Hajji Nizam, the Hazara leader in Karaghuzhlah.
SHINGILABAD AND KARAGHUZHLAH — An Afghan grave is
rarely more than an ovoid mound of dry clay. Sometimes there are a few rocks,
arranged in no particular pattern, or a few shards of chipped pottery.
Occasionally, some strips of colorful cloth whiffle from an uneven wooden pole
that cants over the dead.
But don't be fooled by this lack of mnemonics. The living remember their dead
very well here. Especially if the deaths were violent.
COMMENTS (3)
More...
Especially if the killers have crossed one of the many ethnic divides that
carve up the Afghan countryside into a volatile jigsaw puzzle.
Beneath the vaulted ceiling of his living room in the village of Shingilabad,
Hajji Sultan, a Pashtun elder with henna-painted toenails, recounts murders
that took place 15 years ago as though they happened yesterday.
"Hazara people from Karaghuzhlah village killed my brother and my nephew,"
Hajji Sultan says. His long gray beard fades to ivory where it reaches his
chest. "In broad daylight. At four o'clock, on a Thursday. They ambushed them
on the road, walked them off to the desert, broke their arms, and shot them in
the head, several times."
Hajji Sultan bends his fingers to count the 22 people Hazaras killed in
Shingilabad that year: "Khan, Ghazi, Qamalladin, Sakhedad, Matai, Abdul Rauf..."
Half of the old man's right thumb is missing. "Shrapnel," he explains, but
refuses to tell me which battle the shrapnel had come from, and whom he was
fighting.
I drive over to Karaghuzhlah, a mile or so to the southeast. Hot spring air
along the gravel road quivers with bad blood and recriminations.
In the shadow of a white mulberry tree, Hajji Nizam, the Hazara leader in
Karaghuzhlah, offers a tally of his own.
"Mohammad, Alivar, Haidar, Ghulam Sakhi, Nawruz." Hajji Nizam touches the
outstretched fingers of his right hand with the index finger of his left. His
grandchildren, squatting around him, listen carefully, so that they, too, can
remember the names of their ancestors murdered by the Pashtuns. So that they
can one day repeat them to their children. Overripe berries fall soundlessly to
the ground. "We also found two dead bodies of our people near Shingilabad,"
Hajji Nizam says.
The old man cannot recall the exact year the Karaghuzhlah Hazara were murdered.
Was it 1998, the year the Taliban, which is made up mostly of ethnic Pashtuns,
mutilated, shot, and slit the throats of some 6,000 Hazaras in Mazar-e-Sharif?
Or was it 1997, the year members of the Hazara Hezb-e-Wahdat party joined the
Uzbek Junbish-e-Milli militia in the massacre of 3,000 Pashtun Taliban soldiers
in the Balkh capital?
SUBJECTS:
(3)
HIDE COMMENTS LOGIN OR REGISTER REPORT ABUSE