Teta040 said:
I know about the Pashtun but who are the Hazira?
The Hazara are a people of somewhat uncertain Persianized Turkic ancestry who live primarily in Hazarajat, a very poor and rugged region of central Afghanistan. While they have been dominated by the Pashtun since the days of the Sadozai dynasty, to which modern Afghanistan's roots are usually traced (mid 18th-early 19th cen.), it was the ruthless suppression of their aspirations to an independent state by Emir Abdur Rahman Khan (late 19th cen.), during the bloody twilight of the 'Great Game' era, that effectively broke their backs as major players in the region: tribal leaders were deposed, large numbers of Hazara enslaved, very heavy taxes imposed on the region, and most of the more powerful Hazara tribes driven out of the country altogether, with their lands being confiscated and redistributed to Pashtun invited to settle the region by Abdur Rahman as part of his program of 'Pashtunization' of the country. Abdur Rahman deliberately made an example of the Hazara to other ethnic groups of what might happen if they challenged his rule, famously (among Afghans at least) warning his subjects that they too might be 'worked like donkeys' were it not for having the 'donkey Hazara' to do their work for them.
Hazara slaves were freed when Afghanistan's independence was declared in 1919; however, the promotion of Hazara culture and history were suppressed, Hazara were forbidden positions above entry level in the military and civil services, and the aforementioned reduced status of Hazara chieftain families gave rise to a socioeconomic system in Hazarajat vaguely resembling the post-Civil War South's sharecropper system, with former tribal rulers capitalizing on what status they still retained to coerce and manipulate the peasantry into tenancy arrangements resulting in chronic debt. Many Hazara moved to the cities, especially Kabul, where they almost invariably joined descendants of Hazara slaves at the lowest-paying menial jobs, further 'confirming' the scornful perception of them as a terminally backward and brutish people.
Some Hazara did participate in armed resistance against the Soviets during the '80s; however, as socioeconomically and politically marginalized Shiites (most Afghans are Sunnis) they were not major players in that conflict--although an ill-advised decision to join hands with the budding Northern Alliance as the Taliban began to emerge resulted in both betrayal (Hazara were massacred and their homes and weapons looted by Ahmed Shah Masood's troops during the invasion of Kabul) and, later, even more brutal retaliatory persecution from the (Sunni Pashtun) Taliban than they probably would have experienced otherwise.
Today the Hazara have representation in Parliament and Hazarajat is peaceful by comparison to southern Afghanistan, but the region has received much less aid than those of other major ethnic groups despite being just about Afghanistan's poorest, and by most accounts considerable mutual hostility remains between the Hazara and other Afghan groups, especially the Pashtun.
All I remember is a tibit from M.M. Kaye's novel "The Far Pavilions"--she quoted an Afghan folk song with these lyrics: "There's a boy across the river/with a bottom like a peach/but alas, I cannot swim." Kaye grew up in that area, the daughter of a British army officer, a real colonial upbringing, so I took that as truth.
I briefly touched on this (i.e. the custom of
mehbub / ashna) in my last post--it's not something I know much about though, and in any case it's not adequately documented enough yet to point to any one source as authoritative. Another oft-cited Pashtun 'folk saying' originally reported by a Raj-era English writer, Richard Francis Burton, is "Women for breeding, boys for pleasure, but melons for sheer delight." It's probably best to take the attribution of 'folk saying' status to both of those with a prudent grain of salt, but yes, among the Pashtun at least (not necessarily other groups) there does historically seem to have been a kind of cultural 'safe space' granted to at least one form of what we might consider 'gay relationships,' namely that between adult men and early adolescent boys. Almost reminiscent of the classical Greek version, with the 'courting' of the boy through gifts and 'mentoring' from the older man being central to the ideal--though it's always dicey to draw analogies between cultures so far removed in time and space, especially when the evidence is so scant. According to some journalists' and anthropologists' accounts, under the Taliban this custom was clamped down on severely (since it obviously violates the letter of Islamic law); yet anecdotal evidence suggests that in at least some regions, the Taliban in practice gave a nudge and a wink to their own commanders who wished to engage in it, provided they kept things discreet. Again anecdotally, the custom is said to have re-emerged somewhat in recent years, but more 'underground' than before (not that it was ever necessarily openly discussed). As with the 'analogous' Greek custom,
mehbub / ashna as described appears to fall into what by our culture's standards is an uncomfortably gray area morally--granted these are not small children, in fact they're near the age of marriage on their culture's terms, but the innate power differential seems obvious, and the consensuality therefore questionable.
However, human rights groups have also documented numerous accounts from the Taliban period of what is quite clearly outright sex slavery--the abduction and imprisonment of boys and young men, often from ethnic minority groups or very low-ranking Pashtun clans, who were then made to serve as prostitutes for multiple men, certainly with no 'courting' or 'mentoring' involved. The Hazara were one of the persecuted minorities to whom this apparently quite frequently happened. Above and beyond that, and more to the point given the thread topic, male-on-male rape (and I mean rape, not 'gay sex') in general seems to be more commonplace as a means of violently enforcing power hierarchies among men in Afghanistan than it is in our culture. As with raping women, this is seen as profoundly shaming not just to the individual victim involved, but also to their family/clan/tribe (and again as with women, for this reason human rights workers often find it very difficult to get victims to share their stories, even in settings e.g. refugee camp clinics where it's clear to everyone present that the victim has been raped, whether s/he likes it or not). For this reason, in tandem with the aforementioned volatile ethnic tensions and the general 'cinematic illiteracy' of the culture (for lack of a better phrase), I'm uncomfortable with writing off these child actors' concerns as nothing more than 'homophobia' that they need to 'just get over already'. I can grant that it's not fully possible to clearly distinguish the shame of rape from the 'shame' of being 'gay,' given the way 'gay' is typically defined in Central Asian culture (i.e., as being the 'passive' partner in specific forbidden acts, rather than more generally feeling sexual desire towards other men, as our culture defines it). But I'm not willing to endorse gambling someone's life to force a clarification of the distinction.
