Other articles by the same author:
|
Source:
Rethinking Refuge and
Displacement: Selected Papers on Refugees and Immigrants, Volume VIII, 2000. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological
Association. Pp. 291-321.
ANTHROPOLOGY
AND THE REPRESENTATIONS OF
RECENT
MIGRATIONS FROM AFGHANISTAN
Anthropologists
often bemoan their perceived lack of impact on public policy and discourse. In
the case of Afghanistan,
as I will demonstrate, the opposite is true. Anthropologists are products of
the ideological environments in which they live; the writings on recent
migrations from Afghanistan
by anthropologists are framed by passionate politicized discourse.
Ethnography can
be seen as a means by which anthropology, or the systematic study and
understanding of the human condition, is achieved.1 Ethnographic
writings on Afghan migrants have tended to fall into two categories: macro- and
micro-specialist writings. Both forms, I propose, are framed by political
opposition to the Soviet Union and the post-1978
revolutionary government of Afghanistan.
The study of
spatial and social movements of people has been an important dimension of
anthropological discourse. The migration of millions of people within and from Afghanistan
during the 1980s and 1990s offered a unique opportunity for anthropologists to
study center-periphery relations and to gain new insights into population
movements produced by regional and global political, economic, and historical
processes. In addition, these population movements provided the potential for
informing our anthropological understanding of the adaptation processes of
diverse ethnic groups from Afghanistan
who found themselves in new, challenging socio-cultural environments in Iran,
Pakistan, Europe,
the United States,
and elsewhere.
In this paper, I
argue that the politicization of the study of Afghan migration has resulted in
a missed opportunity and therefore produced meager theoretical and ethnographic
contributions to the understanding of migration and population dynamics, Islam
and social movements, social change, and tribe and central government relations
in Afghanistan.
As part of its main argument this paper offers an assessment of selected
aspects of writings by primarily North American anthropologists about migrants
who left Afghanistan
after the 1978 takeover of the government by the Peoples Democratic Party of
Afghanistan (PDPA), locally called Khalq (masses).
This change in government marks a profound discursive shift in the anthropology
of Afghanistan,
making it unambiguously and viscerally political. Descriptive texts produced in
pre-revolutionary years were replaced by undisguised anti-Afghanistan discourse
and jehad (agitation, struggle)
promoting anti-revolutionary political rhetoric.2
In the following sections, the dominant
paradigm in which Afghan migrants are characterized as political refugees
rather than economic migrants is examined. This will be followed by background
information to situate these migrants and ethnographic accounts about them
within a larger geo-political context. Against this backdrop, the paper
explores the engagement between Western anthropology and these migrants.
Particular emphasis is placed on the ways in which anthropology becomes
politicized in contexts of ideological warfare.
Political refugees or economic
migrants?
Anthropologists
consider most Afghans in the diaspora as refugees. Moreover, in most cases,
they discuss Afghan migration as a phenomenon removed from its larger regional
and global contexts. Absent is the recognition that this massive displacement
was a local expression of global, postcolonial processes driven by capitalism
and the ideological, political, and economic competition between the former Soviet
Union and the United States.3
The millions of
migrants who left Afghanistan
are part of what Appadurai (1996:6) calls the combination of “diasporas of
hope, diasporas of terror, and diasporas of despair” all entangled in the
contradictions of modern, industrial, global capitalism. Thus, to understand
the predicament of the Afghan migrants we need to understand the bigger game
and the larger players. Obviously we all share in the pain, trauma, and tragedy
of every Afghan migrant who has suffered, but the primary structures and
agencies responsible for creating this suffering and pain will not be found in Afghanistan,
Iran, or Pakistan
alone.4
In the 1980s,
goaded by intensive U.S.-sponsored propaganda, millions of Afghans crossed the
borders of Afghanistan
into Iran and Pakistan.
Precise numbers of displaced Afghans are unavailable, but some estimate that
one quarter to one third of the population left the country. Approximately 3.2
million Afghans migrated to Pakistan and 2.3 million to Iran (Christensen
1995:105).5 About 200,000 migrants, including the Afghan political
and economic elite, merchants, and highly skilled professionals, notably
medical doctors, resettled in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia.
The latter migrated in accordance with their own means and abilities as well as
the needs and inclinations of the modern world powers which hosted them. Some
4,000 Afghans were moved to Turkey
from Pakistan,
and about 20,000 currently reside in India.
With the downfall of the revolutionary Khalq
government in 1992 and with the ascendance of the taleban movement in 1994, another sizeable number of intellectuals
and members of the former government bureaucracy fled Afghanistan,
primarily to Pakistan
and Russia.6
For the past 15
years Afghan migrants have been considered the largest displaced group in the
world (Colleville 1997b) prompting one writer to call Pakistan “Mujahiristan” [sic], land of the refugees/migrants
(Barton 1984:21).7 While the Afghan exodus became the focus of much
international political, academic, and humanitarian attention, there is little
published information about the large numbers of people who experienced
dislocation within Afghanistan, especially since 1992. The Danish
anthropologist Asgar Christensen (1995) provides one of the more useful
descriptive accounts of the status, problems, and prospects of these migrants,
especially those in Pakistan.
The categories “refugee” and “migrant” are ambiguous. According to the 1951 UN
Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is an individual who
owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for
reasons of race, religion, nationality, or membership of a particular social
group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is
unable or owing to such fears, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection
of that country (UNHCR 1997:51).
Though widely used, this
definition is a subject of continuous debate by legal experts, policy makers,
and scholars (see, for example, Adelman 1988; Beyer 1981; Harvey
1999; Kay and Miles 1988; Kunz 1981; Shaknove 1985; Stein 1981). Its analytical
utility for ethnographic research is limited. The definition presupposes social
categories and cognitive and emotional conditions that are extremely difficult
(even impossible) to capture, track, and verify. In using such definitions the
ethnographer is forced to accept whatever an informant wishes to claim without
a realistic venue for verification. Moreover, the definition is essentially
built upon the European model of “Civil Society” and Eurocentric notions of
“freedom,” “race,” “politics,” “religion,” and “nationality,” making its
universal application tantamount to a form of Western colonialism. This
definition and its derivatives, such as that used by the Organization of
African Unity, serve as poor guideposts in describing Afghan migrants’
experiences.
In this paper, I
suggest that the vast majority of Afghan migrants qualify as “migrant,” an
economic category, rather than “refugee,” a political category. In either case,
these categories are contingent on the structure and history of the political
economy of Afghanistan,
Pakistan, the
region, and global capitalism. This position is consistent with current
academic debates, the general consensus about the patterns of large-scale
population movements, and conclusions drawn from my ethnographic research among
these migrants (see Abu-Sahlieh and Aldeeb 1996; Bhabha 1996; Hastedt and
Knickrehm 1988; Hein 1993; Howell 1982; Malkki 1992, 1995; Masquelier 2000;
Shacknove 1985; Richmond 1993; Shami 1996; Zetter 1984).
Mass migrations
were familiar features of the pre-Islamic and Islamic history of Central and South
Asia, and the Iranian Plateau. These migrations were crucial
components of the evolution of a centralized polity in Afghanistan.
The country is situated at the confluence of these three culture areas. For
centuries what is called Afghanistan
has been a corridor through which various populations, including armies and
nomadic groups, have regularly moved back and forth.8
The present
borders of Afghanistan
were imposed by Persian, British, and Russian colonial governments during the
second half of the 19th century. The borders with Iran,
Pakistan, Tajikistan,
Turkmenistan,
and Uzbekistan
are straddled by a variety of ethnic and tribal groups. Movement of people
across all but the northern borders continues virtually unimpeded by
governments on both sides. Even during the height of Soviet control of Central
Asia, people crossed the northern borders on a regular basis. But
the border that divides the Paxtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan
is the most disregarded. Paxtun nomadic caravans regularly traverse between Afghanistan
and the Indus plains in Pakistan
(Sweetser 1984).
Global context of Afghan migrants
Over the past 50
years, events in Afghanistan
can be seen as a continuation of the “Great Game” played in the 19th
and early 20th centuries between Russia
and Great Britain
that thwarted prospects for the development of institutions conducive to a
non-insuslar political economy. While the players have changed—Russia
and the United States—the
goals, strategic advantages in the market, and the approaches (money, weapons,
and local blood) remain the same. Weak state systems in the region including Afghanistan
and Pakistan
are dispensable clients and tools used by the big players and continue necessarily to be the local settings for the production of mass population movements
within and across their borders.
During the Cold
War, U.S. and
Soviet efforts to embarrass and dishonor each other destabilized Afghanistan
and resulted in the eventual collapse of its center. Globalization, Cold-War
competition, a destabilized Afghanistan,
and unrestricted population movement across Afghan borders form the basis for
understanding mass migration from Afghanistan
to the neighboring countries of Iran
and Pakistan
during the 1980s. It is significant that during the decade preceding the
revolution in Afghanistan,
thousands of Afghan men migrated to Iran
and later settled in the Persian Gulf region.9
Employed as manual laborers in construction projects and in port facilities,
the migrants sent home large amounts of hard currency, causing serious
inflation in Afghanistan.
The changed focus in relations with its neighbors and heightened internal
economic and political instability sparked the 1978 revolutionary overthrow of
the central government.
The former USSR,
while the main supporter of the new revolutionary regime, was unable to control
the increasingly independent-minded and nationalistic central government,
dominated by Ghalzi Paxtuns; it invaded the country in December 1979. The Russians
killed President Hafizullah Amin and installed Babrak Karmal, a non-Paxtun, as
head of government. After the introduction of Soviet military forces and the
ensuing civil war, millions of Afghans migrated to Pakistan
and Iran.
The United
States has been implicated heavily in events
in Afghanistan
for some time; most significantly it organized and encouraged armed rebellion
against the 1978 revolution in Afghanistan.
U.S. efforts in creating anti-Afghanistan terrorists intensified particularly
after the introduction of Soviet troops (Stork 1980), a development which might
even have been encouraged by the United States to “set up” and “bleed” its Cold
War adversary (Hitchens 1991). In addition to creating and subsidizing the
armed opposition, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, through its elaborate
propaganda network, encouraged the massive exodus of migrants from Afghanistan
to embarrass the Soviet Union and the government it supported in Afghanistan.10
Clearly, despite rhetoric to the contrary, the United States was motivated by
factors other than helping Afghanistan save itself from the “ungodly” Russians
and to regain its “freedom” and “independence.”11
The United
States spent billions of dollars to recruit,
pay, train, and equip large numbers of Afghan migrants to sabotage public
projects, civil sector infrastructure, and implement hit and run operations
against Soviet and Afghan forces (Weiner 1990). It has been alleged that the
U.S. assistance to the various anti-Afghanistan terrorists took “the form of
‘refugee relief’ through established agencies like CARE and the International
Refugee Committee (both of which have records of collaboration with the CIA in
Indochina), and through ad hoc
groupings like the Afghanistan Relief Committee, headed by Americans associated
with the Asia Foundation, an alleged CIA conduit which had a large presence in
Kabul in the ‘60s” (Stork 1980:25). The U.S.-sponsored anti-Afghanistan
insurgency used “the refugee camps as bases for recruitment and training”
(Castle and Miller 1998:158; Goodson 1990). These bands of saboteurs were
romantically popularized by various Western journalists and propaganda machines
as “mojahedin” (plural of mojahed,
agitator, struggler; those engaged in jehad),
“Holy Warriors,” “Freedom Fighters,” and were, together with their Central
American counterparts, hailed by Ronald Reagan as the “moral equivalent of our
founding fathers.” The anthropologist Robert L. Canfield (1984) and sociologist
Olivier Roy (1985) refer to them by the misleading but spicy label of
“resistance.” By using these labels for the U.S.-sponsored terrorist gangs and
anti-revolutionary rhetoric in their writings, anthropologists not only
distorted but blatantly misrepresented what was truly happening in Afghanistan.
Academics,
journalists, and other individuals and groups who had personal and ideological
axes to grind with the Soviet Union and the leftist Khalq-controlled government of Afghanistan, and who had lost their
access to the country, portrayed the migrants with powerful images of victims
and survivors of a yet-to-be-adequately-documented anti-Islamic “genocide”
(Klass 1988:129) and “holocaust” (Klass 1985:28; Revel 1985:22) that caused
millions of Afghans to disengage themselves from local society and to move to
Iran and Pakistan.12
The United
Nations and numerous governmental and private agencies from Europe
and North America undertook elaborate relief projects
for the vast number of Afghan migrants in Pakistan.
An extensive network of largely politicized non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) appeared in various parts of Pakistan
where these migrants were settled (Baitenmann 1990). Iran
did not allow such programs, except for UN relief efforts. To my knowledge, not
a single Western anthropologist has visited and written about the Afghan
migrants in Iran.
Even the UN publications contain comparatively little by way of information on
Afghans in Iran.13 The United Nations and some NGOs have produced a
voluminous literature dealing with various facets of Afghan migrants’ life in Pakistan
that contains a wealth of descriptive information about social and cultural
conditions among these migrants.14
Western anthropology and Afghan
migrants
After World War
II, Western anthropologists began conducting research in Afghanistan.
Archaeologist Louis Dupree, a man with a lengthy career in the U.S. Armed
Forces, was one of the first. He excavated a number of sites in Afghanistan
in the 1950s and 1960s and published highly respected archaeological reports.
Dupree was a prolific writer who, in addition to archaeology, wrote extensively
about various aspects of social and political life in Afghanistan.
However, he never spelled out the ethnographic bases for these writings.
Stationed in Kabul, from 1959 to
1978, as a representative of the American Universities Field Staff (AUFS),
Dupree developed extensive contacts with Afghan government officials and
academics. As a result of these contacts, and his association with a variety of
Western universities and funding institutions, he became a virtual
clearinghouse for social science research in Afghanistan.
In 1978, Dupree
was arrested and briefly detained by the revolutionary government of Afghanistan.
Accused of being a CIA agent, he was expelled from the country (Dupree 1980a,
1980b). It is difficult to assess the full impact of this episode on Dupree and
other researchers whom he helped gain access to Afghanistan.
It is likely, however, that Dupree’s expulsion affected his views and
perceptions of the revolutionary regime and the predicament of the Afghan
migrants who had moved to Pakistan.
He identified so intensely with Afghanistan
that during one of his testimonies before the U.S. Congress he thanked the
committee for giving him the opportunity to “speak for my people, the Afghans”
(U.S. Congress 1986:99).
After 1978,
Dupree’s publications and public statements contain passionate condemnations of
the revolutionary government in Afghanistan,
its policies, and its practices. Dupree was recognized widely as an “expert” on
Afghanistan,
and it is difficult to over-estimate his impact on U.S.
and other countries’ policies toward Afghanistan.
“In the United States, he was a consultant on Afghan affairs to the State
Department, the Peace Corps, the National Security Council, the Central
Intelligence Agency, the Agency for International Development and the United
Nations” (Humphrey 1989:S 4649; Narvaez 1989:D22). He was “an advisor on Afghanistan
to the governments of West Germany,
France, Denmark,
Sweden, Norway,
England and Australia”
(Humphrey 1989:S 4649; Narvaez 1989:D22).15
Dupree (1979:5)
reported that by August 1978, three months after the Khalq takeover of the Afghan government, over 165,000 persons had
migrated to Pakistan.
However, the first organized attempt by anthropologists to address the Afghanistan
revolution, two sessions at the 1980 annual meeting of the American
Anthropological Association in Washington, D.C.,
did not focus on the migrants. Of the 17 papers presented in these sessions,
none addressed the Afghan migrants.16
After the Khalq takeover in 1978, only
anthropologists who had previously worked among various groups in Afghanistan
conducted research among or wrote about the Afghan migrants in Iran and
Pakistan. Very little new ground has been broken in the anthropology of Afghanistan
since 1978. In the past 20 years, only three anthropologists have completed
their doctoral dissertations on Afghan migrants.17 During this same
period, only a handful of articles by anthropologists on Afghanistan
have appeared in the mainstream academic journals in North America
and Europe, and, of these, only two focus on Afghan
migrants. For the first time in at least 30 years, Anthropology News (2000:36) contained a brief, 12-line note about Afghanistan
under the title “Afghanistani [sic]
Women’s Plight.” It announces an Afghan-American anthropologist’s plea “for
more American action against the rulers of Afghanistan,”
“the monster it created for the sake of oil and gas.”
It is remarkable
that the otherwise politically robust and vocal North American anthropology has
been so silent about social and political conditions in a country where the
Cold War had gained some heat before it expired and where a kind of mirror
image of Vietnam
was taking place. In an earlier era, discussion and debate about the moral pros
and cons of the Vietnam War and anthropologists’ collaboration with the CIA in
the war effort was a regular feature in the Newsletter
of the American Anthropological Association
and the Anthropology Newsletter
(predecessors of Anthropology News).
This prompts the questions as to why organized, institutional anthropology was
silent when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan?
And why was it silent when the United States
and its allies, in response, introduced the means which, together with Russian
contributions, directly caused the destruction of the political economy of Afghanistan?
An exploration of the answer to these questions is beyond the scope of this
paper. However, they are important questions to raise and the answer would
likely include some treatment of anthropology’s construction as a discipline
spawned by Western colonialism. The discipline, with a stall in the global
capitalist market, was not really a bystander in the Cold War. Its
protestations of the Vietnam
affair were more a function of being housed in the losing country than a stable
(independent of supply and demand) commitment to lofty moral and ethical
standards.
Portrayals of Afghan migrants by
“anthropologists”
I have already
introduced the context and some of the ways in which portrayals of Afghanistan
and Afghan migrants by anthropologists have been politicized since the 1978
revolution. In this section, I explore specific examples from macro- and
micro-specialist ethnographic writings. Macro-specialist writers, who expatiate
with broad and general strokes on a variety of Afghan issues (see, for
instance, Dupree 1975, 1979, 1980a, 1980b, 1988) fail to capture the important
interrelationships that exist among the various socio-cultural phenomena.
Micro-specialists, on the other hand, have tended to be too narrow in focus,
seldom making generalizations or comparisons with respect to the larger
socio-cultural and historical complexities within Afghanistan
and the larger region. What these two forms of writing share, however, is the
sharp political turn both forms took after the 1978 revolution; their writings,
I shall argue, are framed by anti-Russian and anti-Afghanistan government
political passion.
The
macro-sepecialists
I consider
Dupree as the leading macro-specialist and limit my remarks regarding
macro-specialists to his work.18 While one of his early works (1975)
provides a useful description of population dynamics in Afghanistan,
his post-1978 publications on Afghanistan
became highly politicized. For example, without citing any documentation, he
states that “by mid-August (1978), over 165,000 refugees had flowed from Afghanistan
into Pakistan”
(Dupree 1979:5). Referring to the anti-Afghanistan government activities into
which many of these migrants were recruited, he states that:
The real problem is the Durand Line of 1893
which separates Afghanistan
from Pakistan.
The border has always been a sieve. During the Baluch Insurrection of
1973-1977, thousands of Baluch fled to Afghanistan.
Guerrillas drifted back and forth with impunity. Certain Afghans can do the
same today, no matter how seriously the Pakistanis attempt to block the
incursions (Dupree 1979:5).
This statement
is intended to justify the continued anti-Afghanistan activity originating in Pakistan
by the “Freedom Fighters.” However, the counterpart of the Baluch Insurrection
in Afghanistan
never existed. As early as the summer of 1978, the governments of Pakistan
and Egypt, in
collaboration with and substantial material support of the United
States, had on their soil, established
numerous training camps for anti-Afghanistan insurgent groups. The three
governments were blatantly interfering in the internal affairs of Afghanistan,
in violation of numerous international conventions and norms. Elsewhere, Dupree
issues the following bleak prediction:
If enough Afghans
leave for potentially volatile Pakistan
and Iran, the
Soviets gain a strategic plus. Then, settlers from the European
Soviet Socialist
Republics (not from Soviet Central
Asia, which would invite trouble) can be transplanted to Afghanistan.
In effect Afghanistan
would become the 16th SSR. Unconfirmed reports in Pakistan
media indicate that about 30,000 Russian families recently arrived in northern Afghanistan.
The process may have already begun (Dupree 1983:136).
Clearly, as
noted earlier, this rhetoric has an impact on policy makers for governments who
were actively engaged in the affairs of Afghanistan
and Afghan migrants. Three months before Louis Dupree died in early 1989, after
UN negotiations, the Soviets withdrew form Afghanistan.
It is unfortunate that in this and in subsequent publications Dupree (1979,
1983, 1988) saw Afghan migrants only as
victims of Russian communism and specific alleged violent local conditions in Afghanistan.
He fails to appreciate the importance of the larger regional and global
political economies and their role in the anthropological conceptualization of
Afghan migrants as victims. This tendency to blame Soviet aggression alone for
the massive exodus from Afghanistan
characterizes much of the other anthropological writings on Afghan migrants.
The
Micro-specialists
In this section
I review selected works by what I call micro-specialists. In particular, I take
issue with the ways in which anthropologists have seemingly used reports from
local consultants in an uncritical and misleading manner. I also analyze some
local concepts deployed in this literature to describe Afghan migrants.
Audry C.
Shalinsky (1979) conducted her doctoral dissertation research during the pre-revolutionary
1970s in an Uzbek household that had originally migrated to Afghanistan
from Central Asia after the October 1918 revolution in Russia.
After linking up with some of her former informants who had migrated to Pakistan
in the 1980s, Shalinsky writes about Afghan migrants. She uncritically accepts
their claim that they migrated to and from Afghanistan
strictly for religious reasons. She asserts that these migrants are modern
versions of the mohajerin (plural of mohajer, migrant), followers of the Prophet
Mohammad who migrated with him to Medina
in anticipation of a more hospitable political environment. In so doing, she
lends credence to the activities of
the various U.S.-sponsored saboteur bands, as a righteous and engaged in a
just, even “holy” jehad, against the
legitimate government of Afghanistan.
Perhaps caught
up in her passion to condemn the Russians and the Afghan government they
supported, her report about conditions in post-revolutionary Afghanistan
contains glaring contradictions and ethnographic errors. For example, she
states that the revolutionary government introduced heightened military and
political measures making movement difficult; on the other hand, she describes
the ease with which these migrants could move out of Afghanistan
(Shalinsky 1984:55). Furthermore, she reports uncorroborated and internally
inconsistent claims such as this one:
Property, household
compounds, and furnishings have been confiscated by the government in many
cases. The household heads frequently have made giraw contracts before leaving (1984:55).
A geraw contract, a form of equity
mortgage in Afghanistan,
involves an exchange in which money is lent to the owner of real estate—house,
land, etc. Until the debt is paid in full, the lender has the right to use the
property or, as Shalinsky neglects to mention, the borrower (who retains legal
ownership of the property for the duration of the contract) uses the property
and pays rent to the lender on a regular basis. The rent paid is the equivalent
of the interest for the loan and the real estate serves as security or
collateral in the exchange. These contracts may be recorded with the government
for a fee or arranged privately between the lender and the borrower. To clarify
one aspect of this matter in Shalinsky’s report, let us ask, how can individual
“household heads” whose “household compounds have been confiscated by the
government” make “giraw” contracts? And if the confiscation
takes place after a geraw contract
has been entered, after a few instances like this, putting out money for geraw contracts would be indeed an
unwise and very risky business investment. Was the government selective in
these alleged confiscations? What criteria were used in these selections? Or,
was the practice of alleged confiscation by the government of migrant
“household compounds” universal?
Shalinsky’s
report contains no answers to these important questions. She exacerbates the
contradictions in her report by adding that:
The government
considers the property to have been abandoned by anti-regime people since
leaving the country is a counter-revolutionary act. The mahalla [the administrative name for the enclave of the city of Qunduz
where Shalinsky lived with a household in 1976], which is a particularly good
area of the town near a water canal, is now the home of provincial political
officials and party members (1984:56).
She does not substantiate this
important claim which contradicts her own report and the Afghan government’s
official policies and regulations and the realities encountered by many
migrants who have returned to Afghanistan
over the years.
Some Afghan
migrants (including merchants, physicians, and members of the former
government) that I have interviewed state that they sold all their property,
including “household compounds” at current market rates before leaving for Pakistan.
In many cases the buyers were Afghan Hindus or Sikhs. I know of a number of
cases where Afghan migrants who had arranged geraw contracts in the 1980s paid off their debts and released their
properties from geraw. Many of these
individuals continue to reside outside Afghanistan.
The government of Afghanistan
did not confiscate their properties. The only exceptions to this, that I am
aware of, are the holdings of some of the members of the former royal family, a
few high ranking officials of former governments, and some members of leading
Sufi families who were involved in anti-Afghanistan terrorist activities.
However, vast amounts of household properties were either sold by dislocated
Afghans at discounted prices, abandoned, or destroyed by the warring militia of
the so-called Islamic parties after the collapse of the central government, and
the capture of Kabul by the
“Freedom Fighters” in 1992.
The conditions
Shalinsky describes are more amenable to movement than those in
pre-revolutionary Afghanistan.
The author does not document a single case of religious or political
persecution with any evidence besides an unnamed individual’s claim. Shalinsky
and other anthropologists carelessly use the catchwords “communist,” “Marxist,”
and “unbelievers” in referring to the revolutionary government of Afghanistan.
They use these labels uncritically and parochially; this serves to bolster
their portrayals of the revolutionary government of Afghanistan
as anti-Islamic and evil.
The dubious
veracity of the claims of these anthropologists is problematic, but it is not
the main issue here. The larger issue is their seemingly blind acceptance of
negative accounts conveyed to them by their local consultants and
anti-Afghanistan propaganda. Anti-Afghanistan government propaganda abounded.
The various anti-Afghanistan political groups produced and distributed
thousands of tapes dealing with the themes of jehad, martyrdom, and other assorted pro-“Freedom Fighters” and
anti-Afghanistan propaganda. Every group produced and distributed these free
tapes to the various migrant camps (at least in the registered camps and
neighborhoods) where they controlled the distribution of food, cash, health
care services, and other migrant benefits. Some of these tapes, playing on the
themes of jehad and martyrdom,
contained passionate accounts of death, sacrifices, heroic behavior, and gender
role transcendence that war and battles required of early Muslim men and women.
From an “unregistered
(Uzbek) community” of migrants, Shalisnsky (1993) mentions women who regularly
listen to these tapes “which remind them of their own dead kin, the
extraordinary circumstances of Jihad, and their transformed lives” (1993:661).
From these propaganda tapes and with the aid of an interpreter, she concludes
that there is indeed a jehad underway
in Afghanistan and, a jehad that is
portrayed as the symbolic equivalent of the battle of Uhud in 625 AD which the
Muslim forces lost! It would have been anthropologically interesting to engage
reflexively the producers of, and the listeners to, these tapes about the
contradictions that exist between the so-called jehad of the Afghan mujahedin
and the allusion to a lost battle in one of the tapes Shalinsky (1993)
transcribes in her article.
In another
example, M. Nazif Shahrani, a Western-trained Uzbek Afghan anthropologist,
began his career as a micro-specialist, but the 1978 revolution in Afghanistan
transformed him into an Islamist macro-specialist. He has been a zealous
opponent of the government of Afghanistan
since 1978, especially when Paxtuns led that government. His doctoral
dissertation, written with a micro-specialist perspective, is a useful account
of the pastoral Kirghiz
adaptation to closed frontiers in the Afghan Pamirs. However, there is little
by way of systematically locating the Kirghiz
in the dynamics of the surrounding state structures and historical processes
that brought them to the Afghan Pamirs in the 1940s. It is curious that there
is no mention of the “criminal” record Rahmanqul, their local leader, left
behind in the former Kirghiz-SSR and China
before coming to Afghanistan
(FBIS 1978). It is likely that Rahmanqul and his Kirghiz
followers migrated to Pakistan
fearful that the new revolutionary government of Afghanistan
might turn him over to the Kirghiz-SSR authorities. In the summer of 1982, the
entire group “together with several thousand other Turkic-speaking Afghan
refugees in Pakistan”
(Shahrani 1994:52-53) was airlifted to Turkey
for permanent resettlement (see Shahrani 1984, 1994; Aktar 1984). For a while Alaska,
their first choice, was considered as a possible destination for these Afghan
Kirghiz migrants in Pakistan
(Shahrani 1994:52; Stickbower 1982).
Shahrani has
also written on the role of Islam in the configuration of the polity of Afghanistan
and on the articulation of the so-called jehad
activities in response to the 1978 revolution in Afghanistan.
He considered this Afghan “jehad”
(“Holy War” to him) as an “anti-colonial war of liberation” (Shahrani 1994:53),
overlooking the glaring fact that the inspiration, weapons, wages,
organization, and management of this affair for “liberation” were provided by
the colonial powers. Shahrani was a staunch supporter and sympathizer of the
non-Paxtun migrants and political groups in Pakistan
that were engaged in terrorist activities inside Afghanistan.
He perceived himself as “an honored guest” (Shahrani 1994) among them. He
apparently had expectations to play a direct role in the government that was
planned for Afghanistan
by the “Freedom Fighters” (1994:60-61). In 1989, Shahrani, who conducted
“intensive research among the ordinary Afghan refugees in the camps” and had
“some contacts with the leadership of the various Mujahideen organizations,”
went to Pakistan with plans “to work with the newly formed Islamic Interim
Government of Afghanistan (IIGA), to help with the planning for the
reconstruction of Afghanistan” (1994:61).19 Perhaps misled or duped
earlier by the “Freedom Fighters,” Shahrani abruptly realizes that he had been
rejected by the ones he glorified for ten years as “Holy Warriors.” He
mournfully states:
This long-held,
comfortable and cherished feeling of being in the field at home, however, was
shattered during my attempts to work with the emerging bureaucratic elite of
the Afghan Mujahideen. To them, the fact that I have spent nearly half of my
life in the United States studying, working, and now raising a family, make my
commitment and loyalties to Afghanistan (and, for some of them, to Islam)
suspect (Shahrani 1994:61).
Presumably, his
relationship with these U.S.-sponsored terrorists has been since redefined.
Writing about Afghan migrants in Pakistan,
Shahrani states that “we must also adopt an ethno-methodological stance that
considers self-definition of the refugees themselves.” (1995:189). In this
“self-defintion,” he argues, that we should use either of the “two alternative
terms for displaced people, widely used, by both Persian and Pashtu speakers in
the country….the Persian words panahandah….and
awarah” (Shahrani 1995:189). Panhanda in Farsi (Persian) means one
who seeks or has sought refuge or asylum; awara
(in the Farsi dictionary Shahrani uses) stands for “vagrant, homeless,
tramp, refugee, evacuee, vagabond.”My edition of this dictionary includes
“wandering (about)” as an alternative meaning for awara. Some of these labels are clearly disparaging and would be
highly unusual for self-reference among the Afghan migrants.
David B. Edwards
(1986a) also claims that the Afghan migrants in Pakistan
see themselves as having sought “panah.”
He argues that the concept of panah is
used by Paxtuns in Pakistan
and suggests that Afghan Paxtun migrants have sought “asylum” with their tribal
counterparts across the border. This raises a number of ethnographic questions.
What would be the status of non-Paxtun migrants vis-à-vis the Paxtuns of Pakistan? Do they see themselves seeking panah with (Pakistani) Paxtuns? If we
assume that the Afghan migrants are “refugees” (and I don’t make that
assumption), the host and asylum giver to these migrants would be the state of Pakistan,
not the tribal Paxtuns across the border from Afghanistan.
All Afghan migrant camps in Pakistan
are under the direct control of the national government of Pakistan,
not any tribal group, nor any provincial government. Moreover, the Farsi
concept of panah is not a feature of paxtunwaley, Paxtun charter for
appropriate behavior, and Paxtun social structure. Paxtuns use the term nanawaty (as a component of paxtunwaley) which means giving refuge or asylum to a specific
someone or group that is sought actively by someone or a group. Shahrani’s
term, the Farsi panah, is used
throughout Farsi-speaking societies, but is rarely, if ever, used among Paxtun
migrants in Pakistan.
During my ethnographic research among Afghan migrants in Pakistan
the term awara, in reference to first
and second persons, was not used. On very few occasions it was used, on a third
person basis, in reference to the homeless, poor, criminals, outlaws, and the
mentally ill. And if Shahrani is correct (as he could be about the use of panah among some non-Paxtun Afghan
migrants), it is then understandable that these migrants would prefer a
“self-definition” that includes Shahrani’s panahandah
and “refugee-warrior” (1995:191), both marketable labels with which to
camouflage their real motive for moving to Pakistan—improved economic status.
While I have not heard the “refugee-warrior” (mohajer-mujahed) self-reference among the Afghan migrants, the appellation
clearly echoes the farcical “Refugee”-“Freedom Fighter” anthem.
Inger Boesen
(1985, 1986), while contradicting Edwards’ use of the concept of panah, considers paxtunwaley as the major device used by Afghan migrants in
Pakistan, without realizing that there are hundreds of thousands of non-Paxtun
Afghans whose culture and social relations have no grounding whatsoever in paxtunwaley. Boesen’s chief interest,
however, is in the practical daily problems Afghan migrants face.20
An
anthropological response from “within” to the literature
I have been
keenly interested in the causes and patterns of population movements across the
borders of Afghanistan
for a very long time. When I was growing up in Afghanistan,
I remember my male elders talking about Peshawar
as an exotic and modern place. In those days Peshawar
radio broadcasts included musical programs that sounded more cosmopolitan,
alluring, and more corrupting compared to the fare from Kabul Radio. As a
ten-year-old youngster I overheard a Paxtun Jabarkhel adult male say “te ka pexawar ta zay, gheen de dabelay” (loosely translated, if you are
going to Peshawar, may you be able
to indulge in worldly pleasures). As I grew up, I learned that the phrase
itself and variations on its theme, were parts of my Paxtun popular male adult
discourse in Eastern Afghanistan. When the USSR
invaded the country in 1979 and millions of Afghans moved across the border to Pakistan,
mostly to Peshawar and vicinity, I
thought about this Paxtu saying in attempting to sort out the massive exodus
and to make anthropological sense of what had befallen the country of my birth.
During the
summer of 1980, I visited Pakistan
and carried out ethnographic research among Afghan migrants in Peshawar
and vicinity. I conducted a series of in-depth, open-ended interviews with men
and children who had recently arrived from Afghanistan
and were settled in the Naser Bagh refugee camp which later in 1982-83, was
designated as the camp for widows and orphans (Nunez 1984). I had no problem gaining
access and establishing rapport with my interviewees since some of them were
relatives and most of them belonged to the Paxtun tribal groups of eastern
Afghanistan, one of which (the Jabarkhel) includes my patrilineage. In
addition, I interviewed a number of mostly urban non-Paxtun Afghan adult males
in the city. These interviews took place in the Dean
Hotel, the Green Hotel, the general
area of Sadr Bazar, and in the Takal area, where some newly-arrived Afghan
migrants resided. It became apparent that the vast majority of my interviewees
were enticed by the various anti-Afghanistan propaganda machines and networks
to leave the country. They were convinced that the “refugee” status in Pakistan
offered them improved material living conditions and even opportunities to
migrate to Europe or the United
States.
Anyone with
adequate local cultural and linguistic competence could tell that the various
makeshift hospitals for Afghan migrants contained staged “injuries” and
“patients” who narrated fantastic, often contradictory, tales of “brutality” in
Afghanistan. In
speaking of cultural and linguistic competence, being a “native” was not really
the asset or level of competence that I have in mind. The advantage I am
thinking of involves essentially a set of intellectual and disciplinary tools
with which to remain above parochial interests and to constructively second
guess the ethnographic fare, as an “anthropologist” always should.
Many migrants,
mostly from Kabul, claimed to be
victims of torture by electric shock. These individuals, mostly males in their
thirties, were eager to chat. I observed several instances in which these men
approached Westerners, especially journalists, for conversation. They
maintained that they were ordinary businessmen or low-ranking military or civil
employees of the government of Afghanistan.
They would invariably draw attention to a small tattoo-like impression on their
hands allegedly resulting from an electric shock. In my interviews with some of
these individuals, I wondered what made ordinary and common citizens so
important that caused the state to inconvenience itself in such a measured and
costly way. The most frequent answer was that they were suspected by the
government of Afghanistan of “anti-Russian feelings and opinions,” arrested,
interrogated, tortured, and then released without further action before coming
to Pakistan.
I did not once hear the Farsi
or Paxtu verbs for “asylum,” “bolt,” “elude,” “escape,” “flee,” or “migrate” to
describe journeys to Pakistan. Some of the adult males talked vaguely about the
countryside being full of anti-personnel toy mines that caused death and injury
to children. However, I did not see a single child with mine injuries nor hear
about a specific child who had been killed by mines. None of the children
interviewed recalled seeing or experiencing this either. The stories about toy
mines reminded me of the use of these devices by the United States armed forces in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. My subsequent ethnographic
research in Pakistan during 1983, 1988, 1996-97, and in the United States over the last twenty years, support my initial
ethnographic findings and conclusions. It was in such an atmosphere of vicious
anti-Afghanistan propaganda, unbelievable stories, and contradictions that many
Western anthropologists, finding or imagining themselves locked out of Afghanistan and/or desiring to be engaged in a “Holy War” with
the Russians, began to write about Afghan migrants in Pakistan.
Conclusion
The studies
briefly reviewed here do not enhance the “anthropology” of Afghanistan
and mass migration. Addressing the Afghan migrants as “refugees” and ignoring
the larger context after a brutal encounter with the West, a valuable
opportunity was missed for making contributions to anthropological knowledge.
These writings are reminiscent of the colonial habits of constructing “natives”
and “their problems.” We are repeatedly told that these migrants have been
terrorized, tortured, militarily attacked, and disconnected violently from family
and friend. Little systematic documentation or reliable and impartial
validation for these assertions is offered.
This is not to
claim that none of these migrants have experienced these calamities and
incurred psychological and emotional pain. No doubt many Afghan migrants have
gone through and survived violence and the loss of family, friends, and
material possessions. Let us remember that two superpowers fought on their home
turf and turned it into rubble, wiping out its fragile political economy. And
obviously thousands of migrants have suffered and incurred unimaginable loss,
but this does not mean that the migrant status in itself creates an inevitable
and universal psychological and economic condition.
Portraying
Afghan migrants as victims and as a “problem,” depicting them as a victimized
community with “problems,” and framing them in “self-definition,” psychological
suffering, themes of jehad, mohajerin,
pana, paxtunwaley, and “Freedom Fighters” has been anthropologically
unproductive. Condemning communism, the Russians, and the Khalq Revolutionary Government of Afghanistan
has not carried us far towards a sound anthropological understanding of the
recent migrations from Afghanistan.
There is an urgent need for anthropological research (not necessarily by
“natives” alone), both in the direction of understanding the consequences of
the Afghan migrants’ predicament, and for the purpose of locating the full
context and scope of the local, regional, and global political and economic
arrangements and historical processes that have produced and continue to
produce massive numbers of Afghan migrants and refugees from and within
Afghanistan.
NOTES
Acknowledgements: Field research in Pakistan
during summer 1980 was partially funded by the Department of Anthropology, Northern
Illinois University.
Ethnographic research in Peshawar
during 1988 was funded by a fellowship (FB-2698-88) from the National Endowment
for the Humanities. I am grateful to my son, Shah Mahmoud Hanifi, for his
insights and suggestions during our conversations in which some of the seeds
for this paper were sown. Shah Mahmoud and the anonymous reviewers chosen by
the editors of this volume provided useful comments on the first draft.
However, responsibility for the contents of the paper resides solely with me.
1. In this paper the occasional
interchangeable use of anthropology and ethnography is merely situational but
always cognizant of the distinction and relationship between the two.
2. Most writers often
misleadingly translate jehad to mean
only “Holy War.”
3. Clifford (1994) provides an
excellent overview of “diaspora” that is applicable to the case of Afghan
migrants.
4. This important point is
overlooked in the writings by anthropologists on Afghan migrants. Examples will
be discussed later in this paper. Barfield’s (1984) observations on migratory
processes in northern Afghanistan
are, however, an exception.
5. Edwards (1986a:313), using a
somewhat stereotypical understanding of Paxtun society and culture and dubious
evidence, concludes that the Paxtuns “comprise 50 percent of the Afghan
population generally and perhaps 80 to 90 percent of the refugee population” in
Pakistan. If
his estimates are accurate, it would mean that close to three million Paxtuns
out of roughly 6-8 million had left the country, dramatically altering its
demographic configuration and the balance of ethnic politics both in Afghanistan
and Pakistan,
especially if these migrants remained permanently in Pakistan.
However, large numbers from all Afghan ethnic groups that had migrated to Iran
and Pakistan
continue to return to Afghanistan.
Again, precise numbers are unavailable, but the Paxtun prominence in the
country since 1978 and the domination of the Paxtuns in the taleban movement (1994-present) do not
support Edwards’ assertion.
6. Western scholars and the media awkwardly refer to the
Islamic movement that is presently dominant in Afghanistan—individually and
collectively—as the taleban, plural
of taleb (male student, seeker [of
knowledge]). In Farsi and Paxtu when the noun is used in its singular form,
gender distinctions are made. Referring to the movement and to its members
collectively as taleban (plural, male and female), taleb (singular, male), and taleba
(singular, female), is grammatically correct. English renditions and
transliterations may correctly use “Taleban” for the movement and the plural
male, female, and any combination of the two, “Taleb” for singular male,
“Talebs” for plural male, “Taleba” for singular female, and “Talebas” for
plural female.
7. The correct form is mohajeristan, land of migrants,
refugees.
8. The historical record is replete with instances of
voluntary and involuntary large-scale population movement throughout the
region. During the late 15th and early 16th centuries,
the ancestors of the Yusufzi Paxtuns moved from southwestern Afghanistan and, after having been driven out of the
valley of Kabul, they settled in the valley of Swat, in what is now Pakistan. During the reign of Shah Abbas I
(1587-1629 AD), the Abdali vassals were expelled from Qandahar in southwestern Afghanistan to Herat and northeastern Persia. The 17th and 18th
century history of the Iranian Plateau is marked with forced population
movements as well (Perry 1975). Segments of numerous tribal groups were exiled
to western Afghanistan from Persia during the Safawid rule. In 1738
thousand of Ghalzi Paxtuns were exiled to Mazandaran in Iran, while the Abdalis were moved back to Qandahar by Nadir Shah Afshar who also
transplanted large communities of the Qizilbash from Persia to Afghanistan. The largest of these communities are
located in Kabul and its vicinities. About a century ago
large numbers of Ghalzi Paxtuns were forced to migrate to northern Afghanistan by Amir ‘Abd al-Rahman. During his reign
(1880-1901), the Kafirs of eastern Afghanistan were forcibly converted to Islam and
their land was re-named Nuristan, land of light. In 1892 ‘Abd al-Rahman’s
armed forces brutally suppressed the Hazara of Central Afghanistan forcing
thousands to seek refuge in Baluchistan and northeastern Iran.
9. I first learned of this in autumn 1977 from economist M.
Ishaq Nadiri who had just returned from an economic survey of the Persian Gulf region. I am unable to find published
data on Afghan migrants in the Gulf during the 1970s.
10. Clearly the U.S.
government sought to retaliate for its defeat in Southeast Asia
by the Vietnamese forces that were supported by the Russians.
11. Robert “Bud” McFarlane, National Security Assistant to
President Reagan, summarized U.S. policy towards Afghanistan in a TV interview with John McLaughlin
(John McLaughlin’s One-On-One 1986:2-1):
McLaughlin: What’s the U.S. Policy
towards Afghanistan? Is it to fight to the last Afghan? In
other words to bleed the Russians really as being our prime objective?
McFarlane: Well our policy is well
defined. It is basically that we don’t seek any territory of our own, but we do
insist that the Soviet
Union not
interfere in Afghan affairs. And that if Afghanistan wants to be non-aligned, that is fine
with us.
McLaughlin: Do we want the rebels to win?
McFarlane: Well we don’t want the
Russians to win. We want to be supportive of the rebels, and to the extent we
can, that is in our interest
12. Speaking before a U.S. Congressional Committee, Charles
Wilson, Representative from Texas, a most zealous anti-Russian and the leading
supporter of U.S. aid to the terrorists declared: “In our lifetime, the only thing that can
compare with the genocide that is being attempted in Afghanistan by the Soviet
Union is, of course, the holocaust in the late thirties and the early forties
in Europe” (U.S. Congress 1987:4). However, Wilson’s dramatic imagery and powerful
sentiments are in fact structured by affairs and places far removed from 1930s Europe and closer to home—the Vietnam holocaust. In an interview with Harry
Reasoner on the “60 minutes” TV program (in which the U.S.-sponsored bands of
anti-Afghanistan saboteurs are dubbed “Charlie’s Boys” and Wilson is riding a white horse among them)
Representative Wilson tearfully states:
But, Harry, there were 167 funerals in my
district, and I went to some of them. And—[interviewer injecting: Out of
Vietnam?]—Yeah. One hundred sixty-seven boys from east Texas, from my little congressional district,
167. And they did not have anything to do with it, either. And I love sticking
it to the Russians. And I think most Americans do. They need to get it back,
and they are getting it back. They (‘Charlie’s Boys’) are digging for the last
stand at Gardez, and they (the Russians)’re going to lose. And I love it” (CBS
NEWS 1988:5).
In this “last stand” “Charlie’s Boys”, along with their U.S.
and Pakistani supporters were soundly beaten and driven back to Pakistan by the
armed forces of the legitimate government of Afghanistan.
13. Billard (1985) provides a rare glimpse into the
situation of Afghan migrants in Iran during the early 1980s.
14. See for example the journal Refugees, the UN series The
State of the World’s Refugees, and the series Repatriation and Rehabilitation of Afghan Refugees published by
The Swedish Committee for Afghanistan (1993).
15. Along with Saudi Arabia, these countries were the chief
supporters of the anti-Afghanistan insurgency operations based in Pakistan.
They contributed vast resources to maintain the Afghan migrants in Pakistan.
After his expulsion from Afghanistan, Dupree moved his base of operations from
Kabul to Peshawar. Like several other Western anthropologists, he claimed to
have traveled with the U.S.-sponsored terrorists inside Afghanistan.
Interestingly, in an entry written for the Encyclopaedia
Iranica about Dupree, anthropologist David B. Edwards (1996), while citing
Narvaez (1989), does not mention Dupree’s association with the government of
Norway, the Peace Corps, the National Security Council, and the Central Intelligence
Agency. Other Western anthropologists who were not officially forbidden to
conduct research in Afghanistan, perhaps following Dupree’s lead, began
criticizing the 1978 Afghan Revolution and glorifying the U.S.-sponsored armed
opposition to it.
16. Thirteen of these papers were published (Shahrani and
Canfield 1984). Dupree (1984) wrote
one of the two introductions to this book. For an incisive review of this
widely known and referred to publication see Ghani (1985). The volume contains
only passing references to Afghan migrants. But two chapters, (see Tapper
1984), are devoted specifically to women, making this the first instance where
women’s status and rights in Afghanistan were raised in a public
anthropological forum. Also, women are the focus in general academic
(Howard-Merriam 1987) and UN coverage, such as Refugees (Colleville 1997a). Before the 1978 revolution, there was
little mention of women’s status and human rights in Afghanistan by academics,
journalists, or in UN publications.
17. Omidian (1992) and Shorish-Shamley (1991) researched
health care and folk medicine among Afghan migrants resettled in the United
States. Edwards’ (1986b) dissertation data were collected from Afghan migrants
in Peshawar on issues indirectly related to migrants and migration. Edwards,
who published on Afghan migrants, had visited the country earlier and was
attracted to the Afghanistan of the 1950s and pre-revolutionary 1970s.
18. Dupree was the first Western anthropologist to write on
the post-1978 Afghan migrants (1979). He had earlier written briefly about
patterns of rural-urban and seasonal migration (1975). This early work provides
a brief but useful description of population dynamics in Afghanistan.
19. What Shahrani calls the “Islamic Interim Government of
Afghanistan” (IIGA) was officially known (and self-designated) as the “Afghan
Interim Government” (AIG). The arrangement was initiated, managed, supervised,
and funded by the CIA and the governments of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
20. Centlivres and Centlivres-Demont (1987, 1988a, 1988b,
1994) provide sketches of Afghan migrants’ (especially women’s) local adaptive
responses in Pakistan and their impact on the labor force of that country.
Glatzer (1979) and Pedersen (1992) describe briefly local conditions of Afghan
Paxtun nomads confined to Pakistan because of the unstable conditions in
Afghanistan. All four of these European anthropologists are sympathetic to the
politics of the so-called jehad
against the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Omidian (1992, 1994), Omidian
and Lipson (1992, 1996), and Lipson and Omidian (1992) have focused on Afghan
migrants in California. These works, based on research undertaken initially to
assess the feasibility of establishing health care systems for Afghan migrants
in Northern California, conclude that building these systems would not be
feasible. Other than glimpses into the phenomenon of aging among the Afghan
educated elite and their “less educated and more traditional relatives,” two
conclusions are drawn: most of this elite are unemployed and dependent on the
State of California, and the community is distrustful of outsiders including
and especially the researchers.
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