741,690 | 21,118 | Dari Persian, Uzbek, Turkmen, Pashto | 16 districts | North East Afghanistan |
| Bamyan | 15 | AF-BAM | Bamiyan | 343,892 | 14,175 | Dari Persian | 7 districts | Central Afghanistan |
| Daykundi | 10 | AF-DAY | Nili | 477,544 | 8,088 | Dari Persian and Pashto | 8 districts Formed from Orūzgān Province in 2004 |
South West Afghanistan |
| Ghazni | 16 | AF-GHA | Ghazni | 1,080,843 | 22,915 | Pashto, Dari Persian | 19 districts | South East Afghanistan |
| Ghor | 6 | AF-GHO | Chaghcharan | 635,302 | 36,479 | Dari Persian, Pashto | 10 districts | West Afghanistan |
| Orūzgān | 11 | AF-ORU | Tarin Kowt | 320,589 | 22,696 | Pashto, Dari Persian | 6 districts | Central Afghanistan |
| Parwan | 20 | AF-PAR | Charikar | 491,870 | 5,974 | Dari Persian, Pashto | 9 districts | Central Afghanistan |
| Samangan | 14 | AF-SAM | Aybak | 378,000 | 11,262 | Dari Persian, Uzbek | 5 districts | North West Afghanistan |
| Sar-e Pol | 9 | AF-SAR | Sar-e Pol | 505,400 | 16,360 | Dari Persian, Pashto and Uzbek | 7 districts | North West Afghanistan |
| Wardak | 21 | AF-WAR | Meydan Shahr | 529,343 | 9,934 | Pashto, Dari Persian | 9 districts | Central Afghanistan |
