Katharine Quarmby lays bare the gap between rhetoric and reality in the Government’s Afghan Citizens’ Resettlement Scheme
The new Minister for Afghan Resettlement wrote to all MPs and peers this week, updating them on ‘Operation Pitting’ – the UK’s Afghanistan evacuation programme.
In the letter – which Byline Times has seen – Victoria Atkins said that the Government has pledged to “welcome our new Afghan friends warmly to our country, and to develop the Afghan Citizens Resettlement Scheme” and thanked those who helped evacuate the people most vulnerable to attack because they have “worked with the British Government”.
However, these warm words do nothing to comfort the many individuals left behind, as Atkins acknowledges. With no UK consular support in Afghanistan remaining, all that the Home Office is able to do now is to log the cases received. The stark reality for those who didn’t make it out, who were involved with international organisations and governments, is that all help has effectively ceased.
The chaos, confusion and desperation of the current situation was laid bare in the past few days when the Ministry of Defence apologised for a “data breach” that inadvertently exposed the details of more than 250 Afghan interpreters and others who worked with British forces, many of whom are currently in hiding in Afghanistan whilst their applications to come to the UK are being processed. The email revealed names and even pictures of some of the applicants.
But many others cannot even get to the application stage, despite arguing that they are eligible for support.
One of those is Alex (not their real name) who is currently in Kabul. They were a senior civil servant in Afghanistan and is married with young children. “For the first week, I did not go out but I had to get food for the family so I have gone out this week,” they told Byline Times. “I have been asked several times what was my previous job and I have had to lie. I did not mention that I worked with the Government. I have been called in by the Taliban for questioning twice.”
Alex’s situation is particularly perilous because of their Hazara ethnicity. “There are around 80 very visible Hazara people, including me, who had senior positions before the fall of Kabul,” they said. “For the moment, the Taliban strategy is not to touch us, but once the international community has recognised the Government, the Taliban will identify people like me and kill us, one by one.”
Their children, although young, are terrified whenever Alex goes out and their partner can hardly move for fear. “My spouse has no motivation any more, and my son says to me when I go out ‘the Taliban kills the fathers and Daesh kills the children’ and begs me not to go out,” they told Byline Times on a secure line.
The family hides all of their documents, particularly education certificates in case of house to house searches, moving them from place to place regularly. Alex, who has worked in the migration sector with several governments and many international agencies, says that they have sent “more than 100 emails to country directors, governments, organisations I have worked with but they say because I did not work with them directly as a driver or interpreter, because I was a Government employee, they cannot support me. They relied on people like me to do their work in Afghanistan. But now they have deserted me.”
Western Evasion
Dr Liza Schuster, a sociologist at City University, London, has spent most of the past decade conducting fieldwork in Afghanistan. She has known Alex and their work for many years.
“They worked for the Afghan Government for 20 years, on a number of projects financed, designed and driven by foreign governments yet they have all washed their hands of responsibility for Alex,” she told Byline Times. “Pontius Pilate keeps popping up in my head. This was somebody who never took bribes, who tried to help their country and who believed in democracy.
“They were committed to the agenda set by the EU but the EU shrugs and says it is not a state and cannot help. Alex is not just at risk because they worked for the Government, but also because they are Hazara Shia and so incredibly vulnerable on many levels. Yet not a single European country is willing to take them on.”
Dr Schuster and a group of other academics with connections to the country have been working since mid-August with networks of academics and activists to get people out. All have been inundated with emails from individuals they know in Afghanistan, all of whom are in desperate straits. But Dr Schuster told Byline Times that they keep running into “intransigence of governments and their bureaucracies”.
“Every step I take will be blocked by European governments,” she said. “I’m so angry with the UK Government but also with the European Union, which should be loudly telling European countries, ‘we have a responsibility to the people who have worked with us’.”
The faint support from the international community is increasingly obvious. The European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen recently reiterated that the EU supports Afghan citizens – yet an internal document from the European Commission leaked to Statewatch, which monitors civil liberties in Europe, suggests that the bloc is seeking to return rejected Afghans to other third countries outside of Europe.
Some countries seem particularly eager to do so. The Austrian interior minister, Karl Nehammer, has suggested that if it is not possible to deport Afghan migrants whose asylum request had been rejected, deportation centres should be set up in neighbouring countries. A Taliban spokesman countered this by saying that the new Government would accept deportees – adding chillingly that they would be taken to court when they arrived.
Governments and international organisations are partly able to swerve responsibility for admitting people like Alex because of what Dr Schuster calls the “neo-liberal structure” of development aid, whereby the EU and other international bodies employ private and not-for-profit organisations to implement policies designed by the EU and its member states. Both those organisations and governments can then say that they have only have responsibility for their direct employees, not the civil servants and others in Afghanistan who were tasked with implementing their work in the country.
The sub-contracting culture that funnelled aid to non-governmental organisations and to private companies in Afghanistan, partly because of state failure, has created a uniquely vulnerable cadre of Afghans like Alex, who worked with such organisations but not for them directly. They have no clear route out as a result.
The bitter legacy of foreign involvement in Afgh