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68 TAUBANhumanitarian demand on the Taliban to lift their blockade on Bamiyan.It was the first time in the past 20 years of conflict that one faction hadused food as a weapon of war against another and it demonstrated theescalation in the ethnic and sectarian divisions that were consumingAfghanistan.The Hazaras had always been at the short end of the Pashtun stick, butnever to such an extent. These short, stocky people with their distinctiveMongol features were, according to one theory, the descendants of intermarriagebetween Genghis Khan's Mongol warriors and the indigenousTajik and Turkic peoples. In 1222 Genghis Khan's grandson was killedby Bamiyan's defenders and, in revenge, he massacred the population. 1For one thousand years before that Bamiyan was the centre of Buddhismin India and an important serai or resting place for the camel caravans on:the ancient Silk Route, which linked the Roman Empire with CentralAsia, China and India. Bamiyan remained the protector and capital o|Buddhism for the whole of Central Asia and India after the Islamic conquests.A.Korean monk, Hui-chao who arrived in the town in 827 ADwrote that the King of Bamyan was still a Buddhist and it was not untilthe eleventh century that the Ghaznavids established Islam in the valley.The town is still dominated by two magnificent second-century ADBuddha colossi, carved into a sandstone cliff face. The two statues, one165 feet high, the other 114 feet high, are weathered and cracked whilethe faces of both the Buddhas are missing, but their impact is stunning.The figures are carved with the classical features of all sub-continentalBuddhas, but the figures are draped in Greek robes for they representedthe unique fusion of classical Indian and Central Asian art with Hellenism,introduced by the armies of Alexander the Great. The Buddhas were!one of the wonders of the ancient world, visited by pilgrims from China;and India.Thousands of Buddhist monks once lived in the caves and groicarved into the cliffs alongside the statues. These caves, covered wiiantique stuccoes, were now home to thousands of Hazara refugees whohad fled Kabul. The Taliban threatened to blow up the colossi when theycaptured Bamiyan, generating high-level protests from Buddhist communitiesin Japan and Sri Lanka. In the meantime they had bombedmountain above the Buddhas eight times, creating more cracks insandstone niches that held the figures.The Hazarajat had remained virtually independent until 1893 when iiwas conquered by the Pashtun King Abdul Rehman, who initiated thefirst anti-Hazara programme, killing thousands of Hazaras, moving thousandsmore to Kabul where they lived as indentured serfs and servants,and destroying their mosques. The estimated 3-4 million Hazaras arelargest Shia Muslim group in Afghanistan. The sectarian enmity betwiBAMIYAN 1998-2000: THE NEVER-ENDING WAR ~ 69the Sunni Pashtuns and the Shia Hazaras went back a long way, but theTaliban had brought a new edge to the conflict for they treated all Shiasas murwfaqeen or hypocrites and beyond the pale of true Islam.Even more irksome for the Taliban, was that Hazara women were playinga significant political, social and even military role in the region'sdefence. The 80-member Central Council of the Hazara's Hizb-e-Wahadat party had 12 women members, many of them educated professionals.Women looked after UN aid programmes and Wahadat's effortsto provide basic literacy, health care and family planning. Women oftenfought in battle alongside their men - some had killed Taliban in Mazarin May. Female professors, who had fled Kabul had set up a universityin Bamiyan, probably the poorest in the world where classrooms wereconstructed with mud and straw and there was no electricity or heatingand few books.'We detest the Taliban, they are against all civilization, Afghan cultureand women in particular. They have given Islam and Afghan people abad name,' Dr Humera Rahi, who taught Persian literature at the universityand had emerged as a leading poet of the resistance, told me. Nor didthe Taliban appreciate Hazara women's style of dress. Dr Rahi and hercolleagues wore skirts and high-heeled boots. The poetry of Humera Rahiseemed to echo the Hazaras' new found confidence after centuries ofoppression at the hands of the Pashtuns.'Victory is yours and God is with you, victorious army of Hazarajat. Mayyour foes' chests be the target of your rifle barrels. You are the winner, thevictorious, God is with you. My midnight prayers and my cries at dawn,and the children saying "O Lord, O Lord!", and the tears and sighs of theoppressed are with you.' zDespite the siege and decades of poor treatment and prejudice by thePashtun rulers of Kabul, the Hazaras were now on a roll. They had beeninstrumental in defeating the Taliban in Mazar in May and again inOctober 1997. They had also repulsed repeated Taliban attacks againstBamiyan. The Hazaras had once made up the third and weakest link inthe Uzbek-Tajik-Hazara alliance confronting the Taliban, but now withthe Uzbeks divided and in disarray and the Tajiks in a position of stalematearound Kabul, the Hazaras sensed that their time had come. 'Ourbacks are to the Hindu Kush and before us are the Taliban and theirsupporters Pakistan. We will die but we will never surrender,' Qurban AliIrfani, the defiant deputy chief of Wahadat told me, as we sat trying towarm ourselves in front of a log fire in a room that overlooked theBuddhas, spectacularly draped in moonlight.There was a new found confidence and pride in their organization andtheir fighting prowess. 'We saved the north from the Taliban,' saidAhmed Sher, a 14-year-old Hazara soldier, who had already seen two