I’m Zareen Taj and I’m on my way to Washington DC to join people around the world who are protesting to demand recognition of the ongoing genocide of Hazara in Afghanistan. I am making this video to explain what genocide is and why it applies to the long history of systematic killings of Hazara.
We are calling attention to this now because last week, on September 30th, a suicide bomber attacked hundreds of students taking exams in the Dasht-e-Barchi of Kabul. Over 50 young people were killed, most of them girls. Many more were injured. As we mourn we need more than sympathy — we need the formal recognition that these systematic attacks against Hazara are genocide.
To be able to describe the violence of the holocaust against the Jewish people, the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin formed a new word genocide by combining geno-, from the Greek word for race or tribe, with -cide, from the Latin word for killing. By creating this new word, the United Nations was able to make it an international crime in 1948. Genocide is the intentional destruction of a people with the intent to wipe out, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Genocide is different from all other crimes by the motivation behind it. The victims of genocide are deliberately targeted – not randomly.
Over the last eighteen years, I have interviewed survivors and visited massacre sites. Thousands of Hazara were killed, and many more were left disabled and traumatized by these genocidal attacks.
In the 1990s, Hazara men were hunted by the Taliban. They were killed in front of their families to terrorize survivors. Their dead bodies were left out to rot in the sun. Families were left without breadwinners to starve and struggle to survive.
During the US presence in Afghanistan, terrorist attacks continued. Like this school bombing, many killings now focus on our women, educated people, and our children.
They bomb schools to intimidate us from getting an education, especially to scare girls and women from fully participating in society.
Now with the new Taliban Regime, we are the target of genocide with no protections.
The Hazara diaspora call on the United Nations to recognize the systematic killing of Hazaras in Afghanistan as a crime of genocide.
We call on the International Criminal Court to investigate and bring us justice.
We call on all human rights organizations to join us and act to stop Hazara Genocide.