Defence`s Feeds

The Indian Air Force (IAF) inaugurated its Tuting advanced landing ground (ALG) on 28 December. Tuting is the seventh of eight proposed IAF ALGs to become operational in 2016 in the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, which borders China, and Beijing claims is part of 'southern Tibet'.

The Indonesian Army (Tentara Nasional Indonesia - Angkatan Darat: TNI-AD) has taken delivery of another 16 Leopard 2 RI (Republic of Indonesia) main battle tanks (MBTs). The vehicles, which are part of a contract for 61 MBTs of the type with Rheinmetall Defence, were unloaded at the Port of Tanjong

China's Jiangnan Shipyard on Changxing Island launched its 10th Luyang III-class (Type 052D) destroyer for the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) on 26 December. Built under cover, the ship was launched by shiplift, and joins six others that are either being fitted out in the basin or on sea

The US State Department has approved the sale of 1,250 Boeing Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) bomb guidance kits for Kuwait, the Defense Security Cooperation Agency (DSCA) announced on 23 December. It said the proposed sale is estimated to be worth USD37 million and covers 750 guidance kits for

China's People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) commissioned its 30th Jiangdao-class (Type 056) corvette on 28 December, according to the China Military Online website. Ningde (510) entered service with the East Sea Fleet's 23rd frigate squadron and will be based at Xiamen, opposite Taiwan. A number

TWO unidentified men - reported to be Spanish citizens of Moroccan and Gambian origin -were arrested by police during a counter-terrorism operation in Spain's capital Madrid on 28 December on suspicion of spreading Islamist militant propaganda, Reuters reported. Four magazines for AK-series assault

Raytheon announced on 29 December it has secured a direct commercial sales contract worth more than USD600 million to upgrade an undisclosed country's Patriot Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD) system to the Configuration 3+. "Patriot continues to outpace the evolving threat because

Russian state-owned technology conglomerate Rostec has taken over heavy armoured vehicles manufacturer Uralvagonzavod (UVZ) following a decree from President Vladimir Putin on 27 December. The corporation said the move is likely to be the precursor to the formation of an integrated armoured vehicle

Russia's Armed Forces will receive 905 tanks and armoured combat vehicles, and 170 new and upgraded aircraft in 2017, Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said on 22 December. The aircraft target represents a significant increase on the 139 modern aircraft that Shoigu said were delivered in 2016. The

Key Points System reconstituted to RBS15 Mk 2 standard First firing trials of a land-based RBS15 Mk 2missile conducted in the Baltic Sea in early 2016. The Swedish Armed Forces has reactivated a land-based mobile RBS15 coastal defence capability on the Baltic coast, some 16 years after it was

EVENT The Somali presidential election, postponed four times since September, will now likely be held in January 2017 after the lower and upper houses of parliament were sworn in on 27 December. Parliament will now elect the president. Insecurity prevented direct countrywide parliamentary polls,

The Thai military government has outlined a commitment to accelerate the development of the domestic defence industrial base in 2017 through partnerships with military suppliers and other activities. The new focus is expected to have implications for exporters contracted to supply materiel to

A security guard and a local government official were killed and three others were wounded when unidentified militants drove a vehicle into a the yard of a local Communist Party office before detonating an explosive device and attacking people with knives in Karakax county in China's Xinjiang

THE UNITED States Department of State issued a warning on 23 December, urging citizens to not travel to Jordan out of fear of a potential terrorist attack targeting U.S. citizens and Westerners, Reuters reported.

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Tag: German ArmyNiagale Bagayoko

In 2016, more than half a million Afghans fled conflict to places of safety inside Afghanistan’s borders. Over a third of the yearly total fled in just one month – October. This mass movement was caused by heavy fighting between government and insurgent forces. At the year’s end, AAN’s Jelena Bjelica looks at the statistics of Afghanistan’s internally displaced persons (IDPs).

The newly displaced: facts and figures

More than 580,000 people – 84,257 families – had been displaced within Afghanistan by mid-December 2016, the United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) reported. (For background on how IDPs are counted and recorded, statistics, see footnote (1)). More than half of the newly displaced population – 56 percent – were children under 18 years of age. In all but three of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, UNOCHA recorded some level of forced displacement, while all 34 provinces hosted the displaced. Kunduz, Uruzgan, Farah and Helmand produced the highest numbers of displaced people in 2016, while those receiving the most were Helmand, Takhar, Farah, Kunduz, Kandahar. That the same or nearby provinces appear in both lists show that many people seek safety near their homes.

October was the worse month. There were simultaneous assaults by the Taleban on several provincial capitals: on Kunduz city (see AAN reporting here), Farah city in the west, Faryab’s Maymana in the north and Helmand’s Lashkar Gah in the south. Over a third of the yearly total fled in this month alone, with 213,000 people (31,402 families) on the move. (More in-depth information on displacement is available from an interactive UNOCHA ‘dashboard’ (see here).

The northeast

The highest number of displaced persons was recorded in the northeast region (Badakhshan, Takhar, Kunduz and Baghlan), where over 198,000 people – 28,354 families, fled from conflict. Almost half of them – 93,500 people – fled their home province in October 2016. However, there were other monthly peaks – 30,000 in January and 21,000 in July 2016. Almost three-quarters of all those displaced in the northeast were from Kunduz province (116,000 from Kunduz district and more than 25,000 from Dasht-e Archi district). While most stayed within the same district (eg over 61,000 in Kunduz district), a considerable number moved to other provinces. For example, over 51,000 people displaced from Kunduz moved to Taloqan district in Takhar province and more than 25,000 to Pul-e Kumri district in Baghlan province.

The south

The second highest number of displacements was documented in the southern region (Kandahar, Uruzgan, Zabul, Helmand and Nimroz), where over 164,000 people – 23,867 families (mainly from Helmand and Uruzgan provinces) were on the move. The peak months in the south were August and September, when more than 36,000 and 37,000 people, respectively, were on the move along with March (over 22,000) and October (over 20,000 people). More than a quarter of all those displaced in the south (46,000 individuals) were relocated from Tirinkot district of Uruzgan province (which saw a massive Taleban assault in September. Some remained displaced within the district, but over 22,000 individuals fled to Dand district of Kandahar province. Almost 30,000 people from Nad-e Ali district in Helmand province were displaced, and more than 17,000 of them fled to Lashakar Gah. In the southern region, the conflict seethed throughout the year, resulting in some level of displacement in almost every month of 2016 (the lowest recorded displacement was in June – 2,904 people – possibly related to Ramadan).

The west

The region seeing the third highest number of displacements was the west (Farah, Herat, Ghor and Baghdis). Here. 90,000 people (13,176 families) fled their homes. More than a half of them (around 51,000 people) fled from Farah district alone. While the majority remained displaced within district boundaries, around 11,000 moved to Herat district. However, the district of Farah also received people from the districts of Gullestan (around 2,000 people), Balabuluk (around 3,500 people) and Bakwa (a couple of hundred people). Over 56,000 people ­in the west fled in October 2016.

Annual displacement trends

2016 has been the highest year for IDP numbers ‘on record’, according to UNOCHA. This requires a word of caution; the records on the number of IDPs in the country prior to 2012 are scarce and unreliable. The estimated number of IDPs for the period 2001 to 2009, or earlier periods are patchy, variable and, for some periods, non-existent. A 2015 study by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC), which is part of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the leading source of information and analysis on internal displacement worldwide, offers a rough picture on IDP numbers in Afghanistan since 1978. According to the study, “by the mid-1990s more than 400,000 internally displaced people (IDPs) were living in camps near Jalalabad, Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat.” Following the Taleban’s rise to power in 1996, another million people were displaced. By 2002, according to IDMC, 1.2 million people had been displaced inside Afghanistan. The data for the period 2002 – 2010 are inconsistent and therefore not quoted.

A new increase in number of IDPs was noticed in early 2010; it coincided with ‘the surge’ in United States troops (an 33,000 extra were sent to Afghanistan) with the aim of defeating, or at least ‘degrading’ the Taleban. However, only after the UNHCR piloted a Population Movement and Tracking (PMT) mechanism “as a tool for live data assessments to enable appropriate tracking of the evolving situation of conflict-induced internal displacement in Afghanistan,” as explained in this UNHCR study in late 2011, have the displacement figures become more reliable. So what we can be certain of saying, is that 2016 saw the highest number of IDPs since 2011.

Between 2012 and 2014, the number of newly displaced persons remained below 200,000 per year (in 2012, 102,715; in 2013, 122,815; in 2014, 196,154). In 2015, the number of IDPs increased sharply with approximately 470,000 individuals on the move. “Between 2012 and 2014 there would be increases in displacement during the traditional summer fighting season,” Danielle Moylan, UNOCHA Public Information Officer told AAN, adding that “that has skewed in the past two years – with sharp increases seen in October, in 2015, due to [fighting and the fall to the Taleban of] Kunduz and, in 2016, due to [fighting in] Kunduz and Farah.” (For more in-depth analysis on Kunduz, see also 2016 AAN’s thematic dossier on insurgency and governance in Afghanistan’s northeast and 2015 AAN thematic dossier on the evolution of insecurity in Kunduz).

In mid-2016, it was already clear that the number of IDPs at the year’s end would have increased. Every week for the first six months of 2016, according to UNAMA, more than 6000 Afghans fled their homes, becoming IDPs. That was ten per cent more than in the first six months of 2015.

Trends noticed in the nature of the conflict, noted by UNAMA (see AAN reporting here). appear to be behind the surge in IDP numbers. In earlier years, the Taleban had been unable to mass fighters and menace urban centres because they were vulnerable to international air power. After international troops drew down to a largely non-combat mission at the end of 2014, the insurgents have been able to change tactics and have moved from using IEDs and assassinations to launching ground offensives. The impact on civilians has been clear. Ground offensives have not only become the largest cause of deaths and injuries in the war, but have also forced greater numbers of people to flee their homes.

The real number of IDPs

IDPs tend to remain relatively close to their homes, moving from rural areas to the provincial capital (if it is safe) or to a neighbouring province (see UNAMA 2014 Civilian casualties report). They often also try to return home as soon as conflict is over. Some manage to flee for relatively short periods. However, hundreds of thousands of Afghans are now living in protracted displacement. In 2015, for example, out of a total 1.17 million IDPs in Afghanistan, an estimated 700,000 individuals had been in displacement since 2008 (see UNOCHA 2015 Strategic Response Plan). Those in prolonged displacement often end up in informal settlements. UNOCHA September 2016 update on IPDs highlighted how living conditions of those in prolonged displacement are often undignified and unhealthy, without access to healthcare, clean water or education for children.

The cumulative estimates, ie those in prolonged displacement, plus those newly displaced show that the number of IDPs grew rapidly as the conflict intensified. At the end of 2010, around 352,000 individuals were living as IDPs. By the end of 2012, that number had increased to 500,000 individuals and by the end of 2015, there were more than 1.17 million IDPS (see IDMC chart for the cumulative estimates of number of people in displacement between 2009 and 2015 available here). In mid-2016, according to UNAMA around 1.2 million Afghans had been displaced within the country’s borders. OCHA warned that some of those had been displaced since 2002.

Those who are newly displaced receive a basic aid package from the UN and/or NGOs (according to a UNOCHA count, 33 organisations are currently providing assistance to IDPs; see here). However, given the shortfall in funding for IDPs and the huge numbers of newly displaced, those who have been displacement for prolonged periods of time may face a reduction in the aid they receive. An increase in the total numbers of IDPs also indicates that those in prolonged displacement will find it more difficult to return home, due to intensified conflict across the country.

Conclusion

2016 was yet another difficult year for many Afghans. As well as the IDPs, more than 600,000 people have been pushed out from Pakistan this year (see AAN latest reporting here). Another 427,000 undocumented refugees and deportees from Iran were also recorded by UNOCHA – although caution needs to be exercised with the Iran numbers as, according to UNOCHA, many of the journeys are circular, ie Afghans cross the border multiple times to seek work and repeatedly get pushed back. UNOCHA says that around 10 per cent of these people are found to be in need of humanitarian assistance. More than quarter of a million Afghans travelled to Europe in 2015 and 2016 and many are now facing deportation or forced return to their country (for example, an estimated half of the 190,000 who had sought asylum in Germany) (see AAN reporting here). Along with the 580,000 newly displaced within Afghanistan, this all adds up to a total of 1.6 million Afghans who have experienced or are now facing some form of displacement in 2016.

The increase in the number of displaced due to conflict, coupled with a shortage in funding (the UN received 82 million USD in pledges against a target of 152 million USD), indicates that displaced Afghans are likely to be extremely vulnerable to poverty. For many displaced, the biggest issue, however, is whether and when they will be able to return home.

Edited by Sari Kouvo and Kate Clark

 

 

(1) For 2016, UNOCHA collected statistics on IDPs by conducting joint assessments (ie different humanitarian agencies jointly assess petitions and make visits) throughout the country. These assessments are logged into a database. In previous years, this was the task of UNHCR.

In 2015, IDMC pointed out that “the figures tend to be underestimates, because they do not include all IDPs living in urban areas, who are often dispersed among economic migrants and the urban poor and so are difficult to identify.” The study also emphasised that figures “also exclude IDPs in inaccessible areas across all regions. Nor is data available on former refugees unable to return to their places of origin with which to determine whether they should be considered IDPs.” See IDMC study available here.

 

 

 

Americas

• Boeing will manufacture and deliver 51 Lot 90 Harpoon weapon systems for Brazil, Egypt and South Korea. Valued at $207 million, the contract was issued by the US Navy, and also includes components and spares for the governments of Japan, Australia, Thailand, India, United Arab Emirates, Oman, Kuwait, and Taiwan. The anti-ship missile system is utilized by navies and air forces in over 30 countries.

• The first production conforming Textron AirLand Scorpion jet has made its maiden flight. Lasting one hour 42 minutes, the flight saw pilots perform a range of maneuvers, with the company saying that the aircraft “incorporates a number of improvements based on target customer feedback.” While the Scorpion had been seemingly dismissed as a potential offering in the USAF’s upcoming T-X trainer program, company officials said last week that they still haven’t ruled themselves out of the competition, just weeks away from the expected request for proposals (RFP).

• Contracts have been awarded to Lockheed Martin for $1.4 billion worth of Patriot advanced capability production. The foreign military sales deal will see the delivery of 205 missile segment enhancements for the governments of South Korea, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. The agreement also includes associated ground support equipment for the missiles.

Middle East & North Africa

• Battleground testing of 162 new and upgraded weapons by Russian military forces in Syria has revealed that 10 of these had flaws that had been missed during trials. The Defense Ministry said that it has stopped procurement of these weapons and their manufacturers have been ordered to fix the flaws. Among the systems tested in Syria were Su-30SM and Su-34 fighter jets, Mi-28N and Ka-52 helicopters, and Kalibr cruise missiles.

Europe

• Local Polish firm Mesko will provide the Piorun Man-portable air-defense system (MANPADS) to the Polish military, as Warsaw’s beefing up of its air-defense capabilities continues. $220 million has been set aside for the acquisition, which will include a total of 1,300 missiles and 420 missile launchers. Meanwhile, plans are moving forward for Lockheed Martin to produce and deliver Joint Air-To-Surface Standoff Missiles Extended Range (JASSM-ER) for the Polish Air Force’s F-16 fighter jets. Polish F-16s will also be equipped with new AIM-120 (AMRAAM) and AIM-9X Sidewinder missiles.

• Rheinmetall and BAE Systems have both been awarded contracts as part of the Challenger 2 Assessment Phase for the UK government. Each company will receive $28 million in order to conduct technical studies with the Challenger 2 Main Battle Tank to produce digital models to determine appropriate upgrades for the legacy vehicles. In use with the British armed forces since 1998, the Challenger 2 Life Extension Project will upgrade the vehicle with the latest technology to make it available for operations until 2035.

Asia Pacific

• Japanese government and industry are vying for the sale of Mitsubishi-built air defense radar systems to Thailand. Competitive bids are expected to be solicited early next year, as Bangkok looks to upgrade and add to older European and US-built radars. If selected, the sale would mark the first Thai-Japanese military hardware sale. Tokyo is looking to push for stronger ties with Thailand, partly to counter the growing influence of China in southeast Asian, as relations between old ally the US and Thailand have been strained following a military coup in 2014.

• The Pakistan Army will receive four Mi-35 Hind E attack helicopters from Russia in 2017. Islamabad has paid $153 million in the deal, signed in August 2015, bringing to an end a self-imposed Russian ban on military exports to the country. Once wary of potential Indian protests at such a sale, Moscow now plans to sell as many as 20 of Mi-35s to Pakistan over the next few years.

Today’s Video

Pharewell F-4 Phantom II:

Sarajevo and Kabul lie over 4,000 kilometres apart. One feature that connects the two cities, however, is that both were destroyed during civil wars in the last decade of the twentieth century. Earlier this year, when AAN’s co-director Thomas Ruttig visited Sarajevo and other parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia during a vacation, he came across some haunting images. At the same time, in an Ottoman mosque in Sarajevo as well as a former Sufi monastery near Mostar, he also found a bridge between them. Both regions, the Balkans and ‘Khorasan’, used to be at opposite poles of what was, over many centuries, the ‘Persianate world’ – that vast area that was shaped by both Persian language and culture. An AAN read for the Christmas and New Year holiday season (with input from Obaid Ali on Rumi’s verses and Jelena Bjelica on Balkan history).

At first glance, the Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina looks abandoned. There is a spray-painted wooden fence around it. Weeds grow on its external staircase. The façade of the whitish, modernist, concrete cuboid has been riddled with bullets. No wonder – it is not far from where many civilians were shot dead in Sarajevo’s so-called Sniper Alley during the four-year Serbian siege of the city, between 1992 and 1995. During this time, virtually all of the city’s infrastructure and much of its rich cultural heritage was destroyed.

We almost missed the museum itself, as well as the exhibition about the siege of Sarajevo on the its second floor. And that would have been a shame.

Sarajevo’s National History Museum. All photos in the text: Thomas Ruttig.

Three bicycles: not so distant wars

The Sarajevo museum’s exhibition speaks for itself. It is heart-wrenching in its simplicity, ­with leaflets and faded newspaper cut-outs, some with horrific photos of victims of the war as well as makeshift equipment used by its inhabitants during the siege (when water, electricity, transportation and other services had mostly been cut off and food only sporadically reached the city.) There’s an arrangement of how it would have looked in a small, bombed-out apartment, with laundry drying over a wood fire stove. (1)

There was a photo of a man, who, according to the caption, regularly cycled to visit the grave of a relative in one of the many makeshift graveyards that had to be dug in the besieged city between apartment blocks. It showed him standing in grief in the snow, his bicycle beside him. The original bike featured in the exhibition: the owner had donated it. Many other Sarajevans had also donated to the museum every day items used during the war.

We emerged from the museum in shock, as it had evoked so many flashbacks to Kabul, the city at the eastern end of the Persianate world (more about this below), from where we had just returned. But our thoughts were not only about Kabul. Images of our own, destroyed city of Berlin in World War II also came to mind, from stories told by my parents. Of my grandmother, for example, pushing her bicycle back home through the ruins, with potatoes or turnips in a bag she had bartered against her silver cutlery in the rural outskirts. She did not know when her husband would be back; he was a prisoner of war and worked in a coalmine in Belgium (he did return, but only four years after the war had ended. His fellow miners had treated him as one of theirs and had fed him.) Of my mother, nine years old in the last year of that war, and her mother, in a trek of refugees, cowering in a ditch in a field while low-flying planes fired shots at them. My father, the same age and always hungry in the last year of the war, crawling out of a basement shelter in Berlin in the middle of street-fighting with his grandfather, both with cobbler knives, to a horse dying in the street, in order to snatch a piece of meat. I later grew up in that same street.

After leaving the exhibition, I could not help but think: how could something like this have happened in Europe at the end of the twentieth century? But, as both authors and readers of AAN know, it can and does still happen in many places. It really does not matter whether it is in Sarajevo or in Kabul or Kunduz. It does not matter whether the people who are forced to live in abject conditions due to war (often without the most basic of services), who face the daily threat of being maimed or killed, are from Europe, Asia or elsewhere.

The picture of the bicycle would come back to us once more in Sarajevo, in another exhibition in a small gallery as part of a local festival (2). It was entitled “After Enduring Freedom” and exhibited works of Kabul-based Australian photographer Andrew Quilty. When we found out about it, we knew we did not want to miss it, either.

Andrew Quilty’s photo exhibition in Sarajevo.

This photo of a bicycle was rather unspectacular at first glance: the bike was muddied and leaning against a wall in a village just outside Kunduz. Quilty had taken the photo while he was documenting the US air attack that destroyed a clinic run by Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in the city on 3 October 2015, during a two-week Taleban takeover of the city, visualising this event for many people around the world (AAN analysis of this episode here). The bicycle in the photo belonged to an Afghan man named Baynazar Muhammad Nazar, 43, who had worked as a security guard in Kunduz. He was killed on the operating table while undergoing surgery for a bullet wound in his leg that he had sustained during the attack. This attack has not yet been investigated satisfactorily and might still amount to a war crime.

Afterwards, Quilty had returned to Kunduz and Nazar’s family. He described this, and the story of Nazar’s death, in detail for Foreign Policy magazine. It ends with a scene where Nazar’s wife and children visit his grave, and one daughter’s heartbreaking remarks: “Father, we washed your bicycle — please wake up — you can come home now.” (Here is a photo of Nazar still alive, reproduced by Quilty.)

A mosque in Sarajevo

Fortunately, there are many older, more positive features that connect Sarajevo – and Bosnia as part of the western Balkans in general – to the region that now contains Kabul and Kunduz, sometimes referred to as “Khorasan.” (3) These are the Persian language and culture. At one time, and for many centuries, it was so influential throughout that vast stretch of land that University of Chicago historian Marshall Hodgson (in his 1974 book, The Venture of Islam: The expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods) coined the term “Persianate world.” The Persian (Farsi) language, he wrote (4):

(…) served to carry a new overall cultural orientation within Islamdom. … Most of the more local languages of high culture that later emerged among Muslims … depended upon Persian wholly or in part for their prime literary inspiration. We may call all these cultural traditions, carried in Persian or reflecting Persian inspiration, ‘Persianate’ by extension.

Sabaheta Gačanin, author in a Turkish academic magazine, calls the Persian language a “civilisation bridge … lasting to this very day.”

Careva Džamija, the Emperor’s Mosque in Sarajevo.

 

Including to Sarajevo, for example, although there, the language has not been in use in everyday or even literary life for some 150 years. There, on the left bank of the River Miljacka, which divides the city, is Careva Džamija, the Emperor’s Mosque, or Bakrbaba Mosque in Turkish. (It is not far from Latinska ćuprija, the Latin Bridge, where, on 28 June 1914, the Bosnian nationalist student Gavrilo Princip killed Austro-Hungarian heir apparent Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which helped trigger World War I.) In the mosque’s yard lies the türbe (the Turkish word for tomb, which, in Persian, would be turbat and in today’s Dari and Pashto, ziarat) of Hadži Hafiz Halid [Khaled] Effendi Hadžimulić (1915-2011) that has – to my surprise – a Persian-language inscription on its knee-high marble enclosure.

Part of the Persian inscription at Sarajevo’s Emperor Mosque.

 

ای دریغا پیش از این بودیم اجل

تاعذابم کم بدی اندر وجل

 

گوی آنجا خاک می بیختم

زین جهان پاک می بگریختم

 

چون از اینجا واری آنجا روی

در شکر خداوند شاکر شوی

 

The du’a:

رضینا بالله ربا” و بالاسلام دینا” و بمحمد صلی الله علیه و سلم رسولا” نبیا

 

Of Ottomans and Seljuqs: Speaking Persian in the Turkic empire

The mosque used to be in the heart of the city. At the beginning of the four hundred year-long Ottoman rule (1461-1878), this place was known as the At Maidan, or Hippodrome. Sarajevo itself was founded by the Ottomans, and its name derives from the Turkish word saray, as in caravan saray. The language the Ottomans used in much of their official business in those days, however, was Persian.

Persian was used because the Ottomans were the heirs of the Seljuqs. This Turkic tribal coalition from Central Asia had conquered Khorasan in the first half of the eleventh century, where they adopted the local Persian language spoken by a sedentary, partly well-educated Iranian population. (The Persian language is part of a larger family of Iranian languages to which many Afghan languages, such as Pashto, Dari, Balochi, Pashai and the Nuristani languages, also belong.) Thomas Barfield in Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton 2010) writes that the Seljuqs created

… states with dual organizations. Administration was placed in the hands of “men of the pen,” literate Persians speakers familiar with government, while military commands were allocated to “men of the swords,” tribal Turks and slave soldiers.

From there, they exported the practice of employing Persian speakers to other parts of the empire, including to Anatolia, which they conquered on their way westwards and which became known as the Sultanate of Rum (1037-1194). Henceforth they were called the Rum-Seljuqs. According to E J W Gibb, the author of the standard A Literary History of Ottoman Poetry, “Persian was the language of the court, while Persian literature and Persian culture reigned supreme.” Turkish remained the everyday language of the non-Iranian population of their empire, and Arabic the language of Islamic theology and law. The Persianate influence on Turkic intellectual life further increased during the thirteenth century, when, fleeing the Mongol invasion, many scholars, writers and poets from Persia came to the Seljuq empire.

The Ottomans, the Seljuqs’ successors, inherited the Persianate culture. They continued to patronise Persian literature for five and a half centuries, according to Ehsan Yarshater, director of the Centre for Iranian Studies at Columbia University, and extended the use of the Persian language to the areas of the Balkans they started conquering in the mid-fifteenth century. According to Austrian Bert Fragner, a leading Iranist, the Persianate world reached an “optimal state (…) in a rather constant spatial dimension” – namely, from the Balkans to Central Asia and India – from the fourteenth to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 

Ottoman graves in Sarajevo.

Hungarian scholar Iván Szántó has described how this worked in practice in the Ottoman Balkans:

The number of visitors and immigrants from Iran in the Ottoman Empire was considerable; it was also not uncommon to find people of Iranian origin in important positions in the Ottoman administration of Bosnia. In addition to that, Ottoman institutions often had a Persian imprint as a result of continuing contacts between Ottoman Anatolia and Safavid Iran. Recitations in Sufi dervish lodges of the Mevlevi and Bektashi orders, for instance, were often sung in Persian. Many well-educated Bosnians were proficient in the Persian language, as was reported with much admiration by the seventeenth-century Ottoman traveller, Evliya Çelebi (whose own mastery of Persian is testified by an autograph graffiti he left inside the now-destroyed Aladža Mosque of Foča [also in Bosnia]). So high was the prestige of this language that many local intellectuals felt compelled to study and compose Persian poetry or to write commentaries on Persian literature […]. It should be noted, however, that Iranian-born migrants were not necessarily ethnic Persians; more often they were Turkic-speaking Azeris […].

The passion for the Persian language among the Ottoman Turks and their local subjects in the Balkans is also reflected in their names. One of Sarajevo’s most famous historical personalities, the first native Muslim governor of Ottoman Bosnia (between 1521 and his death in 1541), had a Persian name: Gazi Husrev Beg (1480-1541); this is the Turkic spelling of Ghazi Khosraw Beg, Khosraw being the name of many famous ancient Persian emperors. He was the founder of Sarajevo’s most beautiful mosque, which is still named after him, the Gazi Husrev Beg Mosque. Similarly, the local waqf comprises a madrassa, a famous clock tower, an important library and a hospital. Together, they make up the most formidable complex of Ottoman architecture in Bosnia, if not the whole of the Balkans. The name of Husrev/ Khosraw Beg’s mother, a daughter of the Ottoman Caliph Bayezid II (who ruled from 1481 to 1512), was Seljuka. (5)

At the Gazi Husrev Beg mosque, Sarajevo

Rumi in Bosnia

In the Emperor’s Mosque in Sarajevo, on that quiet Ramadan day during our visit, the few worshippers present, as well as the janitor, thought the inscription on Hadži Hadžimulić’s tomb was Arabic. They did not know what it meant. But only one of the four verses was Arabic, a prayer (du’a): “we accept that Allah is our Lord, Islam is our religion and Muhammad (peace be upon him) is his messenger.”

As it turned out, the other three verses were in Persian, from Mawlana Jalaluddin Muhammad (1207-73)’s famous oeuvre, the 25,600 verses Mathnawi-ye Manawi (online here). Mawlana Jalaluddin is one of the most important poets in the Persian language and his Mathnawi, which teaches Sufis the path to God through true love of Him, is one of the most influential book, and not only for Muslims. Pointing to his place of birth in what is today Afghanistan, Jalaluddin is often given the takhallos Balkhi. However, he is also known as “Rumi“ (a reference to his grandfather, who, according to some sources, was called Hussain Rumi and, given this takhallos, might have been from further west, ie Anatolia, which is “Rum” in Arabic), or simply as “Mawlana.” As a young man, Mawlana went to Turkey with his father, who was a preacher, mystic and poet himself, and settled in Konya, then the capital of the Rum-Seljuq Turkish empire. There, he founded the Mawlawi (Turkish: Mevlevi) Sufi order, also known as the so-called Whirling Dervishes. (6)

It was the Sufi orders that, to a large extent, kept the Persian language alive throughout the Balkans for centuries. Apart from the Mawlawi Sufis, there was the Naqshbandiya, also prominent in Afghanistan. Its first members came to the Balkans in the fifteenth century, according to this 1975 study. In 1463, the first Sufi tekije (or lodge), that of Sheikh Musafer, was established in Sarajevo. Following a decline, the order was revitalised in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by murids of its Mujaddedi branch (see this 2008 MA thesis on the subject) – also known from Afghanistan. After the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, many Sufis in Yugoslavia migrated to Turkey. In 1952, the communist regime in Yugoslavia banned Sufi orders, but Sufism continued to be practiced underground. In the late 1990s, a revival followed. The Naqshbandiya is still the largest Sufi order active in today’s Bosnia.

Blagaj: Sufi poets and warrior-dervishes in the Balkans

An Iranian shop-owner whom we encountered in Sarajevo’s bazaar quarter of Bašcaršija, and who fetched his nai and tambourine to sing Rumi verses for us one evening, told us to visit the Sufi tekije (monastery) in Blagaj. This is a small town near the city of Mostar, where the famous Ottoman-era Old Bridge was destroyed during the Bosnian war (1992-95), and rebuilt afterwards. He also mentioned the name of one Fawzi Mostari (or Fevzi Mostarac in Bosnian, born between 1670 and 1677, died 1747), who, he said, had still been writing poetry in “pure Persian.” We found a 2011 bilingual (Bosnian/Persian) version of his major work, Bulbulistan, published by the Cultural Centre of the Iranian Embassy to Bosnia. Bulbulistan means “The Book of Nightingales.” (This bird features prominently in Persian-language literature, not only because of its sweet song, but also because its Persian name, bulbul, rhymes with gul, flower.)

Following the Iranian shopkeeper’s advice, we went to Blagaj, where the local Buna River springs from a cave in a 200 metre-high cliff, which reminded me of the Silk Gorge (Tangi-ye Abrishom) between Kabul and Sarobi. The monastery in Blagaj was built by the Sufis of the Bektashi order around 1470. The lover of bulbuls, Mostari (who was born there), was inspired by the classical Persian literature of Rumi, Saadi, Jami and others that constitute a central part of the Sufi philosophy.

Former sufi monastery of Blagaj.

 

Mostari studied Persian in the Ottoman capital of Istanbul. There he joined the Sufi order of the Mawlawis founded by Rumi/Balkhi and, at its Dar ul-Masnawi (“House of Masnawi”), wrote his own masterpiece, the Bulbulistan, in 1739, according to Džemal Ćehajić, a Bosnian scholar, who contributed a short biography of Mostari to a 2011 reprint of the Bulbulistan funded by Iran.

Both the title and form of Bulbulistan are reminiscent of, and indeed may have been a conscious reference to, Sa’adi’s famous collection, the Gulistan (The Rose Garden), from thirteenth century Iran. Cultural historian Amila Buturovic describes compares Mostari’s work as a “comprehensive, didactic medley of poetry and prose animated by the rich heritage of Persian poetry (…), but with a distinct touch by his Bosnian author” (here, p 29). Gačanin (quoted above) points out that “many authors in Bosnia and Herzegovina wrote poetry and fiction in the Ottoman, Arabic and Persian languages [who] had their models among the Persian classic poets.” But, he adds, Mostari with his Bulbulistan was “the only Bosniak who wrote an independent literary work (…) in Persian.”

In a shrine on the monastery compound in Blagaj, there are two wooden coffins covered with flags, containing the remains of two holy men.(7) In the case of the first, Shaikh Ačik Paša, a Bektashi also known as Muhammad Hindi, his name speaks for itself. He was either from India, or had spent time there. As for his companion, the plaque outside the room where the graves lie, says: Sari Saltuk, also known as Muhammad Bu[k]hari, from the “Turkistan region [of] [K]Horasan (…), one of the bravest Alperen [an old Turkish word for “hero”, similar to Ghazi] dervish” who “left his country with 700 followers” and took part in the Ottoman conquest of Anatolia and Rumelia (today’s Balkan peninsula). He was buried in Blagaj aged 93. It appears that he came all the way to Bosnia from the Holy City of Bukhara, in Khorasan.

The Sufi graves in the Blagaj monastery.

Libraries under fire

Over the last centuries of the existence of the Ottoman empire, which collapsed at the end of World War I, the Persian language had gradually lost its importance there. The Persianate world became a lot smaller. In the Balkans, much of its cultural heritage was destroyed during the wars of the 1990s – as was the case in Afghanistan, at the other end of the Persianate world.

During the 1992-95 siege of the Bosnian capital, with its destruction and tens of thousands killed, the Sarajevo Oriental Institute was also shelled. Its large collection went almost completely up in smoke after Serbian artillery hit it during the night of 17 May 1992, only two months after the war and the siege started. Of its 5,263 works – with handwritten manuscripts in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew and alhamijado (Bosnian Slavic in Arabic script), including Qurans and collections of Hadiths, of Sufi and other poetry, covering the eleventh to the early twentieth centuries – as few as 53 manuscripts survived. The former Ottoman provincial archives met the same fate. (More background on the destruction in this article.)

Yet the Persianate legacy, spiritual, written and architectural, can still be found. Another collection of manuscripts survived, sheltered in the stone vaults of the library in Husrev/Khosraw Beg’s sixteenth century madrassa. Sufi Islam is reported to be the main form of Islam practiced in many parts of the Balkans. In Sarajevo, a new tekije was inaugurated in 2013, and Persian is studied in academic circles, still providing a “civilisation bridge.” While much of Afghanistan is increasingly out of reach to visitors due to the deteriorating security situation, anyone travelling to the Balkans can still see its legacy.

 

 

(1) A similarly heart-wrenching rendering of the siege in prose form can be found in Miljenko Jergović, Sarajevo Marlboro, Penguin 1997.

(2) The festival also featured the well-known film ”Frame By Frame“ by Alexandria Bombach & Mo Scarpelli and ”Watani – My Homeland“ by Marcel Mettelsiefen, a German photographer who documented, together with then- Stern reporter and occasional AAN contributor, Christoph Reuter, the German bombing of two oil tankers, also in Kunduz province, in 2009, that killed almost a hundred civilians (more about this here).

(3) Khorasan, originally, refers to the region which is now northeastern Iran, Afghanistan north of the Hindukush mountains and parts of Central Asia, up to the Iaxartes River (Syr Darya), also known as Mawara an-Nahr, or Transoxiana, the Oxus being the historical Greek name for the Amu Darya. The use of the term has frequently been extended to all of Afghanistan and adjacent areas of Pakistan, as they are known today.

(4) Quoted via Wikipedia.

(5) There was also another Ottoman governor of Sarajevo with a Persian-sounding name, Siyavus[h] Pasha, who, in his time, around one and a half centuries after Ghazi Khosraw, endowed a waqf in 1580-81 to erect a large guesthouse (han). This was for the poorer members of Sarajevo’s Jewish community. He was also granted permission for the construction of the city’s first synagogue.

(6) There is a heated controversy about who ‘owns’ Balkhi/Rumi/Mawlana. Turkey (he is buried in Konya) and Iran have jointly – without Afghanistan – applied to register his work as their joint heritage with the UN’s “Memory of the World.”  This sparked outrage in Afghanistan. The governor of Balkh province, Atta Muhammad Nur, urged the Afghan ambassador to the UN to protest against this “imperialistic” step. Atta had already erected a monument in the poet’s honour in his capital Mazar-e Sharif. The city’s recently upgraded airport also carries the poet’s name: Mawlana Jalaluddin Balkhi International Airport.

On the other hand, Balkhi/Rumi’s assumed birthplace in Afghanistan – the khanaqa of his father – lies in a dilapidated state and is poorly protected by a simple fence (a photo in this article).

(7) As so often is the case, there are several locations that claim the authentic grave of the Sufi is theirs (see here, p 50). An Afghan example is the rauza, the Grand Mosque, of Mazar-e Sharif.

 

 

 

 

 

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