Currents of discrimination course through Afghan power line project

With a crippled economy, swelling unemployment rates, and bitter infighting between insurgents, Afghanistan has little surplus energy to address accusations of ethnic discrimination. But in recent days, protests in Kabul have rippled discontent through the war-torn nation, underscoring the political crisis facing the country.

This week, tens of thousands of ethnic minority Hazaras stormed Kabul, accusing the Afghan government of deliberately cutting them out of a multimillion-dollar proposed power line route.

“[The] people will never keep quiet when facing injustice,” said Karim Khalili, a Hazara leader and former Afghan vice president.

The so-called TUTAP line, backed by the Asian Development Bank, will thread through Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Pakistan. But the route completely bypasses Afghanistan’s Bamiyan province in the central highlands, home to the majority of the country’s Hazaras. The route is grossly discriminatory, according to Hazara leaders.

Afghanistan’s electricity scenario is grim, with more than 60 percent of the population disconnected from the national power grid, according to the World Bank. But Bamiyan province is particularly poverty-stricken. Most of the region’s Hazara inhabitants identify as Shia Muslims, and were especially persecuted during Afghanistan’s extremist Sunni Taliban regime. Some say the Hazaras are ancestrally linked to Mongol warrior Genghis Khan. Historically, the Hazaras have been subject to oppression for racial and religious reasons, a theme that surfaced in Khaled Hosseini’s novel The Kite Runner. The third-largest ethnic minority in Afghanistan, the Hazaras make up about 15 percent of the nation’s 30 million people.

Afghanistan's other ethnic minorities, including Tajiks, are joining forces with the Hazaras to demand a new TUTAP route. The power line problem, which began as a solo complaint from a single group, is swiftly snowballing to become a personal grievance for the many opponents of President Ashraf Ghani’s government, according to political commentator Haroun Mir.

But Ghani claims he’s working on the situation, and his office recently released a statement saying he will resolve the conflict through negotiations.

“The important point of these dialogues [is] to find means and resources to provide electricity to Bamiyan,” the statement said, noting Ghani appointed a 12-member team to investigate the viability of rerouting the line through Bamiyan and ordered it to deliver its findings later this month.

But critics say the president is only placating the Hazaras and has no intention of rerouting anything. Since taking office in 2014, Ghani has kept few of his promises to bring peace and prosperity to the country. Instead, his administration has lurched from one crisis to another.

Last week, the BBC reported on the backlash from an off-hand comment by British Prime Minister David Cameron, who branded Afghanistan as “fantastically corrupt” and “possibly [one of] the most corrupt countries in the world.” Afghan officials claimed the accusation was “unfair.” Cameron later backtracked, praising the country’s anti-corruption efforts, but the BBC report went on to cite Transparency International’s 2015 corruption perception index, which places Afghanistan at 167—just above Somalia and North Korea.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.