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

Rahman was not a reign of murders – no more so than the reign of any king in my part of the world. He tried to do some good, Habibullah. He didn’t say, ‘The Hazara poison my land, let me be rid of them.’ He didn’t say to his captains, ‘Take a thousand soldiers and bring me back ten thousand Hazara heads,’ as his father did. He had studied politics. He had studied democracy. He believed that a king has to embrace everyone in his kingdom, some more warmly than others, of course. But by murdering Hazara in such numbers, and in doing so forcing them to defend themselves, his father had succeeded in making the Hazara a people held in greater disdain than ever by more powerful tribes. Habibullah himself may have wished to bring peace to his country, but the people who kept him in power found a hundred ways to make the Hazara suffer. With their traditional lands confiscated, Hazaras were forced to look for employment in towns and cities. They were offered only the most menial of jobs and paid very little. If you needed someone to dig a ditch for you, clean your house, tend your animals, dig a well, carry water to your fields – you hired a Hazara. Living on next-to-nothing gives people a certain appearance. They look badly fed, their clothes are ragged, their eyes are dull with tiredness. And because they look tired and ragged and underfed, they are thought of as beggars, and held in contempt. A Hazara with twenty sheep is thought to have ten sheep too many for a beggar, and the ten too many are taken from him. A Hazara with money is thought to have stolen it, and so it is no crime to take the money from him.
    By a process that began with mass murder, the Hazara became an underclass, the poorest people in Afghanistan, and it was thought to be their own fault. When a man has his boot on your neck, he doesn’t wish to think that he is being cruel, that he is betraying God with his cruelty; no, he wishes to think that the man on whose neck his boot rests is not truly a human being, and does not have the feelings of human beings.
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    Habibullah Khan, as I have said, ruled Afghanistan at the time of Abdul Khaliq’s birth, but he did not outlive Abdul Khaliq. No, he was murdered by close friends in the year 1919, or by people who were close friends up until the time they murdered him. He was on a hunting trip without knowing that he was the one being hunted. He had no time to be surprised because the bullets that killed him ended his life in an instant. His brother, Nasrullah, put himself on the throne of his dead brother very speedily, but lasted only a week. Habibullah’s son Amanullah, who commanded the army, threw his uncle into prison and had himself named Emir. What was said of the Barakzai in Afghanistan at that time was the undeniable truth: those to whom you are related by blood want blood.
    Amanullah was even more determined than his father Habibullah had been to turn Afghanistan into a nation that he would not be ashamed to invite his European friends to visit. Early in his reign, however, he decided to sacrifice Afghanistan’s friendship with the British, judging that he could replace potential British visitors with those from Russia and France and Germany. He attacked the British in northern India with great success and made Afghanistan almost free of foreign control. This was a popular thing to do, for after killing Hazara, Amanullah’s supporters most enjoyed killing Englishmen.Amanullah went about Kabul in a motor car, stopping to wave to the people who cheered him. ‘We have much to do!’ he said, and the people replied, ‘Truly, Emir!’ ‘Afghanistan must become the jewel of Central Asia!’ he said. The people replied, ‘Truly, Emir, a jewel!’
    But the Emir and the people had different ideas about the ways in which Afghanistan would be fashioned into a jewel. The people thought Amanullah was going to have more wells dug in the villages, and build a new palace of great splendour,