Afghanistan's Hazara battle ground

FORMER Afghan refugee Abdul Karim Hekmat went back to his homeland to document the plight of those he left behind.

FORMER Afghan refugee Abdul Karim Hekmat went back to his homeland to document the plight of those he left behind.

The deadly plight of the Hazaras in Afghanistan is the starting point for a photography exhibition in Adelaide by a former Afghan refugee.

Abdul Karim Hekmat, who made his way to Australia 12 years ago, was able to establish himself in Sydney before returning in disguise to document his homelands in 2010.

The resulting photographs show a rich and historic culture, but also a threatened minority constantly harassed by the Taliban and ignored by the Afghan Government. “I decided to go back because I did research on the Hazara people for my thesis at Sydney’s UTS and I wanted to see what life was like for the people I had left behind,” he says.

Hekmat thought that his Australian passport would give him the ability to move freely in Afghanistan but in Kabul he had to hide it and then make his way in disguise to the Hazara homelands.

Most Afghan refugees to Australia are Hazaras, a Shi’ite Muslim group with distinct facial features, surrounded by the majority Sunni Muslims and the fundamentalist Sunni Taliban.

The Hazaras live mainly around Bamiyan, where the giant buddhas carved in stone out of the cliff faces were defaced and destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Hekmat was welcomed in the Hazara communities he visited as one of their own.

A chance conversation with one man soon attracted a group of men angry about their situation, and eager for him to photograph them and speak of their plight to the world.

“I had decided not to go back to my hometown in Ghazni province because it was quite dangerous there but my relatives called me and asked ‘why don’t you come to see us’,” he says.

During his time there he photographed the national elections in 2010, when the Hazaras voted in defiance of Taliban threats, but discovered there were not nearly enough ballot papers for them.

Hekmat said that back in 2000 he had had no idea how dangerous his own escape to Australia would be, innocently getting on to a boat to Australia and finding there was no going back.

His position as a former refugee who now works with refugees in Australia has led to him speaking at the recent UNHCR convention in Geneva, after being selected as a representative of refugees from Australia. He says he had discovered in Geneva that Australia’s treatment of refugees was generally recognised as humane.

“But they couldn’t understand why so many Australians were worried about the small number of refugees coming by boat, compared with the flood of refugees to other parts of the world,” he says.

In Ghazni, Hekmat was in real danger and had to use a compact camera. When the Taliban cut off the province he could not get out for his return trip to Australia, and begged the UN helicopter collecting the ballots for help, which they refused.

It struck him that ironically, he might once again become an Afghan refugee. Instead, he was caught up in Afghanistan for months while he cautiously made his way in a circuitous route back to Kabul and a flight home.

Hekmat uses his exhibition, which has shown in university art galleries around Australia, to argue that the Australian Government’s decision to repatriate Hazara refugees to a “safe” Afghanistan ignores the perilous position of the Hazara minority there.

Hekmat’s photographs are visually powerful while the captions, informed by Hekmat’s connection with the Hazara people, give an insight into the everyday perils that afflict them.

There is the farming family pushed off their land by Kuchi, or majority Pashtun nomad group, hungry for the Hazara grazing land.

There is a group of traders posing in front of their destroyed shops, children in front of their destroyed schools and homes, and a father at his murdered son’s grave. Each show a resilient people somehow coping with the disasters that have befallen them.

The exhibition is at Nexus Multicultural Arts Centre until July 30.