| Submit your comments on this article |
| Afghanistan |
| Germany’s Afghan Betrayal |
| 2023-07-30 |
The set up: [LighthouseReports] The German government is rejecting its Afghan staff’s pleas for evacuation, despite its own development agency warning they face Taliban retaliationSee? Everybody’s doing it. Ugh. The German government is rejecting its Afghan staff’s pleas for evacuation, despite its own development agency warning they face Taliban retaliationFollowing the chaotic withdrawal of Western countries from Kabul in August 2021, Germany was quick to promise that it wouldn’t leave its local Afghan staff behind. Germany supported a vast number of development projects in Afghanistan and employed thousands of Afghan men and women to implement them. A few months after Kabul fell, a new German government took office with a pledge to ensure that endangered Afghan local staff could be “brought to safety through unbureaucratic procedures… We will not abandon our allies.” But two years later, in the latest instalment of our Left Behind series, an investigation by Lighthouse Reports, Süddeutsche Zeitung, WDR and NDR reveals that Germany is overlooking internal risk assessments carried out by its own development agency GIZ in order to turn away Afghan workers, some of whom have been beaten and tortured by the Taliban. Around 6,600 Afghans have applied to Germany’s relocation program for government workers now at risk in Afghanistan, known as Ortskräfteverfahren (OKV). Some 2,500 have been rejected and 700 are still awaiting a decision. The vast majority worked for GIZ, which directly employed around 1,000 Afghan local staff in 2021 and is estimated to have employed thousands more on temporary contracts. We verified the stories of 20 former GIZ contractors still in Afghanistan who have been threatened and in some cases physically harmed by the Taliban, who label them as “infidels” for having worked with Germany. We also found two cases of GIZ workers who were murdered by the Taliban in the year prior to the fall of Kabul. GIZ says there is no evidence that they were killed due to their work for the organisation, but their relatives and colleagues say they’re certain that they were killed because of their jobs. |
| Posted by:trailing wife |