Deadly ethnic clashes erupt in Afghan capital

[azara]

News Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20100813/wl_asia_afp/afghanistanunrestethnicminority#mwpphu-post-form

KABUL (AFP) – At least two people were killed in ethnic clashes that
broke out in Kabul on Friday when Hazara villagers allegedly burnt
down the hilltop homes of Pashtun nomads, an official and witnesses
said.

The violence started when Hazara men allegedly burnt mud houses built
on a hilltop above Hazara villages on the southwestern edge of the
Afghan capital, according to officials.

Police fired bullets into the air and used batons to try and disperse
the crowd, but hundreds of youths marched through Hazara-dominated
villages towards the city, witnesses and an official said.

At around sunset the crowd clashed with police, throwing rocks at
hundreds of members of the security forces blocking the way to the
city centre, a senior government official told AFP on condition of
anonymity.

Two Hazara youths were killed by police fire in the clashes, the
official said. A senior Kabul police officer refused to comment.

An AFP photographer saw two bodies: one with bullet wounds at a mosque
and the second in a nearby hospital. The rioters smashed windows of
shops and homes on their march towards the city, the photographer
witnessed.

Crying women and children were among hundreds of Pashtun nomads who
abandoned their mud-brick homes, which an AFP reporter saw burning,
surrounded by police and army personnel.

At least three wounded people were taken towards the city in police
vehicles, an AFP reporter witnessed.

"The Pashtuns fired at us as we arrived there," Ghulam Sakhi, a Hazara
elder, told AFP earlier in the day. "We deserve the land. We own it,
why should the Pashtuns have it?" he said.

But Pashtun elder Mohammad Omar said the Hazara had "forced us out of
our homes" and burnt them down.

Pashtun nomads, estimated to number 2.4 million people, move around
Afghanistan in search of pastures for their camels, sheep and donkeys.

They come mainly from tribes that dominate southern and eastern
Afghanistan and sometimes clash with other ethnic groups as they
travel.

There has been no significant ethnic unrest in Kabul since the civil
war of the 1990s, but there were heavy clashes earlier this year
between resident Hazaras and Pashtun nomads over pastures in
Afghanistan's central highlands.

This year's ethnic clashes mainly occurred in the central province of
Wardak and reportedly claimed several lives. The situation was calmed
when the Pashtuns agreed to pull back south in talks with Vice
President Mohammad Karimi Khalili, who is a Hazara.

The violence caused political tensions between President Hamid Karzai,
a Pashtun, and Hazara allies who backed his re-election last year.

Afghanistan's central highlands are dominated by Hazaras, a minority
ethnic group badly oppressed by the Pashtun Taliban during their
1996-2001 rule.

Pashtuns are Afghanistan's single biggest ethnic group and dominate
the south and east, where a deadly insurgency waged by remnants of the
Taliban is most fierce.