Shooting Star

Ali Mirzad discusses the persecution of his people, the Hazaras in Afghanistan, who have suffered from ethnic cleansing and genocide. His father is a victim of this persecution, and Ali pledges to speak out against racism, hate, and mass atrocity to end the suffering of the Hazara people.

For years I vaguely remembered – apparently, toddlers do remember certain things – mother serenading her lullaby and rocking me to sleep as I would gaze upon the night skies illuminated with shooting stars. In my later years of adulthood, far from that roofless mud house in which I was born, I learned the not-so-romantic version of that memory. I was a war child, a child that is born during wartime. When I set eyes on this magnificent and mysterious world, the Soviets were well within their third year of the invasion of our homeland, Afghanistan.

To my great disappointment, I learned that those were nightly sheelings of rockets and other ordnance that would illuminate the night skies. As my father would recount these tales, he held his breath and released it with a very profound sense of pain and sorrow. War was not something with which he was unfamiliar. He still carries the scars to this date. My father lost the use of his right knee when shrapnel knocked him to the ground. For a moment, he did not know what had happened. For a moment, he felt he was jolted in time and had the flashback of being beaten to the ground as a child.

“As the perpetuity of the Hazara’s genocide and persecution continues, I can but raise awareness, speak out, stand up, write, and shout as loud and as long as necessary to end our suffering and so that no other child’s memories of shootings stars turn into rocket shelling.”

— Ali Mirzad

Today, at age 70, my father does not like to talk much about the trauma he suffered as a child. But I had to know; I needed to know. Overwhelmed by the insistence of a very curious teenager, he caved in. It was then that I learned that my father, his father, and the father of his father, for as far as he could remember, were all bullied and discriminated against by society. But “why, Father”, I asked. “Why? Because we are Hazaras,” he replied with a calm yet profound sense of desolation.

The Hazaras, who once represented 60 percent of Afghanistan’s population, were the victims of systemic ethnic cleansing and genocide in the 18th century under the rule of dictator Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, who had labeled them kaffirs (infidels). According to the Australian newspaper The Argus, On October 20, 1893, the brutal dictator, who was armed and financed by the British Empire, sold tens of thousands of Hazaras into slavery.

This singular yet avoidable genocide placed the Hazaras at the bottom of the barrel in Afghanistan. From then, our existence has been one of perpetual persecution at the hand of one tyrant after another.

After a brief respite in the 90’s, the Hazaras became the victims of atrocities. President Regan’s war on communism and generous arms shipment to the various non-Hazara Afghan guerilla fighters sent the Red Army in retreat. In the absence of the external enemy, the Hazaras became prey again.

In early February 1993, a ruthless warlord named Abdul Rasul Sayyaf descended upon Kabul’s Afshar district to launch an orgy of killing, rape and looting Hazaras. Human Rights Watch and UN reports indicate that thousands were slaughtered, skinned alive and left on the streets for weeks.

The year was 1995, and to every house, we would go, the mourning was visible. Everyone in our small rural Montreal Hazara community was in shock and disbelief. “How could this have happened? What?” I asked. “What had happened?”An elder who was fighting his tears replied: “They killed Baba Mazari (Baba: a national fatherly figure)”.

On 13 March 1995, Abdul Ali Mazari, a Hazara political leader and advocate for the equal representation of all ethnic groups in Afghanistan, was murdered by the Taliban. The Hazara people at home and abroad revered Mazari as their Ghandi or Mandela. He was credited with uniting Hazaras and highlighting their suffering to an international audience.

With Baba Mazari gone, in 1998 the Taliban renewed the fatwas (religious decrees) of Abdur Rahman Khan’s 18th century genocide by killing as many as 5,200 Hazaras in the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamyan alone.

While the 2020 UNAMA (United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan) report indicated that: "80 percent of civilian casualties were of the Shi’a Muslim religious minority belonging to the Hazara ethnic group," the September 2022 Amnesty International report spoke of the renewed torture and execution of Hazaras at the hands of the Taliban.

In the words of former Minister of Justice and Human Rights Champion, Professor Irwin Cotler: "The Holocaust and the genocide, for example, in Rwanda where one million Tutsis were murdered in three months. What makes it so unspeakable is that these genocides were preventable."

Let us reflect on these powerful words from the Never Again Declaration adopted on May 4, 2016, at the International Legal Symposium at Jagiellonian University in Poland, on “The Double Entendre of Nuremberg: The Nuremberg of Hate and the Nuremberg of Justice.”

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