Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 2014

Vol. 34, No. 3, 243–258, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13602004.2014.946766

Afghan-Australians: Diasporic Tensions, Homeland

Transformations and the “2014 Syndrome”

IBRAHIM ABRAHAM and RACHEL BUSBRIDGE

Abstract
With the withdrawal of NATO-led troops from Afghanistan pending in 2014,
Afghanistan and its sizeable diaspora are facing an ambiguous new beginning.
As in Afghanistan itself, the 35,000-strong Afghan community in Australia is nego-
tiating what has been labelled the “2014 Syndrome”—a chronic state of anxiety
about Afghanistan’s future. Drawing on data from a series of dialogues and consul-
tations held with Afghan-Australians of different ethnicities in Melbourne in 2012
and 2013, this article contextualizes and critically examines the tensions and
shared concerns of the Afghan-Australian community in light of the impending
withdrawal. Our study shows that the 2014 Syndrome has exacerbated existing ten-
sions over “Afghan” identity in Australia, which has become intertwined with ten-
sions over the status of Hazara asylum seekers and refugees arriving in Australia.
Given the widely held belief amongst Afghan-Australians that the 2014 withdrawal
will prompt increased flows of asylum seekers from Afghanistan to Australia, this
study argues that tensions around identity frame quite different hopes for the
future of Afghanistan and the future of the Afghan-Australian community after
2014.

Introduction
The year 2014 signals the winding down of military operations by NATO and its allies
against the Taliban in Afghanistan. Only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of
troops will remain beyond the end of 2014, primarily to train Afghanistan’s nascent
defence forces.1 Australia, amongst other allied nations, withdrew its combat troops
one year before the 2014 deadline, leaving only 400 military personnel in the country
to train and advise the Afghan National Army (ANA).2 The scheduled withdrawal has
proved controversial with doubt surrounding the capacity of the ANA to confront the
Taliban, and ambiguity surrounding the precise legal status of foreign troops which at
one point raised the distinct possibility of a complete withdrawal of NATO and allied
forces.3 The potential consequences of an underprepared ANA—such as a return to
civil war or a return to Taliban rule—are of deep concern to many Afghans at home
and abroad. So too is the potential economic impact of the withdrawal given Afghani-
stan’s reliance on foreign aid, foreign NGOs and foreign contractors to provide essential
services which may end if security cannot be maintained.4 The cumulative impact of con-
cerns about what will become of Afghanistan after the withdrawal of NATO and allied
combat troops has been labelled the “2014 Syndrome”, a state of general anxiety
about the country’s future.5
The 2014 Syndrome is not limited only to Afghanistan itself, but also affects the global
Afghan diaspora, which numbers between four and five million people who fled the

© 2014 Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs

244 Ibrahim Abraham and Rachel Busbridge

Soviet invasion, the subsequent civil war, Taliban rule or the present ongoing conflict.6
The 2014 Syndrome manifests rather differently in the diaspora than within Afghanistan
itself, of course. The Afghan diaspora in the “West”, including the approximately 35,000
strong Afghan community in Australia, may be observing the pending withdrawal at a dis-
tance, but the diasporic experience produces tensions and anxieties of its own. Diasporas
are not merely defined by the shared trauma of exile, nor are they cultural replicas of the
homeland. Rather, as Avtar Brah argues, diasporas are complex communities constituted
by the emergence of new forms of political identity and imagination, and desires for new
beginnings.7
This article focuses on the Afghan diaspora in Australia, which, like the global Afghan
diaspora, is predominantly shaped by the flow of refugees. In recent years this flow has
been dominated by Shi’ite Hazaras, many of whom have arrived in Australia on unsched-
uled boat journeys via Indonesia, labelled “unauthorised maritime arrivals” in Australian
law. We draw upon data from a series of consultations and dialogues in order to explore
the key contestations within the Afghan-Australian diaspora, with a particular focus on
attitudes towards the NATO withdrawal as an ambiguous new beginning for Afghans
the world over. Eight consultations and dialogues were undertaken between 2012 and
2013 with the Afghan-Australian community in Melbourne, Australia’s second largest
city which is home to a significant Afghan diaspora concentrated in the outer south-
eastern suburbs.8
These consultations and dialogues explicitly engaged diverse representatives of the
community, namely those of ethnic Pashtun, Hazara and Tajik background. Five consul-
tations were undertaken with separate Pashtun and Hazara community leaders and repre-
sentatives in 2012, with three community dialogues undertaken in 2013 with a diverse
group of Pashtun and Hazara participants, many of whom were university students in
their early and mid-20s. Numerous additional discussions and correspondences were
entered into with Pashtun, Hazara and Tajik Afghan-Australians throughout the
course of the project, providing in-depth knowledge of the diverse discourses circulating
within Australia’s vibrant Afghan diaspora.

Questions of Afghan Identity in Diaspora

Our primary concern in this report is to demonstrate how the 2014 Syndrome has
affected and exacerbated existing tensions within the Afghan-Australian community.
These tensions are focused largely, but not wholly, around questions of identity. This
is not surprising considering that “Afghan”—employed here as national shorthand to
indicate origin rather than ethnicity—is a term used in different ways in different con-
texts by different social actors. Use of the term is rarely free of controversy, therefore
“Afghan” is an identity category that social scientists would identify as “fuzzy”; there
are gradients of belonging that shift according to context, and boundaries of belonging
are far from uniform. The difficulty with the label stems from the fact that, as one revi-
sionist historian writes, it has “dual ethnic and political implications”.9 While it has
become commonplace for the term “Afghan” to designate all those from Afghanistan
regardless of ethnicity, historically “Afghan” was used as a synonym for the Pashtun
ethnic group, who are generally regarded as having been in a politically dominant pos-
ition in Afghanistan since the mid-eighteenth century10 and are the largest single ethnic
group in Afghanistan itself.11 Thus although some members of Afghanistan’s minority
ethnic groups are unconcerned with the use of the term “Afghan”, others—particularly
amongst the Hazara who perceive themselves to be a particularly persecuted minority—
 Afghan-Australians and the “2014 Syndrome” 245

prefer the term “Afghani” or “Afghanistani” to be used to differentiate citizenship from

ethnicity.12
This article will examine how these controversies over identity and belonging have
increasingly become intertwined with questions relating to asylum and refugee status
in the Australian context. Whether one is considered a “genuine refugee” legitimately
seeking sanctuary in Australia from the turmoil of Afghanistan is often a question of
whether one is considered a “genuine Afghan”. This tension around identity has been
exacerbated by competition for finite humanitarian visas to allow family members to be
resettled in Australia, in tandem with the disproportionately large number of Hazaras
claiming asylum in Australia since 2001, which has significantly altered the demographic
make-up of the Afghan-Australian community. These debates over the legitimacy of
claims to identity and refuge, connected to longstanding tensions around Afghan identity
and belonging, are exacerbated by the 2014 Syndrome because of the widely held belief
that the withdrawal will signal increased flows of asylum seekers out of Afghanistan and
towards Australia.
In addition to exacerbating existing tensions, however, our findings suggest that the
2014 Syndrome potentially creates a new ideological tension in the Afghan-Australian
community between the desire for the restoration of national autonomy, and the desire
for international assistance in nation-building and security in Afghanistan. While the
2014 Syndrome is widely equated with anxiety over the future, our findings indicate
that there is another interpretation of the withdrawal, i.e. celebration over the departure
of foreign combat troops and a positive attitude towards the possibility of a reduced
number of “Westerners” in the country.
This understanding of Afghan history and identity emphasizes soldierly isolationism as
an integral part of Afghanistan’s national character and idealizes Afghanistan’s traditional
form of social organization, a combination of Islamic law and tribal custom. Both anxiety
and celebration can be encountered amongst Afghan-Australians. For some the withdra-
wal of NATO and allied combat troops is a potentially disastrous abandonment, while for
others it is a long-awaited liberation. While attitudes do not uniformly reflect ethnic iden-
tity, anxieties about the withdrawal are particularly significant amongst the Shi’ite Hazara
minority, underscoring the division in the Afghan-Australian diaspora between Pashtun
and Hazara communities.

Afghans in Australia
Compared with most non-indigenous peoples in Australia, Afghans have had a long his-
torical presence in the country, starting with a small number of skilled cameleers arriving
in the mid-nineteenth century.13 While the role of these Afghan cameleers in opening up
Australia’s vast desert hinterland is a relatively well-known historical trope, made use of
in a strategic way by Afghans themselves, the contemporary Afghan-Australian commu-
nity is overwhelmingly made up of those who left Afghanistan after the Soviet interven-
tion in 1979, coming to Australia as refugees or as family members reunited with
refugees.14 This has placed Afghans in a controversial position in contemporary Austra-
lia due to the fact that the arrival of asylum seekers via unscheduled boat journeys has
been one of the most passionately debated issues in Australian society in the twenty-
first century.15 People claiming asylum from violence and persecution in Afghanistan
have been central to this debate, not least because of Australia’s involvement in
NATO-led operations in Afghanistan since 2001. Afghan asylum seekers, and in par-
ticular Hazara asylum seekers, have been at the heart of Australia’s ever-shifting
246 Ibrahim Abraham and Rachel Busbridge

“refugee compromise” which seeks to balance the desire for a well-ordered and demo-
cratically accountable immigration and population policy with the desire to protect those
suffering persecution.16
Between mid-1998, when the number of boat arrivals dramatically increased, and mid-
2012, 13,360 Afghans arrived in Australia on unscheduled boat journeys, roughly 40% of
the 33,412 total unscheduled boat arrivals in that period.17 With the exception of the
2002–2003 financial year in which only 50% of Afghans arriving by sea were accepted
as legitimate refugees, the annual acceptance rate during this period was between 94%
and 100%, and the annual acceptance rate for Afghans who did not arrive by boat has
also been high, between 79% and 100% between 2006 and mid-2012.18
Even though Afghan asylum seekers are overwhelmingly accepted into Australia, the
means of arrival for so many has placed the community under scrutiny. Asylum
seekers arriving in Australia by boat are placed under immediate suspicion of deception
by the mainstream media and successive governments because of their mode of arrival
and by the fact that they traverse several countries before arriving in Australia, although
none of these countries are parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention.19 Many people arriving
on unscheduled boat journeys have suffered from the effects of prolonged detention while
awaiting assessment of their asylum claims, as well as a regime of limited government
assistance designed to discourage future boat arrivals.20 In addition, at least several
hundred Hazara asylum seekers from Afghanistan and Pakistan have drowned trying to
reach Australia by boat.21
Australia’s most recent census, from 2011, records 28,598 people born in Afghanistan
living in Australia. Because Australia’s Afghan community also includes people born in
Australia, as well as those born in countries neighbouring Afghanistan and other
countries, it is also worth looking at reports of ethnic ancestry in the census. This is sig-
nificant because, as we noted in the introduction, not everyone who identifies as Afghani-
stan-born identifies as an “Afghan”; Afghanistan-born speakers of the Hazaraghi dialect
of Persian, for instance, were twice as likely to identify as “Hazara” than as “Afghan”
when recording their ethnic ancestry. The census offers no “Pashtun” category, but a
small number of Afghanistan-born respondents identify as “Pathans”, the term histori-
cally used in British India.22 Thus in 2011, 27,442 people in Australia claimed Afghan
ancestry, in addition to 5869 who claimed Hazara ancestry. The Australian government
therefore works with an estimate of 35,000 Afghans in Australia, including 6500
Hazaras.23 This figure is disputed by some Hazara activists in Australia who estimate
their own numbers to be much higher; a blog entry on The New York Times website
that is clearly informed by the testimony of Hazara activists improbably estimates
50,000 Hazaras in Australia, for example.24
The Afghan community more broadly also places greater significance on the number of
Tajik Afghans in Australia than one would expect examining the 2011 census wherein
only 96 people born in Afghanistan record Tajik ancestry; an unquantifiable additional
number are to be found amongst Dari speakers claiming Afghan ancestry. Approximately
9000 of Australia’s 35,000 Afghans live in Melbourne, and 7000 of those 9000 live in the
outer south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne, clustered in and around the region’s com-
mercial and services hub of Dandenong, which has been the most popular single area
of settlement for Afghans who are newly arrived in Australia or newly released from immi-
gration detention. It is the tensions within the Afghan diaspora in Melbourne, and most
particularly in the city’s south-eastern suburbs, that will be the focus of the following
analysis.
 Afghan-Australians and the “2014 Syndrome” 247

Afghan Unity and Ethnic Diversity

Quantifying the Afghan diaspora in Australia in the earlier manner is not merely an exer-
cise in abstract demography; the overall size and characteristics of the diaspora incite and
intensify political debate within the Afghan and non-Afghan community in Australia.
This is the first obvious tension within the Afghan diaspora in Australia, oriented
around the question of Afghan identity, and most prominent in the context of the
Pashtun/Hazara divide. Yet debate about Afghan identity is not only relevant for the
Afghan-Australian community itself, but has also erupted publically in 2010 and 2011
in Dandenong, the hub of the Afghan community in Melbourne. Local government offi-
cials sought to rename a section of Dandenong’s commercial hub with a large number of
Afghan retailers in recognition of the community. They chose the name “Afghan
Bazaar” and adopted a logo featuring a camel in reference to nineteenth-century
Afghan cameleers. Tourist organizations began to promote Dandenong’s Afghan
Bazaar as a destination for gastronomic tourism. Yet some Hazara activists objected
to the name, claiming that the use of the term “Afghan” and the symbol of the camel
did not represent the whole of the local Afghanistan-born community. A number of
Pashtun Afghan-Australians responded by insisting that this was the view of only a
small minority of Hazaras, who were intent on stirring up trouble and creating divisions
in the community.25
While such tensions do inform encounters between Pashtun, Hazara and Tajik in Aus-
tralia, it is notable that in the community consultations and dialogues an almost uniform
desire for a unified and cohesive Afghan-Australian community was articulated by
members of the different groups represented. On the one hand, this desire is evidently
connected to the need of a diasporic community to be able to accurately represent the
needs of its constituent members to government bodies. The desire for a unified
Afghan-Australian community was clearly informed by participants’ experiences of Aus-
tralian multiculturalism wherein organized ethnic community groups, with the support of
the state, facilitate the continued expression and public celebration of ethnicity. As one
young Pashtun man lamented in noting that community celebrations are too often
divided by ethnicity, with Pashtun and Hazara Afghan-Australians only infrequently cel-
ebrating holidays and religious festivals together, “we’re not at the stage like all the Greeks
having the Greek festival. We, the Afghans, we haven’t reached the stage where we can say
‘come here; it’s for everyone’”.
On the other hand, the shared desire for a cohesive Afghan-Australian community was
underpinned by a negative experience of Australian multiculturalism. Given the scrutiny
that Afghans in Australia have been placed under due to a significant number arriving on
unscheduled boat journeys, combined with the Australian military involvement in Afgha-
nistan’s ongoing violence, and periodic public prejudices against Australia’s Muslim min-
orities since 2001,26 there is a clear desire to be seen as a “model minority” community. It
is well understood that displays of inter- or intra-ethnic hostility are unhelpful in achiev-
ing legitimacy within Australia’s diverse society, and that religious hostility—such as
between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims—is particularly unwelcome within Australian
society. A model minority is viewed as one which manages to leave its ethnic and religious
quarrels in its homeland. An additional motivation to develop a more unified Afghan-
Australian community has emerged through what was described as a shared experience
of discrimination. Afghan-Australians are too often identified in public discourse with
terrorists and religious militants, rather than as victims of terrorism and religious mili-
tancy. “Pashtun and Hazara—they’re all being discriminated against [and told to]
248 Ibrahim Abraham and Rachel Busbridge

‘go back to your terrorist country’”, said one young Hazara man in a 2013 community
dialogue.

Vision for the Future

In community consultations and dialogues, we encountered substantially different
visions of what this desire for a united Afghan-Australian community entails for different
ethnic groups and for different age groups. The desire for Afghan unity sits in tension
with the desire to articulate competing and contradictory nationalist discourses and iden-
tities, perhaps exposing the issue of Afghan unity as a rhetorical device through which pol-
itical claims can be made and political influence enhanced. It is certainly reminiscent of
politics in Afghanistan itself wherein Presidential candidates speak vaguely about national
unity but more specifically about the concerns of one or another ethnic group.27 These
substantively different visions of what is at stake in Afghan identity are in many ways con-
cerns transmuted from the homeland, particularly those that relate to the question of
Pashtun political influence. They are also significant diasporic concerns, however,
related to how long individuals and groups have resided in Australia, and the hierarchies
that exist as a result of that.
As Eden Naby has observed in the Afghan-American community, divisions in Afghan
society that were already reflected in its diaspora are exacerbated by new waves of emigra-
tion.28 In Australia, the Pashtuns are the most established ethnic group, with many Pash-
tuns arriving during the 1980s. The arrival of significant numbers of Hazaras in the last
decade or so has led to disruptions in the small diasporic community with previously clear
hierarchies, directed by a small number of Pashtun Afghan-Australian professionals.
This, in turn, has intersected with quite different experiences of conflict for the different
ethnic groups in Afghanistan. As one young Hazara woman explained, discussing tension
between different Afghan ethnic groups in Australia:
The division came in 2001 when the Hazara arrived. The previous Afghan com-
munity was established; they had their organization and mosques and then the
Hazara arrived after the Taliban and after the terrorism in Quetta. They are here
the last ten years, and the others for twenty or thirty years. We couldn’t integrate
and we weren’t accepted. What we want is different from what they want. Our
concerns are Quetta and asylum seekers; it’s not a concern for the Pashtun and
Tajik.
Thus, for many Pashtuns, the desire for a unified Afghan-Australian community had
already been fulfilled; rather than something to be built and achieved in the future,
unity is something that must be rebuilt or reclaimed from the past.

Debate over Identity

When the numerous bureaucrats of Australia’s multicultural apparatuses speak with
many of the older and more established Pashtun leaders of the Afghan-Australian com-
munity, they are typically told that debate over Afghan identity is a trifling concern,
pursued only by a few young troublemakers who may not, in fact, be from Afghanistan
at all. Amongst this older generation of Pashtun leaders, the general view is that the
Afghan-Australian community is already culturally unified, albeit subject to various pol-
itical disagreements and factions, and attempts are being made to undermine this by a
handful of discontents. As one older, male leader in the Afghan-Australian community
 Afghan-Australians and the “2014 Syndrome” 249

said of concerns raised by younger members in the community, “it is not our role to
listen, it is our role to lead”. In some ways this reflects certain tendencies in Pashtun pol-
itical thought in Afghanistan itself, with the belief that the Pashtuns are “the rightful rulers
of Afghanistan”,29 carried over into the diasporic context wherein Pashtun community
leaders claim to have mastered the Australian multicultural environment, demonstrated
by their more established position.
In contrast, bureaucrats listening to many leaders of the more recently established
Hazara community would be told that Afghan identity issues are profound questions of
(mis)recognition; that their belonging to the state of Afghanistan is routinely denied in
Afghanistan itself, imposed upon them in neighbouring Pakistan to deny them legitimacy
there; and that the bureaucratically interpolated label “Afghan” is problematically applied
to them in Australia in so far as it denies significant differences and disputes amongst
Afghanistan’s various ethnic groups. Thus, for the Hazara community in Australia,
“Afghan” operates as an ambivalent label of identification and misidentification, repre-
senting both the myth of a unified community and the hope of a unified community
that accedes to certain Hazara demands for recognition.

Pashtun and Hazara Relationship

Questions of persecution and suffering inform the relationship between Pashtun and
Hazara Afghan-Australians. The Hazaras in Australia situate themselves within a long
narrative of persecution, focused on the reign of the Afghan King Abdur Rahman in
the late nineteenth century and the era of Taliban rule in Afghanistan.30 These are histori-
cal periods with which various other forms of violence and discrimination were compared
and contextualized in community consultations, in dialogues and in personal conversa-
tions and messages sent to researchers. As Denise Phillips shows, Hazara diasporic pol-
itical identity is performed in two ways in Australia: by seeking to explicitly move beyond
past trauma in order to begin a new life in a new land and, conversely, by “refusing to
forget” past trauma.31 This was particularly evident amongst the younger Hazara
Afghan-Australians. Some younger Hazara community members expressed a desire to
move beyond ethnic categories, pointing to the Young Australian of the Year for 2013,
the Afghan-Australian refugee Akram Azimi, as a role model. “He’s not locking
himself in one room named ‘Hazara’ or ‘Pashtun’. I don’t want to talk about the past;
it’s a waste of time”, said one young Hazara man. Nevertheless, the Hazara desire for a
more unified Afghan-Australian community is significantly predicated on the non-
Hazara acknowledging this history of suffering.
Such acknowledgement of Hazara suffering is something Pashtun and Tajik leaders are
reluctant to do, particularly in current context of fluidity and unsettledness of 2014 Syn-
drome wherein acknowledging the suffering of other ethnic groups can be perceived as
downplaying the suffering of one’s own. As one older Pashtun-Tajik woman explained,
“the Pashtun have their own issues, especially people living in the border area [of Afgha-
nistan and Pakistan]; it’s not peaceful there”. Indeed, for some members of the Pashtun
Afghan-Australian community, it is the Pashtun living in eastern Afghanistan who are
suffering the most from the current situation; they are caught between Taliban insurgents
and foreign soldiers and, many believe, they have lost a significant amount of political and
military power to Tajiks from the Panjshir valley, making an historical narrative of the
powerful Pashtun persecuting the powerless Hazara difficult to accept. Even non-
Hazara leaders sympathetic to the plight of the Hazara are resistant to privileging
Hazara suffering, while some Pashtun and Tajik Afghan-Australians are openly sceptical
250 Ibrahim Abraham and Rachel Busbridge

of claims of Hazara suffering, viewing such claims as attempts to fraudulently obtain

asylum for one’s self and then for one’s family, as we will analyse.

“Genuine” Afghans and “Genuine” Refugees

This longstanding tension around ethnicity, identity and belonging in Afghanistan has
particular ramifications for the acceptance of newly arrived Afghan asylum seekers and
refugees in Australia. The specific debate within the broader Afghan diaspora in Australia
is whether the large numbers of Hazara asylum seekers arriving in Australia in recent
years are “genuine refugees” and “genuine Afghans”. In his oft-cited essay on the com-
plexities of the term “refugee”, Roger Zetter argues that the term carries with it a complex
set of values and judgements which can substantially differ between individuals and insti-
tutions, a process of systematization or interpolation he refers to as the delinking of “case
from story”.32 This can be observed in the context of the Afghan diaspora in Australia, for
the question of whether an individual is a “genuine” Afghan refugee is not merely a ques-
tion of whether an individual or a community truly belongs to the state of Afghanistan,
but about the broader sweep of Afghan history.
This issue of genuine refugees forms a major fault line in the Afghan-Australian commu-
nity. It proved a controversial topic during community consultations and in private corre-
spondence with researchers, but less so in community dialogues, since explicit questions
about the integrity of others is a difficult topic to breech—although breeched it was.
Amongst Pashtun and Tajik representatives, there was a noticeable and repeated slip
between discussing who is a “genuine refugee” and who is a “genuine Afghan”. Said
one Pashtun leader, representatively of broader views, “this whole thing is about the
Hazara; this question about genuine Afghans. After the conflict of 1881 they fled to Paki-
stan and now they’re called ‘non-genuine Afghans’”. The common Pashtun and Tajik
claim was that when Hazara asylum seekers began arriving in Australia, they presented
themselves as Afghan nationals when they were in fact from Pakistan or Iran and merely
seeking a better life rather than fleeing violent persecution in Afghanistan itself. It can be
argued, however, that this view oversimplifies the reality of migration to and from Afghani-
stan, which has long been defined by the “circulation” of individuals or whole communities
back and forth across porous and shifting boundaries.33 This was evident in dialogues and
consultations. One young Hazara man explained his family’s situation:
When my parents were killed in 1992, my uncle and aunt moved because they
knew they would be next. Where? To Pakistan where there was some peace.
After five years, they moved to Australia because Hazara are always considered
Afghan first and secondly Pakistani. They’re second degree [second class]
citizens.
Allesandro Monsutti’s exhaustive study of patterns of Hazara migration in Afghanistan,
Iran and Pakistan argues that “the Hazara illustrate the fact that no hard and fast distinc-
tion can be drawn between the categories of political refugee and economic migrant”,34
and this was certainly the case for many Hazara participants in dialogues and consul-
tations.

The “Boat People”

In the context of the 2014 Syndrome, the debate over who is a “genuine Afghan” and who
is a “genuine refugee” has intensified given the uncertain future of Afghanistan after the
 Afghan-Australians and the “2014 Syndrome” 251

withdrawal of NATO-led combat troops. The Afghan-Australian community is in broad

agreement that this withdrawal will see significantly more Afghan asylum seekers
attempting to come to Australia on unscheduled boat journeys. Hazara activists and
our research participants contend that so long as Afghanistan, and more recently Paki-
stan, remains unsafe, Hazara asylum seekers will continue to try to reach Australia by
boat.35 As one young Hazara man said in a community dialogue, “if things get worse
in Pakistan, they’ll come over here. People just want a safe life; trust me, no one wants
to die in the sea”.
Participants also agreed, contrary to widespread hostility in Australia towards “boat
people”,36 that the arrival of more asylum seekers need not negatively impact upon Aus-
tralia. Two Pashtun Afghan-Australian men in our community dialogue foresaw advan-
tages to an influx of refugees after the end of 2014; “Afghans are hard-working people and
this is to Australia’s advantage” said one, with the other suggesting they be resettled in
rural areas where many Afghans have found employment and built stable lives.37 This
replicates some earlier rather sympathetic media portrayals of Afghan asylum seekers
as “hard-working types who are eager to fit in to their new surroundings—just the sort
of immigrants Australia needs”.38 Nevertheless, internal debates in the Afghan-Austra-
lian community reveal a much more ambivalent and complicated stance towards the
potential influx of asylum seekers post-withdrawal. This is not only due to the identity
issues we have analysed earlier in the article but also due to the finite nature of refugee
resettlement programmes, and the implications of this for the resettlement of family
members from Afghanistan.
Given the limited number of people who can be resettled in Australia as part of the
humanitarian immigration scheme, competition and distrust have developed within the
Afghan-Australian community, exacerbating ethnic differences and tensions. Between
2008 and 2012 on average 816 family reunion visas were issued each year for Afghans
to come to Australia, with individuals (often with large families) competing for these
visas.39 In early 2014, after the dialogues were completed, the Australian government
announced that all refugees who arrived in Australia by boat since 2001 “will be given
the lowest processing priority when they apply for family reunions”.40 Although this
has increased the concern Hazara Afghan-Australians have for their family members in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, it may reduce internal antipathy within the Afghan-Australian
community. On the other hand, however, antipathy towards Hazara asylum seekers arriv-
ing on unscheduled boat journeys is partly predicated on the fact that if they are accepted
as refugees and resettled in Australia, which they usually have been, they are included in
the overall humanitarian intake which will still reduce the number of humanitarian visas
available to offshore claimants hoping to be resettled in Australia.41 Sophia Rainbird has
found a similar sense of distrust amongst asylum seekers in the UK based upon fears that
one may become the victim of another asylum seeker’s success.42
Given the intense desire to see one’s family members in Afghanistan resettled in Austra-
lia, exacerbated by the constitutive anxieties of what we have been referring to as the 2014
Syndrome, it is not surprising that Pashtun and Tajik representatives expressed quite
openly the opinion that many Hazara Afghans receiving asylum in Australia are Pakistanis
or Iranians who have taken advantage of Afghanistan’s turmoil to migrate to Australia.
That the Hazaras have suffered violence was hardly at issue. What was the subject of
much disagreement were representations made by Hazara asylum seekers to Australian
immigration authorities. As one Pashtun man said, “the word ‘genuine’ doesn’t mean
they are Hazaras or not. Who’s genuine? It’s someone who doesn’t use someone else’s suf-
fering for their own ends”. For Hazara Afghan-Australians such discourse merely
252 Ibrahim Abraham and Rachel Busbridge

reinforces their argument that they have never been accepted as equal citizens of Afghani-
stan.

The “Case” of the Hazaras

The issue of the persecution of the Hazara in Afghanistan and Pakistan is experienced in
subjectively very different ways by people within the Hazara community in Australia and
those outside of it. Because the Hazaras have been keen to take advantage of new oppor-
tunities in education and commerce in Afghanistan since the end of Taliban rule, noted
scholar of Afghanistan Amin Saikal argues that in Afghanistan, “[t]he Hazaras are no
longer as oppressed, deprived and exploited as they once used to be”.43 He rejects
claims circulated by “elements in the diaspora” that the Hazaras are “the most deprived
and oppressed group in Afghanistan”.44 Indeed, Saikal claims that “the Hazara case has
become somewhat of an industry. Some public and academic figures and organizations
have drawn on the issue for a variety of purposes, including enhancing their individual
and organizational standing, and exercising policy influence”.45
This is valid in the Australian context in so far as we have found a sense of competition
for resettlement visas and the resources of the multicultural state. Yet the reality of multi-
cultural bureaucracies and refugee activism makes the notion of the “Hazara industry”
unviable in the Australian context. The amounts of money small ethnic groups
compete for is relatively petty and typically linked to specific, one-off events such as
sports days. Moreover, non-Hazara supporters of Hazara refugees in Australia are far
more likely to be young Marxists and anarchists or retired churchgoers than influential
political operators. In any case, within Australia’s Hazara community, such views are
hard to reconcile with stories of ongoing persecution of Hazaras by Afghan institutions,
including stories of discrimination against Hazara students in Afghan universities which
resonate strongly with Hazara university students in Australia, and a difficult relationship
with the Afghan Embassy in Australia.46 Moreover, ongoing violence in Afghanistan and
Pakistan and ongoing attempts by Hazara asylum seekers to come to Australia give the
community a sense of perpetual crisis, intensifying the desire for family members still
in Afghanistan to be resettled in Australia ahead of the withdrawal of NATO-led
combat troops.

National Autonomy and Nation-Building

We have shown that longstanding tensions within Afghanistan itself have manifested
within the Afghan diaspora in Australia since the arrival of a significant number of
Hazara asylum seekers. We have also shown that these tensions have been exacerbated
by the impending withdrawal of NATO-led combat troops in Afghanistan and, poten-
tially, the withdrawal of a significant number of foreign NGOs and contractors. Fears
and hopes for Afghanistan post-2014 have created an additional point of contention in
the Afghan-Australian diaspora. Although it is apparent that the broad anxiety associated
with the 2014 Syndrome is pervasive in the Afghan-Australian community, the consul-
tations and dialogues we have undertaken with the community suggest that this general-
ized sense of anxiety sits alongside what is, for some, an attitude of celebration, where the
withdrawal represents an opportunity for the (anti-colonial) restoration of Afghan “tra-
dition”.
To illustrate different perspectives on the 2014 withdrawal that we take to be repre-
sentative of two broad positions held in the Afghan diaspora in Australia, we will
 Afghan-Australians and the “2014 Syndrome” 253

summarize a brief debate which emerged in the third community dialogue held in May
2013 between a male Pashtun Afghan-Australian university student in his 20s and a
male Hazara Afghan-Australian university student also in his 20s. “All foreign involve-
ment should be ended”, the Pashtun student insisted. “I mean all foreigners, and all
foreign weapons sales, should be finished. They shouldn’t remain in the country.”
The Hazara student argued in response that, “we should think of what people need;
security and better rule. Most people are worried about the withdrawal of troops. In
its condition, Afghanistan can’t stand on its own. To improve, they need friendships
with powerful countries”. The debate then turned to the popularity of ongoing
foreign involvement in Afghanistan. The Pashtun student argued that 90% of
Afghans wish all foreigners to be gone from Afghanistan, while the Hazara student
argued that 90% would prefer the foreigners to stay. The young Pashtun Afghan-Aus-
tralian then placed the withdrawal of US-led forces within an Afghan nationalist narra-
tive, arguing that “this has been the history of Afghanistan; like when the British arrived,
we know the story. Afghans have been like that through their whole lives”. This was not
nuanced enough for his Hazara Afghan-Australian interlocutor. “But look at history
after the Soviet invasion”, he said. “Did Afghanistan improve? Now look at it after
the US. I’m not saying they did a great job, but they trained troops and lots of students
are going to university.”
Although no trace of religious radicalism was detected amongst any research partici-
pants, one can detect the influence of global Islamist ideology amongst some young
Pashtun Afghan-Australians. The online accessibility of Islamist analysis is evident in dis-
course that views Western involvement in Afghanistan through the prism of a neocolonial
conspiracy, including the imposition of parliamentary democracy and the language of
human rights as a deliberate attempt to undermine Afghan culture. Adherents of this pos-
ition are sceptical of the claims of the mainstream media and international NGOs, leading
to apparently irreconcilable differences with Afghan-Australian peers over questions of
recent Afghan history.
The young Hazara Afghan-Australians in our dialogues indicated not only that they
were concerned about the withdrawal of troops, but also that they have been rather dis-
appointed with what foreign intervention has achieved in the years since the overthrow of
the Taliban. As one young Hazara woman said:
If you go across Afghanistan, a majority don’t want the Taliban, but most people
aren’t happy with what foreign forces have done. We expected more. Our
achievements in the last ten years are less than we wanted. Afghanistan is still
the second most corrupt country in the world and the worst place for women
in the world, but it’s better than under the Taliban.
This was an attitude shared not only by the Hazara. One younger Pashtun man was at
pains to point out to his Hazara peers in a dialogue session that a significant proportion
of the Pashtun community in Australia also left Afghanistan because of the Taliban and is
therefore grateful for their removal from power.
An older Pashtun-Tajik woman who was also supportive of foreign intervention never-
theless shared in the disappointment with what foreign intervention has achieved, arguing
that “the US forgot about capacity building and just focused on military actions”. The
result, she argued, is a large number of unemployable young men joining the Taliban
out of economic necessity. The placing of excessive blame on foreigners was criticized
by another young Hazara woman, however:
254 Ibrahim Abraham and Rachel Busbridge

You can blame Bush and Obama, but have you seen how rich Afghan politicians
are? They have millions! If they’re not loyal to us, if they’re not building our
schools, why do we expect Bush or Obama to do it? I haven’t seen as many
rich people in Melbourne as I have in Kabul!
Indeed, one sentiment that could be agreed on by participants in community dialogues of
all ages, ethnic backgrounds and political dispositions was disappointment in Afghan
politicians.

Afghan Women’s Rights

One issue that proved both prolific and controversial in community dialogues was
women’s rights, pointing as it does to some of the ideological alignments underlying
both a sense of anxiety and an attitude of celebration towards the withdrawal. Much
like the young people in Afghanistan interviewed by Amina Kator,47 the lack of edu-
cational opportunities, safety and personal autonomy for women and girls was a particu-
lar concern for Afghan-Australian women, and many Afghan-Australian men. Some of
these concerns were echoed in the research led by Nida Iqbal conducted amongst
young Hazara women in Australia who feel their education in Australia is also being
undervalued and fear the possibility of arranged marriage.48
There was much concern that the 2014 withdrawal would make the situation for
women in Afghanistan worse. Concerns were usually not articulated in the language of
liberal rights familiar in the West, however. On occasions when such language was
used, it was met with an animated response from traditionalist Afghan-Australian men
who viewed the discourse of women’s rights as a Western imposition alien to Afghan
society. Rather, concerns about the fate of women in Afghanistan after the 2014 withdra-
wal were usually articulated in a more practical way by emphasizing the need for specific
education and training programmes, and even by articulating women’s rights through the
framework of Islamic law. This is perhaps done in recognition that the political views of
diasporic Afghans “may be in conflict with local needs and possibilities”.49 Or as Mir
Hekmatullah Sadat argues more strongly, while the diaspora has “the potential to
lobby and promote tolerance, multiculturalism, stabilization, and national reconstruction
projects”, tensions also exist between diasporic Afghans and locals who view their invol-
vement in nation-building and reconstruction as undermining Afghan tradition.50

Westerners in Afghanistan
The challenge of the ongoing presence of Westerners in Afghanistan is succinctly sum-
marized by William Maley:
The Afghans find themselves in a very difficult situation. Given the ongoing
threat posed by the Taliban, they need outside support; but they need suppor-
ters more attuned to the realities of their situation than the United States has
historically proved to be. Maintaining the right kind of international support
is one of the most burdensome challenges that Afghanistan faces.51
It is precisely the question of the right way to articulate approval of this ongoing inter-
national support in Afghanistan that emerged as an acute concern within community dia-
logues, intertwining as it did with different ideological standpoints and forging new
tensions inside the community. In many ways, this was a particularly pressing concern
 Afghan-Australians and the “2014 Syndrome” 255

for Hazara Afghan-Australians; the suspicion of some Pashtun Afghan-Australians is that

support for the ongoing presence of the NATO-led coalition as well as Western NGOs is
incompatible with Afghan national autonomy, and traditional Afghan culture and reli-
gious practices. It can be broadly stated that the manner in which the 2014 Syndrome
affects the Hazara diaspora in Australia is incompatible with certain Afghan historical nar-
ratives and aspects of Afghan self-identity, grounded in largely tribal notions of autonomy
and soldierly isolationism. Perhaps not surprisingly given that the Pashtuns view their
community in Afghanistan as the key targets of NATO-led coalition operations, there
was a difference of opinion on foreign involvement that divided broadly, but not
wholly, along the Hazara/Pashtun axis.

Conclusion
This question of the Afghan diaspora disrupting Afghan tradition through engaging with
the homeland demonstrates that diasporic identity involves dislocation. This is, at the
very least, an affective dislocation in which one is continually emotionally pulled back
to one’s homeland through the repetition of tragedy or by the constant arrival of new dia-
sporic actors with their own familiar accounts. This is particularly significant for the
Afghan diaspora whose roots in Australia, the USA or Europe are shallower than that
of other comparable diasporas, and whose comparatively greater wealth and education
may well allow them an influential role in Afghanistan itself if they so choose.52
Indeed, despite being adamant that their future lies in Australia, as fully committed
and engaged citizens, it is difficult for Afghan-Australians to decouple their individual
lives and community relations in Australia from contemporary and historical events in
Afghanistan.
During community dialogues and consultations, as soon as participants would collec-
tively agree that past conflicts must be put behind them, and that tensions in Afghanistan
itself must not dominate their lives in Australia, one or more constitutive exceptions
would be raised—a contemporary conflict that should be addressed or a contentious
view on an historical period that should be accepted. At the same time as there were con-
stant slippages between Australia and Afghanistan, the present and the past, the general
and the specific, research participants in community consultations and dialogues would
move between discussing the particular concerns of their specific ethnic community in
Melbourne, Australia, Afghanistan or elsewhere, and discussing “Afghans” as a collective
label. Only very occasionally was this an explicit juxtaposition; more generally it was an
expression of the specific concerns of one part seeking a more inclusive whole, albeit pre-
dicated on different foundations.
We have therefore argued in this report on the concerns and contestations animating
the Afghan minority in Australia that there is a clear desire to develop a unified
Afghan-Australian community to more effectively engage with Australia’s multicultural
society and bureaucracy. We have demonstrated, however, that there also exists contra-
dictory narratives of ethnic identity and nationalist discourse that undermine these
desires for closer and more cohesive relations between the constitutive ethic groups of
the Afghan-Australian community. The most visceral fault line running through the
Afghan-Australian community, we have argued, concerns the large numbers of Hazara
asylum seekers arriving in Australia in recent years, often via unscheduled boat journeys.
This, it has been shown, is linked to longstanding disputes over Afghanistan’s turbulent
past, exacerbating ethnic tensions, otherwise explicable through competition for finite
resettlement visas allowing family members in Afghanistan to come to Australia.
256 Ibrahim Abraham and Rachel Busbridge

This desire to resettle family members in Australia is intensified by concerns about the
impending withdrawal of NATO-led combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014.
We noted that while differences of opinion exist in the Afghan-Australian community
about the desirability of the withdrawal of foreign combat troops, and the possible sub-
sequent withdrawal of foreign NGOs and contractors, there is a broad agreement that
the withdrawal will lead to an increase in Afghans seeking asylum in Australia. Should
this come to pass, there may well be an amplification of existing tensions within the
Afghan diaspora in Australia, as the most pressing contemporary desires for peace and
prosperity engage the unsettled histories and identities of the land of Afghanistan itself.

NOTES
1. Michael Gordon and Mark Landler, “Decision on Afghan Troop Levels Calculates Political and Military
Interests”, The New York Times, February 12, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/13/us/politics/
obama-to-announce-troops-return.html (accessed January 6, 2014); Mark Landler, “U.S. Troops to
Leave Afghanistan by 2016”, The New York Times, May 27, 2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/
28/world/asia/us-to-complete-afghan-pullout-by-end-of-2016-obama-to-say.html (accessed June 26,
2014).
2. David Wroe, “Australian Troops Leave Tarin Kowt”, Sydney Morning Herald, December 17, 2013,
http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/australian-troops-leave-tarin-kowt-20131216-
2zhep.html (accessed January 6, 2014).
3. Matthew Rosenberg, “Impasse with Afghanistan Raises Prospect of Total U.S. Withdrawal in 2014”,
The New York Times, October 13, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/world/asia/impasse-
with-afghanistan-raises-prospect-of-total-us-withdrawal-in-2014.html (accessed January 6, 2014).
4. Victor Mallet, “Afghanistan’s Forgotten Crisis: Its Economy”, Financial Times, May 20, 2013, http://
www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/59d9a5ae-b21e-11e2-a388-00144feabdc0.html (accessed January 6, 2014).
5. Victor Mallet, “Afghanistan: A Precarious Transition”, Financial Times, April 15, 2013, http://www.ft.
com/intl/cms/s/0/1e835ea2-a295-11e2-bd45-00144feabdc0.html (accessed January 6, 2014).
6. UNHCR, ‘2014 UNHCR Country Operations Profile—Afghanistan’, 2014, http://www.unhcr.org/
pages/49e486eb6.html (accessed January 17, 2014).
7. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, London: Routledge, 1986, p. 193.
8. This article emerges from the three-year research project Capacity Building for Reconciling Divided
Communities in Victoria, overseen by the Chief Investigator Michális S. Michael, and funded by the
Commonwealth of Australia through the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the State of
Victoria through the Victorian Multicultural Commission and Vichealth, and the William Buckland
Foundation.
9. Sayed Askar Mousavi, The Hazaras of Afghanistan: An Historical, Cultural, Economic and Political Study,
New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997, p. 63.
10. Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2010, p. 268.
11. There has never been an accurate census of the population of Afghanistan. The last attempt was a
partial census carried out in 1979 under Soviet oversight, and after decades of war, contemporary
population estimates vary by over 20%; at the lower end, the Afghan Central Statistics Organization
estimates 25.5 million, and at the upper end, the IMF estimates 32 million. A new census was under-
way by late 2012, but it deliberately excludes the question of ethnicity, as well as the question of
language which can be a proxy for ethnicity. The debate over ethnicity and identity in Afghanistan
is exacerbated by this information gap such that estimates of ethnic make-up vary. The size of the
Pashtun population is usually estimated at between 40% and 50% of the population of Afghanistan,
although Pashtun nationalists estimate between 60% and 65%; the Tajik population is estimated
between 25% and 30%, and the Hazara population between 10% and 20%, with Hazara activists
often claiming demographic parity with the Tajiks. See Anthony H. Cordesman, The Afghan War:
Creating the Economic Conditions and Civil-Military Aid Efforts Needed for Transition, Washington,
DC: Centre for Strategic & International Studies, 2012, pp. 20–24.
12. Barfield, Afghanistan, op. cit., p. 24.
13. Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Afghan Community Profile, Canberra: Department of
Immigration and Citizenship, 2012.
 Afghan-Australians and the “2014 Syndrome” 257

14. Ibid.
15. James Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera: The Story of Australian Immigration, 2nd ed., Mel-
bourne: Cambridge University Press, 2007, pp. 176–219; Louise Chappell, John Chesterman, and
Lisa Hill, The Politics of Human Rights in Australia, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009,
pp. 190–220.
16. Chappell, Chesterman, and Hill, Politics of Human Rights, op. cit., pp. 195–196.
17. Angus Houston, Paris Aristotle, and Michael L’Estrange, Report of the Expert Panel on Asylum Seekers,
Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2012, p. 94.
18. Ibid., pp. 98, 101.
19. Debbie Rodan and Cheryl Lange, “Going Overboard? Representing Hazara Afghan Refugees as Just
Like Us”, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 29, No. 2, 2008, pp. 153–169 (157–158).
20. William Maley, “Security, People-Smuggling, and Australia’s New Afghan Refugees”, Australian
Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 55, No. 3, 2001, pp. 351–370.
21. Declan Walsh, “Fleeing Pakistan Violence, Hazaras Brave Uncertain Journey”, The New York Times,
April 27, 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/world/asia/fleeing-violence-in-pakistan-hazaras-
brave-uncertain-journey.html (accessed January 6, 2014).
22. Eden Naby, “The Afghan Diaspora: Reflections on the Imagined Country”, in Central Asia and the
Caucasus: Transnationalism and Diaspora, ed. Touraj Atabaki and Sanjyot Mehendale, London: Rou-
tledge, 2005, pp. 169–183 (182).
23. Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Afghan Community Profile, op. cit., p. 5.
24. Luke Hunt, “Coming to Australia”, The New York Times, September 4, 2012, http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.
com/2012/09/04/new-australian-immigration-policy-hurts-afghan-refugees/ (accessed January 6, 2014).
25. Nicole Precel, “Split over Dandenong’s Afghan Bazaar Plans”, Dandenong Leader, August 18, 2011,
http://dandenong-leader.whereilive.com.au/news/story/split-over-dandenongs-afghan-bazaar-plans/
(accessed January 6, 2014).
26. Joint Standing Committee on Migration, Inquiry into Migration and Multiculturalism in Australia, Can-
berra: Parliament of the Commonwealth of Australia, 2013, pp. 55–86.
27. Timor Sharan and John Heathershaw, “Identity Politics and Statebuilding in Post-Bonn Afghanistan:
The 2009 Presidential Election”, Ethnopolitics, Vol. 10, Nos. 3 and 4, 2011, pp. 297–319.
28. Naby, “Afghan Diaspora”, op. cit., p. 169.
29. Amin Saikal, “Afghanistan: The Status of the Shi’ite Hazara Minority”, Journal of Muslim Minority
Affairs, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2012, pp. 80–87 (81).
30. Robert Canfield, “New Trends among the Hazaras: From ‘The Amity of Wolves’ to ‘The Practice of
Brotherhood’”, Iranian Studies, Vol. 37, No. 2, 2004, pp. 241–262 (260).
31. Denise Phillips, “Wounded Memory of Hazara Refugees from Afghanistan: Remembering and For-
getting Persecution”, History Australia, Vol. 8, No. 2, 2011, pp. 177–198 (192).
32. Roger Zetter, “Labelling Refugees: Forming and Transforming a Bureaucratic Identity”, Journal of
Refugee Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 1991, pp. 39–62, pp. 40–41 (59).
33. Robert Nichols, “An Inter-regional History of Pashtun Migration, c. 1775–2000”, in Ethnicity, Auth-
ority, and Power in Central Asia, ed. Robert L. Canfield and Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek, New York: Rou-
tledge, 2011, pp. 144–162.
34. Alessandro Monsutti, War and Migration: Social Networks and Economic Strategies of the Hazaras of
Afghanistan, New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 168.
35. Walsh, “Fleeing Pakistan Violence”, op. cit.; Hunt, “Coming to Australia”, op. cit.
36. Andrew Markus, James Jupp, and Peter McDonald, Australia’s Immigration Revolution, Sydney: Allen
& Unwin, 2009, pp. 123–129.
37. Frank Stilwell, “Refugees in a Region: Afghans in Young, NSW”, Urban Policy and Research, Vol. 21,
No. 3, 2003, pp. 235–248.
38. Mungo MacCallum, “Girt by Sea: Australia, the Refugees and the Politics of Fear”, Quarterly Essay,
No. 5, 2002, pp. 1–73 (18).
39. Department of Immigration and Citizenship, Afghan Country Profile, Canberra: Department of Immi-
gration and Citizenship, 2012, p. 7.
40. Thea Cowie and Shalailah Medhora, “Family Reunion Setback for Refugees Who Came by Boat”,
SBS World News Australia, January 8, 2014, http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2014/01/08/family-
reunion-setback-refugees-who-came-boat (accessed January 8, 2014).
41. Jupp, From White Australia to Woomera, op. cit., p. 179.
42. Sophia Rainbird, “Distrust and Collaboration: Exploring Identity Negotiation among Asylum Seekers
in East Anglia, Britain”, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2012, pp. 139–156 (148–150).
258 Ibrahim Abraham and Rachel Busbridge

43. Saikal, “Afghanistan”, op. cit., p. 83.

44. Ibid., p. 85.
45. Ibid., p. 86.
46. Diana Glazebrook, “Becoming Mobile after Detention”, Social Analysis, Vol. 48, No. 3, 2004, pp.
40–58 (43–44).
47. Amina Kator, “Hopes and Dreams: Interviews with Young Afghans”, in Land of the Unconquerable:
The Lives of Contemporary Afghan Women, ed. Jennifer Heath and Ashraf Zahedi, Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2011, pp. 357–365.
48. Nida Iqbal, Andrew Joyce, Alana Russo, and Jaya Earnest “Resettlement Experiences of Afghan
Hazara Female Adolescents: A Case Study from Melbourne, Australia”, International Journal of Popu-
lation Research, Vol. 2012, 2012, pp. 1–9 (5–6).
49. Naby, “Afghan Diaspora”, op. cit., p. 181.
50. Mir Hekmatullah Sadat, “Hyphenating Afghaniyat (Afghan-ness) in the Afghan Diaspora”, Journal of
Muslim Minority Affairs, Vol. 28, No. 3, 2008, pp. 329–342 (340).
51. William Maley, Rescuing Afghanistan, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006, p. 30.
52. Naby, “Afghan Diaspora”, op. cit., p. 169.