How int'l organisations are failing Afghan women
On August 30, just one day before the American deadline for withdrawal from Afghanistan, I messaged Parwana (not her real name) on WhatsApp to see how she was doing. "No help for now … but we are good so far. I can at least move around with a proper hijab and a mahram [a male family member as a chaperone]," she replied with a hint of resignation. Parwana had been due to leave on a plane out of Kabul airport in the last days of Western evacuation efforts, but a last-minute glitch prevented her departure. Young, educated and employed by a high-profile international organisation, she was not alone in her situation. I was receiving hundreds of messages from Afghan women like her, all fearing for their future and desperately seeking to escape Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
Since the Taliban entered Kabul on August 15, I have been leading a volunteer initiative consisting of more than 200 members to help young Afghan women and their families. The idea emerged after a few other former faculty members of the Asian University for Women (AUW) in Bangladesh, where many Afghan women have graduated, and I decided to attempt to assist some 180 Afghan students and alumnae who wanted to flee. Since we launched the effort, I have been in contact with other Afghans desperate to leave as well. Before the August 31 deadline, Western governments flew out a significant number of Afghans and foreign nationals - more than 114,000 in fact.
But even now, numerous people from various backgrounds are continuing private efforts to evacuate more, out of frustration that the official "West" has failed in its duty to rescue those who deserve to leave Afghanistan. Many of the unlucky are Afghan women who write countless emails and WhatsApp messages to Western governments and organisations that tout how keen they are to help Afghan women. The answer, though, is often silence. Despair reigns among the forgotten. Typical is the situation of Farzana (she asked me not to use her last name), who, like many Afghans, is in limbo. An employee of the large German NGO Welthungerhilfe (WHH), she reached out to me through her sister who knows me. Afraid for her life, Farzana said she had asked Welthungerhilfe for evacuation in mid-August and received no update for two weeks.
On September 1, I felt compelled to write an urgent message to the WHH human resources office on her behalf and received a reply one week later, on September 7, asking for a document that "proves [Farzana's] employment" at WHH, as if they had no record of who was working for them in Afghanistan. Germany had announced on August 16 that it was evacuating 500 Afghan employees of "NGOs like Welthungerhilfe" but obviously WHH never got the message across to people like Farzana.
After my email request, WHH referred her to the German government for special visa approval, but without any instruction as to how she might reach the nearest German diplomatic mission that would stamp her passport. Despite the grand claim by German foreign minister Heiko Maas on August 30 that Uzbekistan will allow entry to Afghans bound for Germany, Farzana told me the German embassy in Qatar replied to her email on September 13 that Berlin is, in fact, still only "endeavouring to make arrangements with Afghanistan's neighbouring countries". She remains in Kabul, unable to decide what to do next.
This kind of slow bureaucratic hell without end is killing many Afghans who have had close connections to the West, not physically as the Taliban might, but slowly with anxiety from within. They live each day in agony as they struggle to accept the hard reality: that it might be better to make other plans than to keep on waiting for the promised help that never comes.