The Honey Thief by Najaf Mazari, Robert Hillman Read Free Book Online Page B

his ceremonial uniform of green silk with his sword at his side and swore that he would be Russia’s best friend in the world once he crossed the Oxus and seized Afghanistan with his Russian carbines. But when he crossed the Oxus, he met with the British, who had thousands of troops in Afghanistan at that time, and swore that he would be Britain’s best friend in the world if those troops were withdrawn. Lepel Griffin, the British envoy in Kabul, arranged the deal in the British fashion of mixing good manners with treachery, and Abdur Rahman became Emir of Afghanistan in 1880.
    In that year of 1880, Hazarajat was divided between those in the north who had supported Sher Ali as Emir, since he’d treated them with no more than average cruelty, a tyrant they could bear, and those in the south who remembered that the new ruler in Kabul, Abdur Rahman, was a man of great violence. The Sher Ali supporters feared that Abdur Rahman would take his revenge on them, and they argued that all Hazara should stand as one against the scourge to come. I wish I could say that every Hazara stood by his brother, but such was not the case. The southern Hazarajat came out in support of Abdur Rahman for the sake of survival, and the Emir limited his vengeance to the north.
    And his vengeance was terrible. His years of exile in Tashkent had acted on his ambition like a whetstone on a knife’s edge. He remembered the rebellion that had cost his father the throne and regretted that he had not acted sooner and killed those who had not honoured Afzal Khan. He had made a vow that on his return to Kabul, any man who opposed him would die. He meant those who had opposed him in the present, those who might oppose him in the future, and those who had opposed him in the past. He made a blunt offer to the Hazara of the north: ‘Send your leaders to Kabul to kneel at my feet, or die.’ No Afghan of any ethnic group will accept an ultimatum other than in the most desperate circumstances. To even make an ultimatum is insulting; usually, the order of words is so crafted that those who are being warned can save face. Abdur Rahman knew very well that his ultimatum would be rejected, as it was. His soldiers were already advancing on Hazarajat even as the offer was being discussed.
    Massacres take many forms, not only in Afghanistan but elsewhere in the world. Sometimes people are rounded up in groups of fifty or so and shot all at once. Sometimes the massacres are carried out in smaller numbers, a family at a time, so that it is only after some weeks that a final tally reaches into the thousands. The number killed depends on the organisation of the killers. The more efficient the killers, the faster the murders, and the faster the murders, the greater the final tally. Abdur Rahman’s soldiers were not as efficient as the German soldiers who murdered Jews in the 1940s, but they did their job to the satisfaction of the Emir. They went from house to house, forcing the younger men into the centre of the village, where they murdered them according to the preference of individual captains and generals. In some villages, most of those killed were put to the sword, either with a single wound to the upper chest delivered with a downward stroke so that the blade struck the heart from above, or by beheading. In other villages, scaffolds were set up with long cross-beams from which five or six men could be hanged at one time. If long beams were not available, men were hanged one at a time from tall tripods. Certain commanders chose to kill their captives with gunfire, shooting Hazara on their knees. Resistance of any sort was punished by torture, conducted in the open before the gaze of those whose own turn would follow. The more savage commanders killed every Hazara they encountered, regardless of sex and regardless of age.
    Garrisons were left in many villages of the north. The soldiers of the garrisons punished at will. When outbreaks of resistance were too great for the