We, the Hazara people of Australia, strongly condemn the genocide and ongoing massacres of our people in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Throughout history our people have tried to live as honest and sincere civilians in Afghanistan and Pakistan. We have always relied on the state authorities in those countries to provide us with security, regrettably despite their promises they have contradicted themselves in practice by sponsoring and supporting the terrorist and extremist groups. We will not, however, lose hope in our civil and humane struggles of campaigning for our human rights, and protesting for violation of our right to life.

There are about 700,000 Hazaras in Pakistan who are living through an ethnic cleansing carried out by the state supported terrorist and extremist organizations. The history of Hazaras in Pakistan goes back to late nineteenth century when more than half of the population of Hazaras was massacred in Afghanistan and the rest were forced to banish their homes and take refuge in the neighbouring countries. These waves of mass migration into neighbouring countries have continued until today, the recent one started when Taliban took power in Afghanistan. Even though, the collapse of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan by the Allied forces encouraged many Hazaras in Iran and Pakistan to return to their homes, the regular nomadic attacks on Hazaras and the oppressive treatment by the current government is once again driving Hazaras to flee the country.

This time however, the neighbouring countries are no more welcoming to Hazaras. Only in the last few years about two thousand Hazaras have been killed in the Quetta city of Pakistan. These killings are carried out by RPG firings on residential areas and suicide attacks and machine gun firings at civilians during communal festivities. Target killing of Hazaras has become a daily norm in Pakistan; two very recent incidents include killings of about thirty Hazara travellers picked out as Shi’ite Hazaras from a bus who were shot dead on the spot, and a suicide attack on the Eid festivity whose major victims were women and children.

These killings are carried out following regular religious decrees that identify Shi’ite Hazaras as infidels who must be killed. The recent open letter, which was published in ‘Daily Jung,’ one of the leading national newspapers, called for killing Hazaras on the spot wherever they were found in order to clean the pure land of Pakistan from these infidels. Such open letters contain the signatures of prominent religious scholars, which make them very effective in manipulating the public opinion.

The governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan support the terrorist organizations that carry these systematic attacks. In Pakistan their strong and complex ties with the government can be analysed in the context of the sponsorship and support of Pakistani intelligence and security agencies of the militant operatives in Afghanistan and Kashmir. Today the major political parties in Pakistan get a significant portion of their constituent support from giving political and legal incentives to such radical and terrorist organisations. Sates and governments, such as that of Saudi Arabia, ambitious to lead the Islamic world and maintain their influence in the region, support these organizations financially and theoretically to promote their radical ideologies.

These offshoots and proxies of Al-Qaida and Taliban take pride in having devastated the Hazara communities and crushed their social life in Afghanistan; and they now intend to do the same in Pakistan. These are the aims they explicitly state in their open letters and their religious teachings.

Following the Bonn Conference and the establishment of the Parliament in Afghanistan, Hazaras anticipated the beginning of a democratic political culture that would uphold the dignity of our people within a just society. With such hopes we participated in the process of disarmament and cooperated in the formation of a new democratic political system.

Against all our efforts and expectations, the Karzai government and the international forces have failed to provide us with security against the daily illegal occupation of our homes and the brutal killings of our people in Afghanistan. The annual attacks of the Taliban supported nomads result in occupation of our homes and killings of dozens of our people every spring which is not only taken as not important, but our protests for our lives are also suppressed as unacceptable and rebellious. The shear arrogance and ignorance that the international forces exhibit in practice towards our people nullifies any reasonable expectations. This situation in Afghanistan is becoming even worse since the Karzai government has started making efforts to integrate the Taliban forces in the government. Through these efforts the government is giving legal and political concessions to the terrorist activities of these extremist organizations and leaving no hope for reconciliation and peace in the country.

We want a peaceful Afghanistan, which is free of terrorist bases; a country that is no longer identified as the hub of drug trafficking. We have played a significant role in the history and culture of Afghanistan & Pakistan; the destroyed statues of Buddha in Afghanistan were our historical pride; dozens of social, academic, artistic and sports figures and top army officers and commanders in Pakistan and Afghanistan are marks of the resilient and hardworking spirit of our people. Our people are eager to contribute to the development of a just and peaceful society as a home for everyone.

We have suffered from tyrannic oppression for over two centuries, and yet there is another holocaust we have to go through in Pakistan. We, the Australian Hazaras, strongly sympathise with the oppressed and tormented Hazaras who are suffering at the hands of Al-Qaida and its proxies such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi in Pakistan, and the nomads and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

We state our explicit demands as follows:

1. Condemning the current systematic genocide of our people in Pakistan.

2. Questioning the inexcusable silence of authorities in Pakistan, and the international community.

3. Appealing to the international community to raise their concerns with the Pakistani government about the genocide of Hazara people.

4. Asking the international community to call for a fair investigation into the systematic genocide of Hazaras at the hand of those who publicly confess to their crimes.

5. Demanding the Australian Foreign Minister to personally communicate to his counterpart in Pakistan and raise his serious concerns about the genocide of Hazaras taking place right now.

6. Recognising that the Taliban group, the Haqqani network, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Sepah-e-Sahaba and other radical groups are terrorist groups who pose a genuine threat to the world security and peace.

7. Rejecting the incorporation of the Taliban in Afghanistan’s government by any means.

8. Emphasising that the incorporation of Taliban would compromise the rights of the minorities and particularly women’s rights. Furthermore, it would undermine the process of building a democratic system that can guarantee a peaceful and persecution free environment.

The failure to act on these matters will facilitate the genocide of Hazaras in Pakistan; and will also ensure that Afghanistan and Pakistan remain in a state of turmoil and ongoing bloodshed.