Power to the People (3): Perspectives from Bamyan Author : Jelena Bjelica Published: 5 June 2016 Downloaded: 5 September 2018 Download URL: https://www.afghanistan-analysts.org/power-to-the-people-3-perspectives-from-bamyan/?format=pdf The TUTAP commission established by President Ghani following massive protests recently decided in favour of the Salang route for a north-south power line. The commission ruled further that Bamyan should get its own 220KV power line by 2019. This is a balanced solution in the midst of crisis, meant to temper ethnic tensions that arose from speculation and political manipulation on the original routing of the power line. Some members of the protest movement have accepted the decision but still question whether it will be implemented; others continue to mobilise. AAN’s Jelena Bjelica and Thomas Ruttig report from Bamyan, with contributions from Ali Yawar Adili, on the issue of the power supply to the province, the national power grid, regional electrical power sharing and the spectrum of opinions throughout the province. Electricity-related protests are not a new phenomenon in Bamyan. Civil society activists from Afghanistan’s central highlands organised the first protest in 2009. Esmail Zaki, Coordinator of the Civil Society and Human Rights Network for the Central Region, told AAN that the first protest was held under banners depicting typical Hazarajat shrubs with the slogan, “Please save me.” Bamyan is not connected to a national grid and activists have warned of an inevitable environmental catastrophe should local people be forced to continue using scarce vegetation, such as shrubs and bushes, in a region already prone to erosion, as their basic source of fuel. Therefore, the protests not only reflected a genuine ‘desire for electricity’ but also concerns for the local environment. However, he said, development needs got mixed up with political demands, and “the people who claim they are the leaders of these [May 2016 TUTAP] protests are the same people we were protesting against in 2009.” Civil society networks in Bamyan province began to protest in 2009 because the province still had no reliable electricity supply, almost a decade into what was supposed to have been a reconstruction-oriented international intervention, that had brought in large amounts of investment. A 2011 Afghan government survey (1) found that “animal dung was the most common source of energy for cooking in Bamyan,” with 45.5 percent of households using it for 1 / 12 this purpose, followed by straw, shrubs or grass and wood. In three out of five households, domestic solar power panels usually attached to the roof of a house were most commonly used for heating and lighting. Dung cakes (chalma) are still widely used in rural areas of Bamyan, here stored in a cave. Photo: Thomas Ruttig. This situation changed for the better in January 2014, when a New Zealand-financed multi- million off-grid solar power project went online. (New Zealand led the Bamyan Provincial Reconstruction Team until April 2013 and the country continues to finance development projects in the province). With a 1 MW output, this is one of the largest off-grid solar systems in the world (for facts and figures about it see here). It originally supplied clean electricity 24 hours a day to 2,500 of the 3,500 households in Bamyan (with around 33,000 people, according to official Afghan data), businesses and government buildings, including schools and hospitals, in Bamyan’s New City and the towns of Haiderabad and Mulla Ghulam districts. The Norwegian government extended the system for an additional number of households in 2015. However, while the off-grid solar panels are now providing a basic power supply to the provincial centre, it is still the only source of much-needed electricity to the province. AAN observed, while in Bamyan city, that electricity is not in fact available 24 hours a day; instead it runs from 6.00am to 11.00am and from 6.00pm to 11.00pm. A number of communities in and around the city still lack power (some people, mainly Tajiks and IDPs, still live in caves to the west of Bamyan city); and in the province’s outlying districts, the situation is, of course, much worse. Many people in Bamyan city complain about how expensive solar electricity is. While Kabul citizens pay 2 Afghanis for 1kV, in Bamyan the price is 16 Afghanis. In September 2015, Ghulam Haidar Sadiqi, the director of Da Afghanistan Bresha Sherkat (DABS), the state-owned electricity company, said that a provincial committee had fixed the rates because of the high 2 / 12 maintenance costs of the solar power system and its losses, including damaged batteries and solar panels. In 2016, Zaki’s civil society network organised five TUTAP-related protests. The protesters demanded that the route of a planned high voltage 500 kV transmission power line, linking the north of Afghanistan to the south, pass through Bamyan instead of the Salang Pass, as previously decided by the Karzai government in December 2013. They based their demands on statements by Hazara political party leaders in Kabul who referred to a study by a German consulting firm that seemed to favour the Bamyan route. In fact, however, the final decision was always to be taken by the Afghan government. The first of the renewed protests was organised in January 2016 when the network first learned about the TUTAP line not being routed through Bamyan province. During one of the protests, participants placed a giant alekain, a regionally popular kerosene (hurricane) lamp, on a pedestal in the middle of one of the city’s main squares, an artistic reminder for passers-by of the electricity issue. The alekain had also been chosen as the symbol of the TUTAP protest movement organised from Kabul (see an earlier AAN dispatch here). The protesters vowed to take the memorial down only when Bamyan’s electricity problems had been solved, and various representatives among local authorities and the provincial council, who had initially supported the protests, told AAN they did not mind the lamp staying. The commission’s recommendations and findings On 15 May 2016, Ghani established the national commission (known to the public as the TUTAP Commission) for reviewing the power line project; he particularly tasked its members to review the cabinet decision of 30 April 2016 to route the north-south power transmission line through the Salang Pass. Ghani also suspended the ongoing procurement process for the companies that would construct the power line. The establishment of the commission, the day before the large protests in Kabul and Bamyan of 16 May 2016 that had already been announced, was intended to preempt the protests, but they were held anyway. The latest protest took place on 29 May 2016 in the provincial capital, but only 60 people – mainly women – gathered at ‘lamp square,’ to reiterate their demand that the main TUTAP power line be routed through Bamyan. It was a protest against the TUTAP power line commission’s ruling made in favour of the Salang route five days earlier on 24 May 2016. Many protesters, not aware of the 2013 decision, saw the commission’s decision in favour of the route through the non-Hazara Salang region as discrimination against the Hazara population. The commission’s report presented a balanced solution meant to calm the ethnic tensions that had flared up in Kabul and the central region. The fact that the body was looking at an already approved and financed project, however, left little room for manoeuvre, as changes would have required relaunching the entire project, with new surveys, environmental studies and project documents, delaying the implementation considerably. (2) 3 / 12 The commission, led by Dr Muhammad Humayun Qayumi (an engineer and professor who currently serves as the president’s chief adviser on infrastructure and technology and is the head of the influential Development Council established by Ghani), originally comprised of 13 members. It initially included six Hazaras of different political backgrounds (some also put the Ismaili leader’s son Mansur Naderi, Minister for Urban Development, in this group which would have given the majority of seven) to give the ethnic group that constituted the bulk of the protesters a significant voice. The six Hazara members appointed by Ghani were: Ahmad Behzad, MP from Herat, one of the protest leaders and in the group of those 31 MPs currently boycotting parliament (see this AAN analysis); Barna Karimi, a former deputy chief of staff during President Hamed Karzai’s administration, former deputy minister for policy with the Independent Directorate for Local Governance (IDLG) and Afghan Ambassador to Canada in 2012 and 2013; in 2015, he was Ghani’s first nominee for the post of Minister of Telecommunications but his nomination was rejected by parliament; Abdul Qayum Sajadi, a Ghazni MP in the Wolesi Jirga, founder of a Kabul-based think- tank, the Afghan Centre for Strategic Studies as well as editor-in-chief of Fajr-e Omid monthly and Guftaman-e Now, an academic quarterly journal; Assadullah Sadati, an MP from Daikundi province and chief editor of Musharekat weekly of Hezb-e Wahdat Islami-ye Mardom led by Khalili; he is also a member of the Enlightening Movement’s leadership council; Ustad Muhammad Akbari, a former mujahedin leader from Bamyan and the founder of Hezb-e-Wahdat-e Melli-ye Islami, MP for Bamyan; (3) Engineer Muhammad Nasir Ahmadi, CEO and founder of the company Omran Holding Group since 2004, a Hazara originally from Uruzgan. The other members appointed were former jihadi commander and MP from Parwan, Haji Almas Zahed, a Jamiati; the second deputy speaker of the Meshrano Jirga, Hasibullah Kalimzai, a Pashtun from Maidan Wardak province; two current ministers (Sayed Sadat Mansur Naderi, for urban development, son of the Baghlan Ismaili community leader; and Minister of Economy Abdul Sattar Murad, another Jamiati); Deputy Head of the National Security Council, Faizullah Zaki, an Uzbek close to Jombesh leader General Dostum; and finally former finance minister Hazrat Omar Zakhilwal, now Afghan ambassador to Pakistan.