For more than a century, the Hazaras of Afghanistan have been defined by two things: a distinct language and lineage, and a history of being erased. Today, in the suburbs of Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney, that erasure is being reversed not on a battlefield, but on a census form.
The Hazaras are a Persian-speaking ethnic group native to the Hazarajat highlands of central Afghanistan. Religiously, they are diverse, mostly Shi’a Muslim, with significant Sunni and Ismaili communities, and a growing number of non-religious Hazaras in the diaspora. What unites them is not creed but a shared language, Hazaragi, and a shared memory of catastrophe.
A FOUNDING TRAUMA
That catastrophe has a date: 1891 to 1893, when Afghan ruler Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, known as the “Iron Amir,” crushed a series of Hazara uprisings with a campaign historians now widely describe as genocide. More than 60 percent of the Hazara population is estimated to have been killed, enslaved or driven from their homes. Land was confiscated and handed to loyalist tribes; thousands were sold into slavery in the markets of Kabul and Kandahar. Canada’s House of Commons studied the episode in 2023 and formally acknowledged it as mass atrocity.
The survivors scattered into British India, into Iran, and into diminished standing inside Afghanistan itself. Each community took a different path.
In Quetta, in what is now Pakistan, Hazara refugees built schools, businesses, sporting clubs and civic institutions, forging a robust and self-conscious ethnic identity despite decades of sectarian attacks. In Iran, Hazara migrants found a linguistically familiar home but a socially subordinate one, often facing precarious legal status and everyday discrimination. Inside Afghanistan, Hazaras remained politically marginal, their history of dispossession compounding into generations of underrepresentation.
THE VIOLENCE RETURNS
The twentieth century did not bring relief. In August 1998, Taliban forces who had just seized Mazar-i-Sharif carried out a massacre of the city’s Hazara residents, going house to house, according to Human Rights Watch documentation, and demanding that people recite Sunni prayers to prove they were not Hazara. Estimates of the dead range into the thousands.
Since the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, Hazaras say the pattern has resumed. Rights groups have documented targeted killings, forced displacement, and exclusion from government and security jobs. In September 2022, a suicide bombing at an education centre in Kabul’s Dasht-e-Barchi neighbourhood, a majority-Hazara area, killed dozens of mostly young women sitting university entrance exams. Islamic State’s regional affiliate claimed responsibility; parliamentary human rights committees in Canada and elsewhere have since asked whether the violence amounts to a recurrence of genocide.
It is this second wave of persecution that pushed large numbers of Hazaras toward resettlement far beyond the traditional diaspora triangle of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, above all to Australia, and in smaller numbers across Europe.
COUNTED, AT LAST
What happened next in Australia has become a case study in what community recognition can look like in practice.
Australia recognises Hazaragi as a distinct language in its own right, rather than folding it into Dari or Farsi, the first country to do so. Its census also lets people record their ancestry as “Hazara” specifically, rather than the broader “Afghan” category under which the group’s identity had often been submerged in earlier waves of migration and in countries of first asylum.
But recognition on paper only translates into recognition in data if people use it, and for years, many didn’t. In the 2016 census, just under 16,000 people recorded Hazara ancestry, and about 22,000 reported speaking Hazaragi at home, numbers community leaders considered a serious undercount.
Ahead of the 2021 census, young Hazara organisers ran a grassroots campaign urging people to write “Hazara” under ancestry and “Hazaragi” under language, rather than defaulting to “Afghan” or “Dari” out of habit or unfamiliarity with the form. One organiser, Mehdi Sina, told the Dandenong Star Journal the campaign was about more than data: the “Afghan” label, he said, had been “imposed on us for so long.”
The results were striking. The 2021 census recorded roughly 41,700 people of Hazara ancestry and a near-identical number of Hazaragi speakers, close to four times the 2016 figures, making Hazaras the second-largest ancestry group, at 44.3 percent, among Australians born in Afghanistan.
WHY IT MATTERS
For a community that spent much of the twentieth century having its identity denied, dismissed or actively targeted, an accurate national headcount is not a bureaucratic footnote. It shapes funding for interpreter services, community programs, and settlement support; it shapes political representation; and, community advocates say, it shapes something less tangible but no less important, the simple fact of being recognised by a state as who you are, rather than as a subset of someone else’s category.
With another Australian census approaching, community organisers are again preparing to encourage Hazara Australians to declare their ancestry and language explicitly. For a people whose modern history began with an attempt to erase them from the map of Afghanistan, each census now stands as a small but deliberate act of the opposite: being written back in.
