The Hazara Genocide: History, Memory, and Ongoing Persecution
- hcofbritain
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
note: full report attached below
The Hazara Genocide (1891–1893) under Amir Abdul Rahman Khan
Afghanistan’s history has been marked by cycles of violence and conflict that have disproportionately harmed its most vulnerable groups. Among the darkest chapters is the Hazara genocide carried out during the reign of Amir Abdur Rahman Khan in the late nineteenth century (1891-1893). What began as an assertion of central authority over the semi-autonomous Hazara regions soon escalated into a systematic campaign of mass killing, enslavement, and dispossession, an attempt to annihilate the Hazara people. Between 1891 and 1893, the Amir’s campaigns devastated the Hazara population, with contemporary sources and later scholars estimating that over 60 percent of the community was exterminated or forcibly displaced.
Following his consolidation of power in Afghanistan, between 1891 and 1893, Abdul Rahman launched extensive military campaigns targeting the semi-independent Hazara region known as Hazarajat1(also referred as Hazaristan), which included present-day Central Afghanistan provinces such as Bamiyan, Daikundi, Uruzgan, Ghazni, and Wardak. He framed these campaigns as jihad, a “holy war” against Shia Hazaras, branding them heretics and infidels. The attempt to religiously allege and justify Hazaras as “infidels” was a deliberate tool for oppression: it mobilized Sunni clerics and tribal militias while simultaneously dehumanizing the Hazara population. A royal decree even instructed clerics to announce after Friday prayers that the Shia Hazaras were not Muslims, but unbelievers who must be exterminated or enslaved. Abdur Rahman promised land, property, women, and children of the Hazaras to those who joined him in the Hazara war - ensuring that the violence was both ideologically sanctioned and materially incentivized (a justification recorded both in contemporary Afghan sources and British officers’ reports of the time.)
The brutality of Abdur Rahman’s rule has been documented extensively. Historians such as Jonathan Lee described his reign as “an unmitigated disaster for the ordinary citizen,” noting executions numbering approximately 5,000 per year often carried out through horrific methods including bayoneting, hanging, disembowelment, crucifixion, and even being blown from cannons. While these acts targeted all of Afghanistan, the region of terror reached its peak in the Hazarajat, where villages were destroyed, agricultural infrastructure ruined, and tens of thousands of men, women, and children were enslaved or killed. Contemporary court historian Fayz Muhammad Katib, writing under restrictive circumstances, recorded accounts of Abdul Rahman’s “slaughter and assault” widespread across Hazara territories in Afghanistan. Dr. Gregory Stanton of Genocide Watch has also concluded that the Hazaras were victims of genocide under Abdur Rahman, with over half the population exterminated during his time.