Hazara Community (Pakistan)

Andy Slaughter Excerpts

Monday 4th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr John Denham (Southampton, Itchen) (Lab)]

I am very grateful indeed for the opportunity to have this debate. I hope that the hon. Member for Milton Keynes South (Iain Stewart) and a number of others may be able to participate, given the time at which we are starting. I am also grateful that the Minister is in his place to respond on what is obviously a busy day for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, given the visit of President Hamid Karzai and President Asif Ali Zardari. That visit makes this a timely debate—I will return to that point in a few moments.

On the Wednesday before last, I and a number of colleagues from across the House helped to organise a lobby of Parliament by members of the British Hazara community. That was the week in which many right hon. and hon. Members were signing the memorial book for Holocaust memorial day. That event asks us all each year to be aware that genocidal persecution on religious and ethnic grounds is not simply an appalling past event but an ever-present danger that we have to be aware of. The persecution of the Hazara community, in Quetta and other parts of Balochistan, is undoubtedly persecution for religious and ethnic reasons—it bears those strong hallmarks—and that is the issue I want to raise today.

The last time this matter was raised on the Adjournment was in a debate led by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Alan Johnson) on 1 March last year. The Minister responded to that debate too. I am sure that when he speaks the Minister will agree that things have not improved for the Hazaras in Quetta since that debate last March.

I do not want to pretend that I have long been aware of the history and plight of Hazaras; the truth is that I was not. Beyond some references to the community in novels such as “The Kite Runner” and an awareness of the small—about 150—but distinctive community in Southampton, of whom I had met a few, I had relatively little knowledge of the Hazara community. As a group, the Hazaras are physically quite distinctive, with somewhat Mongolian looks, and that distinctive appearance has helped to contribute to their vulnerability in Pakistan.

I did not know a great deal about the history and the plight of the Hazara community until a group of my constituents came to see me earlier this year. The story they told me truly appalled me. Theirs is a long history, and I will not attempt to rehearse it here tonight. Suffice it to say that the community originated in central Asia, in the Afghan central highlands. The Hazaras converted to Shi’a Islam in the 13th century, and while the majority remain Shi’a, there are now Sunnis, Ismailis and secular members of the community.

Persecution of the Hazara community by Afghan rulers started, I am afraid, under the British Empire, and it has been a consistent problem in Afghanistan ever since. Many Hazaras have left Afghanistan, and over 100 years ago many settled in and around Quetta, which in due course became part of Pakistan. We are all familiar with the recent waves of refugees from Afghanistan to Pakistan, some of whom have eventually made their way here, where they have sought and been granted asylum.

However, the Hazaras that I am talking about today are part of that much longer-established community in Quetta who are not refugees but Pakistani citizens. For a long time, they lived free from persecution in Quetta, thriving educationally and economically. As citizens, they are entitled to full support from the Pakistani state. Since the late 1990s, however, their situation has changed dramatically. The killings started in 1999. Since then, more than 1,000 Hazaras have been killed in Quetta, 3,000 or more have been injured, and 55,000 or so have been forced to flee to Europe or Australia. All of those came from a population of between 500,000 and 600,000.

The perpetrators are a banned Sunni militant al-Qaeda-affiliated group called Lashkar-e-Jhangvi—the LEJ. The Taliban and the LEJ have both issued fatwas against the Hazaras. After the recent violence, an LEJ spokesman was reported as saying that the Hazaras had been warned in 2012 that they should leave Balochistan, the province in which Quetta sits, and that as many had not done so, the LEJ will not allow Shi’as to leave alive in 2013.

That is the background to the dreadful bombing in Quetta on 10 January this year. The death toll was well above 100, and more than 120 people were injured. One of my reasons for seeking this debate is that although that incident was widely reported on television and radio and in the press, the reporting rarely gave any context to the violence, which was generally reported as simply another bomb attack in Pakistan. Some reports alluded to a generalised struggle between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims. The few that even mentioned the Hazaras did not explain their history, the background to their situation or the agency of their persecution. One of the reasons for having this debate is to put on public record at least some of that background, and to challenge some of the myths.

One such myth is that the persecution is a manifestation of some generalised Sunni-Shi’a conflict that has manifested itself from time to time in regional tensions in other parts of the middle east. I do not believe that that is the case. It is clear from the targets of the violence and from the death toll that the violence is directed at just one distinctive community within the wider Shi’a community. I understand that the Hazaras of Quetta are 33 times more likely to be killed by political violence than members of the wider Shi’a community in Pakistan. That constitutes a focus on a particular religious and ethnic group.

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

My right hon. Friend is making a powerful case. As he has said, this constitutes not only religious but ethnic cleansing, and the figures that he has given the House are stark. Is he aware that, despite the 1,000 deaths, the local government in Pakistan—which, fortunately, has now been disbarred by the Pakistani Government—has not brought a single charge against anyone for the offences, and that not one member of that government has ever condemned any of the atrocities?

[Mr Denham]

One of the most serious problems is that there has been no acceptance of responsibility by the Pakistani authorities of the kind that we would expect in a serious situation such as this. I hope that the Minister will be able to tell us what representations Her Majesty’s Government have been able to make to the Pakistani authorities on this matter.

The problem with the ill-informed, shallow or sweeping reporting that we have seen is that it tends to obscure the real causes of the violence and to obscure the responsibilities. It allows the incidents to be shrugged off as though that is “just the way things are”. Since 1990, the violence has included ride-by and drive-by shootings, personal attacks, suicide bombings, rocket attacks and car bombs, as well as the ambushing of buses and taxis and the subsequent selection of Hazara passengers for execution.

This is not the first time that my constituents have alerted me to what has happened to their relatives. Under the last Government, I took constituents who had family in the Swat valley in Pakistan to meet Lord Malloch-Brown, then a Foreign Office Minister, to alert him to the violence being carried out by the Pakistan Taliban. My constituents had come to me with stark examples of what had happened to members of their families in the recent past. I shall not give the House details of names, as family members might suffer as a result, but I have received clear documentation of constituents who had seen family members—male breadwinners—singled out for murder in three separate incidents over the past three years. The effects of that are devastating for the entire family. In a country with little in the way of a social security system, the loss of a male breadwinner has an impact on every member of the extended family.

There are wider consequences too. The Hazaras in Quetta have to live in isolation from other Pakistani citizens, not least because those other citizens fear being caught up in the violence. They suffer travel restrictions, and virtually all the Hazara students in Quetta have dropped out of university, following attacks on student transport. Hazara people have also faced difficulty in accessing civil service jobs. As has already been pointed out, however, not a single terrorist has yet been prosecuted. On the rare occasions when individuals have been arrested, they have been released. The provincial governor has been replaced, but little action seems to have been taken as yet.

The failure of the Pakistan authorities to safeguard the Hazara community is surely beyond doubt, but concerns remain about a much more sinister involvement. It is alleged that the intelligence services, the Inter-Services Intelligence, sections of which have a history of involvement with extremist forces, have links in some ways to the LEJ. I want to put it on record that I do not know whether such links are documented or what the strength of the evidence is, but the concerns about those potential connections are widely shared among those I have spoken to.

There are complicated provincial politics in Balochistan, involving not only the movements I have mentioned. The province is also tied up in the wider regional conflict, and there have been separatist movements and movements calling for autonomy. Many Hazaras believe that they have been caught up as innocent victims in the wider geo-politics.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Andy Slaughter (Hammersmith) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr Denham) for allowing me to trespass on his debate for what I hope will be only a couple of moments.

Hazaras do not stand out from the rest of the population of Hammersmith. I was not well acquainted with them until I was introduced to the local Hazara community, and before that I would not have distinguished them from the Afghanistan, Mongolian and south Asian minorities in my constituency. Sadly for them, however, they do stand out in Pakistan, and they have been victimised to an extent that cannot be overemphasised.

I want to make two points to the Minister. First, what is intended by the alliance between the LEJ, sections of the Taliban and, possibly, sections of the security services is nothing short of genocide. A threatening letter issued last year told Hazaras in Quetta:

“Just as our fighters have waged a successful jihad against the Shia-Hazaras in Afghanistan, our mission”

—in Pakistan—

“is the abolition of this impure sect and people”.

Last August, a report from the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan stated:

“Hazaras have been…uprooted from Machh, Loralai and Zhob. It seems a campaign has been launched to terrorize the Hazara community so that they leave Quetta by selling their businesses and property at throwaway prices. Pamphlets have been left at their homes telling them to sell their houses and leave.”

That sustained and organised campaign of murder and aggression led to the appalling snooker hall bombings of 10 January—the second bomb was designed to kill those who had come to save the victims of the first—and the harrowing sight, which I think we all saw on the news, of the bodies of the dead remaining unburied, and of relatives waiting with the coffins for three days, in sub-zero temperatures, to make public the plight of the whole community. In the end, it was that, and only that, which embarrassed the Pakistani Government and the Prime Minister enough to make them step in and impose governor’s rule in the province over the—I do not think that this is an exaggeration—gimcrack Government who had behaved in the way I have described.

Yes, there is effective military rule at present, and yes—thank God—there have been no more atrocities; but no one believes that the security situation has been resolved. Military rule is not the solution in the longer term. The Hazaras do not want that any more than anyone else. They simply want to live in peace in their own country, with their neighbours, as they did for so many decades. That is an obligation for the Pakistani Government, and it is an obligation that I hope the Minister will address in his response to my right hon. Friend’s points. I hope the Minister will tell us how the British Government can help the Hazara population—the diaspora in this country and elsewhere, but principally those in Pakistan—to secure what they want, which is simply the ability to live in peace and security in their own homes.