Thirty years ago, the dwelling would have been luxurious. But today, between walls damaged by artillery blasts and under collapsing ceilings, over 1,000 nomads from Afghanistan’s south are preparing to spend the winter in Kabul’s condemned Darul Aman Palace.
The roughly 300 Pashtun Kuchi families say they have little food and were driven to live as landless beggars after violent clashes with local minority Hazaras over rights to a plot of land. In September, they found refuge in the neoclassical palace – built in the 1920s by King Amanullah Khan to emphasize his western-style reforms.
According to the United Nations, Kuchis are one of Afghanistan’s most vulnerable minority groups. “Nobody pays any attention to us. The government doesn’t support us. We don’t know how long we are supposed to stay here,” says Abdul Malim, a 39-year-old Kuchi who lives on the palace grounds with his wife and 10 children. “We are cold, we have no food. We just want some land, a normal place to live.”
The squatters lived as refugees in Pakistan until just six months ago when they returned to build on land they contended their ancestors owned. But Hazara residents of the area where these Kuchis staked their claim – in the Dasht-e Barchi neighborhood of west Kabul – asserted the Afghan government gave them the land to build a cemetery. Clashes ensued, with over a dozen injured and the newly built Kuchi homes burned to the ground.
The government then moved the Kuchis to the ruins of Darul Aman, where they have lived for the past two months without electricity, adequate water supplies, or an alternative. Lands Kuchis used to graze their sheep and goats for centuries are now either settled or confiscated, UN representatives say. Water and other resources are depleted and clashes with local farmers over grazing rights are becoming more frequent.
“After 30 years of war, several droughts, and because of poverty, day by day, Kuchis are losing their way of life,” one of the 10 Kuchi members of parliament, Parween Dorani, told EurasiaNet.org. “We are becoming more of a settled people because we have nowhere to go, and nobody wants us near their land.”
For hundreds of years, Pashtun tribes ruled much of what is now Afghanistan. Favoring their ethnic brethren, rulers granted the southern Kuchi sheep and goat herders use of summer pastures in the more fertile central and northern regions, to the chagrin of local Hazara and Tajik minorities.
While Kuchis are said to have prospered when the mainly Pashtun Taliban movement ruled in Kabul from 1996-2001, these same Hazara and Tajik communities were persecuted and even massacred.
The land dispute has clear ethnic undertones. “The Kuchis can come and say they have documents from a hundred years ago to prove the land is theirs, and it might be true,” said Sarwar Jawadi, a former member of Afghanistan’s parliament who is an ethnic Hazara living in Dasht-e Barchi. “But now we have a new government, where everyone has a voice, and we need a land registration system to tell us to whom the land belongs today.”
Leaders from both sides say there has been little government intervention either to quell the recent tensions between Kuchi nomads and their Hazara neighbors in west Kabul, or to develop long-term solutions to land disputes in Afghanistan.
“We don’t have animals anymore, we just want to build homes on our land and have our life,” says 60-year-old Amir Gul, whom the Kuchis at Darul Aman say is their leader. “We will settle down, if we have somewhere to stay.”
For now, the Afghan National Army (ANA) says it is tasked with providing the Kuchi squatters food and water, but is also ordered to keep them confined to the palace.
Behind the snarls of barbed wire that keep them caged in, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has set up tents to serve as temporary classrooms for the Kuchis’ 600 children, as well as makeshift sheds for bathrooms.
The government provides water for washing and drinking, but sometimes it is not enough, the Kuchis say. Amir Gul says they receive small portions of rice and bread, and that two families live in each of the palace’s gutted rooms. “It is sad. They have no water for showers and no way to build their lives,” says Abdul Ahad, an ethnic Tajik ANA soldier stationed at the palace. “We give them food, too, but they have nowhere to go.”
“But we are afraid if we let them stay here too long” – the soldier jokes – “they will show up one day with documents saying this land is theirs.”
Erin Cunningham is a freelance journalist based in Kabul.
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