Has your government ever decided to get rid of four eventful decades from your history textbooks? Well, mine has. The Afghan government has decided to eliminate any post-1973 events from the school texts. That is, the country’s new school books simply leave out the last four decades of events: no Soviet involvement, no brutal years of civil war, no rise of the Taliban, no culture heritage destruction, no massacres, no U.S. involvement and no millions of people rescued from the sinking ship of the country in Taliban era and before that. The intention – the hope – is that this know-nothing “de-politicized” approach will lessen tensions by avoiding controversy and division in schools, which since the 1970s have been ideological battlefields. Farooq Wardak, Education Minister simply says ‘it is to encourage brotherhood and unity.’ But people disagree. The absence of modern history in the school books is more likely an indication of irreconcilable divisions in society rather than a portent of national reconciliation.
Before naming the major events during the past four decades, if we look deeper into the history of Afghanistan that has been transferred from man-to-man-not by the books-a big part of this country’s history has been removed. For instance, unlike what I read few years ago in my school books, I found out that the King Abdul Rahman who is known for some Pashtuns to be the modernizer of Afghanistan, is actually the killer of 60% of Hazara and Nuristan minorities and a slave dealer. This is removed from the book and forgotten, but just the saying goes ‘history sometimes repeats’, it actually did. One and half decades ago, the Taliban wanted to ‘modernize’ the country more, they massacred the minorities in Afshar, Mazar and …’unaware that history has witnessed that once’
Now, these are some of the major highlighted parts of our history that lie in the past four decades. Russian invasions and how it happened, ‘English invasion is also enlightened here’, the years of civil war that left millions dead and thrown out of the country, homeless, uneducated, disabled, drug addicts, jobless and family less. Warlords that the destroyed cultural heritages that Afghans were proud of, massacred minorities, and the reason why it all has happened and by whom.
Just by looking at every single event that left disasters, wouldn’t it be better to literally let the next generation know the real face of all this misfortunean that let the country up to this point, and learn lessons from it? Or it is just okay if they blindly ignore the facts and remove the history? ..so that the next generation will interpret the history differently as they hear from individuals, and repeat the history just like Taliban did many years after Abdul Rahman.
I like the idea of brining brotherhood. But I never agree that it can be brought the way the government has blindly chosen now. In fact, in this government, there is a scarcity of knowledge and education which is why disasters happen over and over again; criminals like King Adbul Rahman, Taliban and… are not held accountable for their crimes and yet their history removed. Now knowing the disasters left from the last four decades, especially from the Second King Abdul Rahman ‘Taliban’, if we let the history get removed again, there will be Third Abdul Rahmans ‘modernizing’ Afghanistan again just like the Second and First ones did. In other words, removing the history doesn’t change anything. Just like a donkey is still a donkey, no matter what color his saddle is, a criminal is a criminal through any sort of intention of purposely harming others. Instead, the government should literally use the history as a mirror of the past and a light for the future. Officially punishing the criminals and publicly apologizing the victims can lessen tension of hatred but not removal of the history.
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