Sectarian riots add to Afghan woes

KABUL // Broken glass lay on the pavements and pictures of parliamentary candidates were ripped down or torn, as if slashed with knives. A day earlier, rioters had swept through this part of Kabul, looting shops, beating civilians and leaving as least four people dead.

Members of the Taliban were not responsible for the violence, nor were their sympathisers. Instead, it was a rare show of force by Afghanistan's Shiite minority and a sign of the growing sectarian tensions that are threatening to add to the security concerns in the country. "Even when the police came here, they were not scared," said Gulab Gul Zadran, as he sat in the ruins of his medical clinic. "They just kept destroying things."

Although the exact circumstances of the bloodshed are still not clear, the trouble began following clashes between ethnic Hazaras and Pashtun nomads - known as "Kuchis" -on the capital's outskirts on Friday. Hazaras then staged a protest inside the city, which developed into a riot. Anarchy paralysed the Koti Sangi area of Kabul, with mobs of young men attacking local shopkeepers. Scores of people were injured and one police officer was among the dead. The exact number of civilians killed is disputed, with both sides claiming they suffered significant losses.

Pashtuns caught up in the trouble insist they were deliberately singled out in a pogrom-style campaign of intimidation and accuse Hazara politicians, including Mohammed Karim Khalili, one of the country's vice presidents, of orchestrating the violence. Dr Zadran was beaten to the floor. Money was stolen from him along with a laptop computer, a stethoscope and other medical equipment. "The government is very corrupt and does not want security, nor do the foreigners. We have people in the government who are encouraging this," he said.

Far from being a random act, the riot was a sign that tension between Hazaras and the nomads is boiling over. Fighting between the two groups took place in nearby Maidan Wardak province this spring, just as it had done in previous years. Angry exchanges between politicians and rival sections of the media followed and both sides traded ethnic slurs. With foreign troops scheduled to transfer the nation's security to Afghan forces by the end of 2014, there are widespread fears that any resulting power vacuum could lead to a civil war.

Amanullah Danishwar witnessed the riot, hiding in the same building used by Dr Zadran. He said the worst of the trouble lasted from 4pm-6pm, but the situation was not fully under control until the next morning. "The police I saw were shooting in the air, I did not see them shooting directly at the protesters. But I saw two dead bodies. One was Pashtun and one was Hazara," he said. Mr Danishwar, a Hazara, described the Pashtun as a young man with a bullet hole in his heart. "I am a hundred per cent worried we will have a civil war," he added.

Concerns such as his existed even before last week's violence and minority groups in particular have often expressed their opposition to the possible return of the predominantly Pashtun Taliban to government. During the early and mid-1990s sectarian fighting between rival militias killed tens of thousands of people in Kabul alone, leaving much of the capital in ruins. For many Afghans, it remains the darkest period in the country's blood-soaked history.

In response to last week's unrest, the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, appointed a panel to investigate the rising violence between the two sides. At the centre of the trouble are disputes over land and grazing rights, but ethnicity has inevitably become an issue as tensions have increased. This often results in unsubstantiated rumours, claims and counter-claims. In the past, Hazara politicians have accused Kuchis of carrying out attacks with the help of the Taliban and another militant group, Hizb-e-Islami. They insist there are far fewer nomads than suggested by official estimates, which are as high as five million.

In the wake of the riot, conspiracy theories have also begun to swirl among the Pashtun community, Afghanistan's largest ethnic group. One man whose office was looted claimed that Mr Khalili, the vice president, had planned the unrest during a series of secret meetings held the week before. Mohammed Khan, an MP for the southern province of Ghazni, also blamed the second vice president and another prominent Hazara politician, Haji Mohammad Mohaqiq.

"The truth is that the Hazaras were just showing off their power in this area," he said. "Hazaras, Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Tajiks are all living like brothers in the countryside. Responsibility for the things that happened in Kabul belongs to the leaders." Despite the ethnic tensions in Afghanistan, there is no appetite for one radical idea recently put forward by a former US ambassador to India: "de facto partition". Robert D Blackwill, who also served as an envoy to Iraq under the former US president George W Bush, provoked anger here when he effectively called for the country to be divided between Pashtuns and non-Pashtuns.

Speaking before the riot, Abdul Reza Rezai, a Hazara MP for Maidan Wardak, said he strongly opposed that approach but would support a new federal system of government based upon ethnic lines. "Now if you try to force a Pashtun, he will still never vote for a Hazara or Tajik. And if you try to force a Hazara, he will still not vote for a Pashtun or Tajik," he said. "We should accept that Pashtuns are our big brothers and Pashtuns should accept that Hazaras have a large population in Afghanistan. We should have mutual respect for each other."

@Email:csands@thenational.ae