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On August 30, just one day before the deadline for the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan, I sent a message to Parwana (pseudonym) on WhatsApp to see how she has been doing recently.
“No help for the time being…but so far we are all fine. I can at least walk around with a suitable headscarf and Mahram. [a male family member as a chaperone],” she replied with a hint of helplessness.
In the last few days of the evacuation work in the west, Parwana was scheduled to leave the Kabul airport by plane, but a last-minute malfunction prevented her from leaving. Young, educated, and employed by well-known international organizations, she is not alone. I have received hundreds of messages from Afghan women like her, who are worried about their future and desperately seeking to escape the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Since the Taliban entered Kabul on August 15, I have been leading a volunteer program of more than 200 members to help young Afghan women and their families. This idea came after several other former faculty members at the Asian Women’s University (AUW) in Bangladesh, where many Afghan women graduated, and I decided to try to help about 180 Afghan students and alumni who wanted to escape. Since we initiated this work, I have been keeping in touch with other Afghans who are eager to leave.
Before the August 31 deadline, Western governments sent a large number of Afghans and foreign citizens—in fact, more than 114,000.
But even now, out of frustration that the official “West” has failed to fulfill its duty to save those who should leave Afghanistan, many people from different backgrounds continue to make private efforts to evacuate more. Many unfortunately Afghan women have written countless e-mails and WhatsApp messages to Western governments and organizations, boasting how enthusiastic they are to help Afghan women. However, the answer is often silence. Despair prevails among the forgotten.
This is typically the case of Farzana (she asked me not to use her surname), and she is in a dilemma like many Afghans. As an employee of Welthungerhilfe (WHH), a large German non-governmental organization, she contacted me by knowing my sister. Farzana is worried about her life. She said that she asked Welthungerhilfe to evacuate in mid-August, but did not receive any updates within two weeks.
On September 1, I felt it necessary to write an urgent email to the WHH Human Resources Office on her behalf, and received a reply on September 7 one week later, requesting a “certificate [Farzana’s] WHH’s work” as if they had no record of the people working for them in Afghanistan. Germany announced on August 16 that it was evacuating 500 Afghan employees of “NGOs like Welthungerhilfe”, but apparently WHH has never Convey information to people like Farzana.
After receiving my email request, WHH referred her to the German government for special visa approval, but without any instructions on how to reach the nearest German diplomatic mission, her passport could be stamped. Although German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas declared on August 30 that Uzbekistan would allow Afghans travelling to Germany to enter, Falzana told me that the German Embassy in Qatar responded to her email on September 13. Said that Berlin is actually still “working”. Make arrangements with Afghanistan’s neighboring countries.” She stayed in Kabul, unable to decide what to do next.
This endless slow bureaucratic hell is killing many Afghans who have close ties to the West. Their bodies are not like those of the Taliban, but slowly with inner anxiety. They live in pain every day because they struggle to accept the cruel reality: instead of waiting for promised help that will never come, it is better to make other plans.
The official escape options for the remaining Afghans are sadly flawed and nearly absurd. In mid-August, both Britain and Canada hyped up the resettlement plan for Afghans. However, John, a British volunteer in our group, spent a day and a half trying to call the British government’s special hotline for Afghan refugees, but received a pre-recorded message indicating that the phone number was not actually prepared for Afghan refugees. A media report on the same hotline stated that some callers were even redirected to a washing machine company.
As for Canada, a government source told us a week after the widely publicized announcement about the acceptance of 20,000 “vulnerable Afghans” that the press release preceded the actual plan, so there were no clear details to share.
On August 17, India also generously provided Afghans with a special “electronic emergency X-Misc visa.” This sounds good, except for an Afghan I know who didn’t receive it after applying. In fact, Indian media The Wire reported that Afghans who successfully obtained this special visa were “almost negligible.”
The United States has also announced that it will provide Afghans with special immigrant visas (SIV) or priority designation as refugees, but it seems that only those who have fled the country will benefit immediately. As early as June 2020, an internal report of the U.S. State Department estimated that the average waiting time for Afghan SIV applications was “480 days.” The processing of one of these “priority designations” does not actually start until the applicant is outside Afghanistan.
Zahra (pseudonym) was lucky. Before the fall of Kabul, she and her husband came to India on medical visit visas and were able to survive the ongoing turmoil. She is eligible for the U.S. Department of State’s level 2 refugee designation, but requires a recommendation from her NGO employer in the U.S. So far, she has been obstructing her request (they even directly told her to stop contacting them). She asked me not to disclose the name of the employer because she was worried that if she made it public, they might delay punishment for her longer.
If one stays silent, it doesn’t seem to be different: many Afghan women contact me saying that their email requests for help from Western employers are often ignored.
The usually self-exaggerated mission statement of the international development department about helping people build a better life or shape a better world does not seem urgent when it comes to the situation of local employees in Afghanistan. When these organizations can’t even help their employees, it’s hard to believe that they really help anyone.
The United Nations, whose mission is to respond to such crises on the ground, is also not as effective. The families we contacted who entered Baluchistan in Pakistan in late August told us that they discovered that the local UNHCR office in Quetta was closed for unknown reasons. Quetta is the first major city to enter Pakistan from the Spin Boldak-Chaman border crossing. This Afghan refugee hotspot does not have a functioning UNHCR office for refugee registration is meaningless, but several other Afghans were also in early September. The report stated that they could not use the services of UNHCR’s Quetta office.
A local contact told me that the United Nations may succumb to “political pressure” from the Pakistani government. The Pakistani government fears that too many Afghans will arrive and has begun to expel Afghans who it considers to have entered the country “illegal”.
However, this does not prevent UNHCR or other UN branches from using the Afghanistan crisis to raise funds. “The UNHCR is providing life-saving care and protection to families in need on the ground.” It may be true, but it does not seem to be so eager in Quetta. I complained about this situation to a friend who worked at the United Nations for a long time, and she didn’t sound surprised at all. “That’s why I said, don’t give money to the UN. This is worse than wasting it,” she sighed.
I am not saying here that the West needs to save anyone who wants to leave Afghanistan, but that the West should do the right thing for those who meet its criteria for emergency assistance, especially educated women.
AUW, which we have been trying to help its students and alumni, is a recipient of a large amount of Western aid.
Although 148 Afghan students and alumni managed to leave Kabul on the last two U.S. evacuation flights, the university’s bragging assertion of the rescue did not mention the fact that about two dozen are still in Afghanistan and many more are in neighboring countries. . They all face countless dangers for various reasons, from having a feminist activist as a mother to not having a stable legal status. They don’t want the world to forget them, even if the university seems to have done so.
Among them, Somaya Ahmady (Somaya Ahmady) spent her dwindling funds on accommodation in a hotel in Kabul on our recommendation to save money. Her home is in the remote city of Herat. She told me that a distant relative who had joined the Taliban forced her to marry him, so she ran away with her mother’s blessing.
“I work hard to achieve my goals through higher education. Now I have no hope of continuing. The only plan is to find a way to escape Afghanistan so that I can [stay] Alive,” she said.
The organization in Afghanistan told me that the prime minister of AUW is Cherie Blair, the wife of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It has not given them an official update or responded to their emails for nearly a month. Finally, on September 24, the university held a Zoom meeting with them, only that they should wait “a few months” and did not provide an exact timetable. This is to be expected. It is just another international institution, and it does not take care of all the Afghan women it takes care of.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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