20 families forcibly displaced by descendants of a feudal landlord with Taliban support
At least 20 families were forced to leave their homes over a land dispute in the village of Bom-Chahar-Asyab in Lal-o-Sarjangal district of Ghor province, local sources tell Zan Times.
According to village residents, the dispute traces back more than 80 years when Haji Musa purchased the land on which the village now occupies from a feudal landlord named Sadiq Khan. The residents say the land transfer was done using customary documents, when the seller hands over deeds in front of eyewitnesses, rather than registering the sale in the courts.
Successive generations of villagers transformed the area. “People in this village have over 1,000 fruit trees and 400 thousand non-fruit trees, and they have built their own houses,” another resident tells Zan Times. “They were forced to move despite all this.”
The land ownership dispute flared up more than 15 years ago, as descendants of Sadiq Khan used the court system to try to reclaim the land from the descendants of Haji Musa. “Razzaq Khan, one of Sadiq Khan’s heirs, has a sharia document,” says a resident who asked not to be identified. “During the previous government, Razzak Khan pursued the legal dispute.”
Everything changed in the dispute between the two Hazara parties when the Taliban returned to power. A source says that the heirs of Sadiq Khan again pressed their claim, this time in a Taliban court. They were successful. The court decided in Razzaq Khan’s favour and issued a court order that forced the people to leave the village, ignoring their own documentation, which they say proves they have ownership of the land.
Another villager tells Zan Times that the Taliban judiciary in the district forced people to put their fingerprints on documents and transfer ownership of the village to Sadiq Khan’s heirs. All of the orchards and buildings that they built over successive generations have effectively been confiscated by Razzaq Khan, with the support of the Taliban.
What happened in Bom-Chahar-Asyab appears to be happening elsewhere. Since the Taliban have regained power, there has been a stream of reports of villagers forced at gunpoint to leave their houses and villages, which were then handed over to someone else.
In most cases, previously powerful landlords claim ownership of entire villages, where generations of poor peasants have eked livelihoods from the land. Pashtun and Hazara feudal lords are using the Taliban court system to appropriate property in Daikundi and now Ghor from the small and very poor land holders. The Taliban court system is famous for delivering quick results. And when it comes to land disputes, the Taliban sides with powerful absentee landlords, displacing the most vulnerable and leaving them with no shelter ahead of the coming winter. According to news reports, tens of thousands of villagers have been forcefully displaced in the past year.
As for Bom-Chahar-Asyab, its residents aren’t stopping their opposition to the transfer: They sent a protest letter to the Taliban, asking for it to send a fact-finding team to investigate their complaint.
