Doubly Displaced: How Two Soviet Invasions Created Two Generations of Uzbek Refugees
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Shafi Hashemi was nine years old in 1987 when his father decided that Afghanistan was no longer safe for his family. Selling off what he could, Hashemi’s father, Mir, raised just enough money to pay a smuggler to take his two young sons to Pakistan, while the rest of the family stayed in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan.
The young Hashemi brothers were not the first in their family to take flight. Their father was also a refugee, having fled the Soviets as a child in the late 1920s; their grandfather was killed during the communist takeover of what is now Uzbekistan. At the age of six, Mir Hashemi and his three brothers — the oldest of whom was just 12 — escaped from the Uzbek city of Qarshi to Mazar-i-Sharif in northern Afghanistan, where he settled and eventually raised a family.
The younger Hashemis’ 1987 journey lasted more than two weeks. After crossing the Afghan-Pakistan border, they spent a few days in Peshawar. While Afghan Pashtun refugees would largely remain in that province among their fellow Pashtuns in Pakistan, the ethnically Uzbek Hashemi brothers moved on.
Since the days of Alexander the Great in the fourth century B.C., the territory of modern Afghanistan has been at the center of trade and migration networks in Central and South Asia. But while many Afghans find themselves following the same paths as previous generations of refugees, traders, and travelers, twentieth-century political developments have made some of these pathways much less accessible for Afghanistan’s Uzbeks, especially since the Soviet period.
“These countries, especially Uzbekistan, are pretty hard-core police states, and their border control is a lot better,” says Daniel Karell, an Afghanistan expert at NYU Abu Dhabi.
“Afghanistan’s border with Iran and with Pakistan is more porous,” he adds.
Eventually, the Hashemi brothers arrived in Quetta, Pakistan. Though home to Afghan Hazara settlements since the 19th century, over the years many Uzbeks had settled there as well. The Hashemis’ relatives were further south, however, so the brothers once again moved on.
Finally, they reached the port city of Karachi, capital of Sindh province and Pakistan’s largest city. Received by adult half-siblings from their father’s first marriage, Shafi and his brother settled into an apartment block in the neighborhood of Sohrab Goth, a dusty strip wedged between the national highway and the Lyari River on the outskirts of Karachi city. It was nearly a year before their father had saved up enough money to join them there, bringing along their mother and younger sister.
“My dad had a lot of his childhood friends living in that area,” says Hashemi, recalling his family’s time in Karachi. “Somehow the majority of Afghan Uzbeks ended up in Karachi, instead of Peshawar or Quetta.” Like the rest of the roughly 40,000 Uzbek Afghan refugees that settled in Karachi in the 1980s, the Hashemis settled there because of family and ethnic ties.
“Although the Afghan migratory networks have acquired a transnational dimension, they seem to divide along ethnic lines: Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and others rarely rub shoulders along the way,” writes Alessandro Monsutti, an expert on Afghan refugees who has done extensive fieldwork in the region, in his 2005 book “War and Migration.”
While one of Hashemi’s uncles had passed through Karachi six years earlier with his family, they stayed just a few months before migrating to the U.S. Soon after Hashemi’s family reunited in Karachi, they too began the process of applying for resettlement to the U.S., sponsored by that uncle’s family. Though better than their situation in Afghanistan, the family had arrived in Karachi during a period of major upheaval.
“There were a lot of police in the area where we used to live. They were known to be taking a lot of bribes at the time, and there was a lot of drug-related stuff among the Pashtuns,” Hashemi recalls. “As kids we heard about these things in passing, and we’d be told by our parents to not go to certain areas.” Karachi, which had become a nexus for trading American weapons and Afghan heroin, was on its way to becoming what is now one of the most violent cities in the world.
At one point, their neighborhood of Sohrab Goth became so dangerous that the Hashemis had to move away to another part of the city. But while the children were able to get along easily, Hashemi’s parents had a harder time. “I had a lot of Pakistani friends. I learned Urdu pretty well, and we played cricket together,” Hashemi recalls. “Eventually we had to move back to Sohrab Goth because my dad had some issues with the locals, and the adults weren’t so welcoming.”
In November 1989, the Hashemi family was resettled to the United States. They received their green cards immediately, and moved into an apartment block in Brooklyn. Ten years later, the family moved out to Long Island, in part to join a significant Uzbek community there. Many of their Long Island neighbors were refugees who had passed through Pakistan, just like the Hashemis. “One of the reasons I continue to live in Long Island is to be close to this community I relate to,” says Hashemi.
Uzbeks comprise just two percent of all Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and for a time, Karachi was their main destination. But by 2005, when Pakistan conducted the first census of its Afghan refugee population, only thirteen thousand Afghan Uzbek refugees were still registered as living in the Sindh province where Karachi is located. Over three times as many were recorded in Balochistan, mainly around the city of Quetta.
One of these is Rasheed Mukhtar, who arrived in Quetta as a child in 1985. Now the owner of a hardware shop in the city, Mukhtar also founded and manages an amateur football club for local Afghan Uzbek refugees. The club is named after the ancient silk-road city of Bukhara in modern-day Uzbekistan, to which Mukhtar traces his roots.
“As a refugee, I felt it was important for me to create this club in order to popularize my nation,” says Mukhtar, referring to the Uzbekistan and its diaspora. “Sport is something which makes you famous in the world, and it creates love among people as well.”
Afghan Uzbek refugees from the Soviet invasion of 1979 have now lived in Quetta for almost four decades. Many of Mukhtar’s players were born and raised in Pakistan, but repatriation efforts in recent years have led many to seek opportunity elsewhere. While some are returning to Afghanistan, others have gone further afield — to places like Istanbul and Jeddah, in Saudi Arabia. With a language that is relatively similar to Uzbek, Turkey has emerged as a popular destination as well.
“Uzbek communities in Pakistan are often connected to quite successful communities in Saudi Arabia, and also in Iran where they are often involved in the money exchange business,” says Magnus Marsden, a social anthropologist at the University of Sussex. “Another destination that is becoming more and more important since the mid-1980s is Turkey. Young Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan are able to go to Turkey both via smuggling routes and on tourist visas, and many go on to work in carpet and clothing factories, mainly in Istanbul.” (As a result of the refugee crisis, the Turkish embassy in Kabul recently tightened its rules for issuance of visas in Afghanistan — applicants with empty passports and no prior Turkish visas are likely to be rejected, as are those without proof of income or employment in Afghanistan.)
Though Mukhtar himself returns to Afghanistan occasionally during the spring tourist season, he doesn’t plan to return permanently. “If Pakistan forces us to, we will return. But we are happy in Pakistan.”
Since coming to America, Hashemi has only returned to Afghanistan once, when he married an Afghan Tajik woman there in 2005. Though some of his in-laws still live in Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif, he does not see the country as a long-term option. “I would love to go back again, but the safety and stability of the country is questionable, as always,” he says.
Still, after his father’s recent passing, Hashemi started making plans to compile a book about his family’s history. In addition to speaking to elders in his Long Island community who knew his father as a child, he also intends to visit Uzbekistan soon — for the first time in his life.
“Sadly, our family history goes deep like this,” says Hashemi when recounting the story of his father’s escape from Uzbekistan. “I want to learn more about what people experienced during the Soviet invasion [of Uzbekistan],” he says. “How families were separated — and for what reasons so many people were killed.”
