by Barat Ali Batoor
I don’t normally believe any month or day is any worse than the other, but for some reason August has an awful place in the history of the Hazara people in Afghanistan.
When the Taliban took control of the northern border town of Mazar e Sharif on August 8, 1998, the mass killings that followed claimed the lives of at least 2,000-5,000, according to the Washington Post. Local residents believe more than 15,000 Hazaras were massacred.
In August 2013 I embarked on my journey to asylum in Australia after I received death threats over my photo essay published in the Washington Post. I travelled with people smugglers through Pakistan and Southeast Asia.
When I was locked up in a safe house in Malaysia I heard the news that the first group of people seeking asylum had been sent for offshore processing. The news dropped on me and 19 other Hazara asylum-seekers like a bomb.
It was a difficult decision to make but we were all on the same page. We could not go back to Afghanistan because of the threats the Hazaras were facing in general and individuals in particular.
We decided to keep going in the hope that we would at least be safe on one of the offshore islands. Ten years later, I realise how lucky I was that I did not end up in Papua New Guinea or Nauru where I would have suffered under Australia’s harsh immigration policies.
Last year, on the day Kabul fell to the returning Taliban, the then president shambolically escaped and surrendered the country to the terrorist group.
According to United Nations reports, some 3.4 million people from Afghanistan were displaced by the conflict and nearly 20 million people – almost half the population – are now facing acute hunger.
The Hazaras have once again become the victims of Taliban and ISIS atrocities. Thousands were evicted from their ancestral lands in Daikundi, Uruzgan, Helmand and Balkh in the early months of the Taliban occupation.
The community has been attacked in schools, mosques, on public transport and more recently in religious processions and gatherings to the west of Kabul when they were commemorating the death of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad.
Taliban attacked their only Hazara commander last month in Balkhab district in northern Sar-e-pol province after he parted his ways from them. As a result many civilians were killed and thousands of Hazaras took shelter in the mountains.
More than 5,000 refugees from Afghanistan are currently on temporary visas in Australia and some remain in detention centres. Most of them are Hazaras.
The diaspora community called on the previous Scott Morrison Government to grant them permanent protection, but one year after the fall of Kabul they are still living in uncertainty.
The Labor government promised in their election campaign that they would abolish the TPV/SHEV and provide permanent resettlement pathways for all refugees. They also promised that they would expedite family reunion visas and clear the way for citizenship.
That will give them the opportunity to reunite with their families, many of whom are still living in Afghanistan under fear of persecution. They hope the Albanese government will fulfil their election promise soon as possible and end this uncertainty.
– Barat Ali Batoor is a double Walkley-award winning photographer and a former Hazara refugee from Afghanistan. Batoor’s recent documentary film also won an award at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival and was nominated with the Walkley Documentary Award. Batoor lives in Pakenham. He works with the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre as a Community Organiser and teaches photojournalism at the RMIT University in Melbourne.
