We are abandoning Afghan women | A request for more help and rescue

A women’s rights activist in Afghanistan sent me a message: “I’m alive, I don’t know for how long. I have received many similar messages from women across Afghanistan and also from women’s rights groups working on the ground.

I have a friend’s daughters who stay with me during the holidays: they are 7, 10 and 14 years old. The 14-year-old is lounging in baggy jeans and a t-shirt that reveals her young belly as she types her phone and sends selfies to her classmates. The girls sit down to read books, ask for money to run to stores, and argue over who is going to use the seemingly top red controller to play video games. I sit in a corner, carefully browsing the hundreds of emails that arrive in my inbox.

They send me hundreds of scanned documents of women and children in Afghanistan, ID photos staring at me while the speeches of girls who love their freedom echo around me. I try to explain to them that I am trying to get women and children out of Afghanistan because they can marry them against their will, because they maybe cannot go to school, that they always have to ask a man’s permission to be who they are … and these girls stare blankly at me, unable to conceive of such a thing.

I don’t know if I will be able to help everyone who comes to me with hope. Currently, the UK Afghan Assistance and Resettlement Policy (PFRA) does not include Afghans and their dependents who are at high risk of persecution due to the activism of their wives. and human rights. I look at the diagrams of other countries and try to find other options; those of some of our allies, such as Canada, seem more hopeful. Will the UK surely follow and prioritize these women?

This is why I subscribe to the call of the The independent for the British government to increase the number of refugees able to leave Afghanistan. The current proposal does not meet the scale of the challenge. I mean, surely we had a plan, before we retired, for the obvious threat to women and those we worked with to improve women’s rights. Surely no government worth its salt would have taken a step that clearly posed a clear and immediate threat to women in a country without having an adequate plan specifically for women’s safety.

It is certain that any country which would have professed its commitment to the education of girls and used the freedoms granted to women as a justification for its actions for so long, would have had a clear and organized plan, with charities on the ground. and local agencies to assess the risk. situation of Afghan women. I asked Foreign Minister Dominic Raab and Defense Secretary Ben Wallace to send me the copies of the assessments they did on women’s safety in their planning, and also send me the details of what they have in place to at least mitigate the risk. I look forward to reading the detailed analysis and strategy for women’s security that, of course, any decent government that has been in a country for so long would surely have undertaken. Surely, because we never forget the experiences of women in politics, right?

It seems that the women in Afghanistan were collateral damage that none of the governments involved even considered when they decided to withdraw. I was surprised that when Donald Trump started the pullout he didn’t consider the outcome for the female of the species. I would have thought that Joe Biden and our own government could have thought more about it. Well yes it can be difficult for women and girls for a while but don’t worry the Taliban have said that everything will be fine. So now we’re hoping the girls of Afghanistan will depend on their own Super Smash Bros to defend their rights, except they don’t have a brightly colored controller to help them out.

We are where we are now. Afghan women cannot afford time to despair. Action is what is needed. In addition to making the resettlement of women, as well as women’s rights activists and workers, a clear priority, we must prioritize the needs and rights of Afghan women and girls in all actions taken in response to the situation. . Together with the United Nations, we must ensure that Afghan women and girls are involved in shaping any humanitarian response. We must encourage neighboring countries to keep borders open for evacuations and facilitate assistance, including support for shelters and gender-based violence services for women and their families who cannot flee.

We seem to have forgotten the experiences of women and girls in planning this troop withdrawal; we must not forget them in the future. Boris Johnson and Joe Biden can talk about the responsibility that ends with them. Waste! In reality, the responsibility lies with Afghan women, who will in fact bear the brunt of their decisions. I guess it’s easier to handle a weight if you always have someone else carry it.

Of The independent From Great Britain. Special for Page12

Translation: Celita Doyhambéhère