August 15, 2021 is a date that’s etched in the memory of most Afghans. It was the day the Taliban took over Kabul’s Presidential Palace, thereby becoming the de-facto ruling government of Afghanistan.
For 30-year-old former Kabul resident Mansour Haidari, it is still a nightmare he finds hard to believe. Mr. Haidari used to work at one of Kabul’s well-known five-star hotels. “Nobody thought the Taliban would come back to power, especially after 20 years of seeing improvements in Afghanistan,” said Mr. Haidari from his Berlin home.
On April 14, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden announced that the complete withdrawal of U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan would be completed by August 31. The Taliban began to capture more Afghan territories from May onwards.
“When the Taliban took over Herat, that’s when people in Kabul got alarmed. At first, we thought this act of capturing territories was part of the U.S.-Taliban’s Doha peace negotiations. But when Mazar-i-Sharif was captured, Kabul residents realised that everything was over,” said Mr. Haidari. The day Kabul fell, recalls Mr. Haidari, the streets were empty of cars, there were massive lines outside banks as people wanted to withdraw money and very soon Afghan police were replaced by Taliban militants.
Entrepreneur Matiullah Rahmaty, 28, was still working at the startup incubator he founded in Kabul when the Taliban arrived. “As per the analyses I’d read, the soonest we expected the Taliban to reach Kabul was December 2021. But everything happened so fast that it left us confused,” said Mr. Rahmaty, who now lives in the North German city of Luebeck.
Both Mr. Rahmaty and Mr. Haidari left Afghanistan with their respective spouses within months of the fall of Kabul. They arrived in Germany via Abu Dhabi, where they stayed in a refugee camp as they finalised their paperwork and secured the right visa.
According to the UNHCR, more than 1.6 million Afghans fled their country following the Taliban takeover in 2021. Around 2% of those have been admitted in Germany.
Being a NATO member, Germany had a military presence in Afghanistan, mostly in the Northern parts of the country.
According to a source from the German Foreign Office, “Since admission procedures got under way, 30,000 affected individuals have been admitted to Germany. This group includes Afghans who worked for Federal Government institutions, as well as their family members. It also includes particularly at-risk Afghans who have been identified by the Federal Government with the help of civil society.”
On October 17, 2022, Germany announced a special Federal Admissions Programme to take in 1,000 Afghan refugees per month. The programme is applicable only for Afghans living in Afghanistan and the individuals would be recommended to the German government by ‘registration-authorized bodies’ such as NGOs. Mathematically speaking, there should have been 9,000 Afghans in Germany under this programme by now, but that’s not the case.
Clara Beunger, a German member of Parliament from the left party (Die Linke) and the spokesperson for refugee and legal policy, calls the German government’s handling of the refugees a disaster. She notes that high-ranking military, political and academic activists had warned of Taliban revenge attacks since May 2021, but little heed was paid.
Kabul Luftbruecke (translating to Kabul Airlift) is a civil society organisation that helped Mr. Haidari escape Afghanistan. It has also helped evacuate over 3,500 Afghans to neighbouring countries as well as via charter flights to Germany.
There were three phases of evacuations. The first was the military allocation where Afghans who worked closely with the German military and administration (known as Ortskräfte) were evacuated on military airplanes. This process was haphazard. When the new German coalition government came to power in December 2021, to streamline the process they began an interim evacuation process in March 2022, where Afghan individuals could apply to evacuate. This process was delayed as well. The final phase was the announcement of the Federal Admissions Programme in October 2022.
Role of NGOs
A source from Kabul Luftbruecke noted that the approach of the Federal Admissions Programme was not very practical as it left a majority of the heavy lifting –identifying people to evacuate, cross-checking their documents, co-ordinating with the government – with the NGOs.
“We see our role in advising the government and defining the criteria, but we never asked to be made the ‘gatekeepers’. Verifying applications is a time-consuming process. It isn’t feasible for NGOs to carry out the work that requires an entire government department,” said the source . The other criticism is that the programme isn’t flexible according to the changing situation on the ground.
When the Taliban came to power, it promised to uphold women’s rights within the framework of Sharia. But soon after, rights of women and girls were trampled upon. In 2022 itself, classes for teen girls were canceled immediately after schools began, it was mandatory for women to have a male guardian to accompany them outside the house, and a strict dress code for women was announced. In December 2022, women were barred from universities and working in NGOs. The male guardians would be punished if women broke the law.
Restrictions on women have not been taken into consideration in the Federal Admissions Programme. “The German Foreign Ministry postulates on feminist foreign policies, but then discards the very groups that are most vulnerable,” noted the source from Kabul Luftbruecke.
The source from the German Foreign Office noted that Germany regularly highlighted the human rights situation in Afghanistan in international fora such as the Human Rights Council of the UN. “We have strongly campaigned for the widening of EU sanctions on members of the Taliban regime who are responsible for restricting the rights of women,” said the Foreign Office.
Federal Admissions Programme
Ms. Buenger noted that the implementation of this programme has been delayed for months. “I am not aware of any entries under the programme to date. Only in the last few weeks have the first commitments been made.”
Samiullah Hadizada is an Afghan activist and a social worker with the Berlin Refugee Council. Mr. Hadizada helps Afghan asylum seekers in Germany with visa procedures, accompanies them when they need legal help, a home or even psychological support. Mr. Hadizada feels Germany has forgotten its promise with regard to the Federal Admissions Programme.
“It has been 10 months, but not a single person has been granted a visa for departure,” noted Mr. Hadizada.
In March 2023, the German government suspended the Federal Admissions Programme to do thorough security checking of applications after reports emerged of abuse of the application process. Ms. Buenger noted that this was followed by a right-wing campaign to question the admission process. These accusations were never proven. The admissions programme began again towards the end of June 2023. Only 3-5 applications were processed per day in June, as there was a huge backlog.
Germany does not have diplomatic ties with the Taliban regime. This makes paperwork within Afghanistan difficult. For Afghans who have a permission to fly to Germany, they still have to get an Afghan passport (which can cost anywhere from $700 to $1,200 for fresh ones) and a visa to reside in Pakistan which has additional costs. The German visa application process takes place in Islamabad.
“Persons who have been granted admission, receive assistance from the German government to leave for Pakistan. They also receive accommodation there for the period in which they go through the visa process,” said Ms. Buenger.
In Islamabad, the cost for German visa processing is paid by the German government.
From March to June 2023, when German visa processing was suspended, many Afghans who were eligible for the Federal Admissions Programme had to decide for themselves if they wanted to continue staying in Afghanistan or risk overstaying their visa in Pakistan. As per Kabul Luftbruecke, the German government also wasn’t supporting any exits from Afghanistan to Pakistan or Iran, as they wanted to clear the backlog of the suspended German visa applications of Afghans already present in these countries. As a result, thousands of Afghans were left in a limbo despite being eligible to enter Germany.
Even people leaving in 2021, had to undergo long wait times. Berlin-based Mr. Haidari, who was rescued by Kabul Luftbruecke, had to wait for three months in the refugee camp in Abu Dhabi, where he wasn’t allowed to leave the premises. “We weren’t treated well in Abu Dhabi. We were visited by German Embassy employees who were sympathetic to our situation. Our biometrics and photos were taken at the refugee centre and we got our visas to come to Germany in a few weeks,” said Mr. Haidari.
For Mr. Rahmaty, the entrepreneur from Kabul, the wait at the Abu Dhabi refugee centre was seven months.
Rigid regulations
Pro Asyl, Germany’s largest pro-immigration advocacy organisation, has criticised many aspects of the Federal Admissions Programme. Especially the requirement that only people living in Afghanistan can apply for the evacuation. “Many Afghans are so endangered by the Taliban that they have already fled to neighbouring countries. However, they do not have a long term residence permit there and cannot obtain it,” said a Pro Asyl spokesperson.
For many who have fled Afghanistan via illegal human trafficking routes and reached Germany, they have to go through the asylum registration process.
The first thing new refugee arrivals in Berlin have to do is to get themselves registered at the Arrival Centre located in a former psychiatric hospital complex in North-western Berlin. The official registrations only happen during working hours of the facility run by the State Office for Refugee Affairs Berlin (LAF). It’s an administrative body that does the registration, medical checkup, counselling and provides accommodation to the arriving refugees.
The asylum procedure-related interviews and document processing happens at the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF), which ultimately decides on whether to grant someone asylum or not.
Refugees from Ukraine
According to Destatis, “Net immigration from Ukraine in 2022 (+962,000) was higher than that from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq together in the period 2014 to 2016 (+834,000)”. As of April 2023, Germany took in 1.06 million Ukrainian refugees.
One line of argument often heard in the media is that the admission of refugees from Ukraine had delayed the admission process for Afghan refugees. “I consider this to be an invalid excuse. If priorities had been set accordingly, it would have been possible to implement the Federal Admissions Programme in parallel. Overall, the handling of the refugees from Ukraine shows what is possible when there’s political will,” said Ms. Buenger.
Unlike refugees from Afghanistan or elsewhere, Ukrainian refugees do not have to undergo the asylum process. Many Germans also opened their homes to accommodate war refugees from Ukraine. But for those who couldn’t find accommodation, they were housed by the LAF.
A slight distance away from the temporary housing at the Arrival Centre in Berlin, is an area that comprises container homes. The area called ‘Haus 21’ has enough container homes to accommodate 250 refugees. In April 2022, there were reports of Afghan refugees staying in the container homes here being asked to evacuate for housing Ukrainian refugees.
“The Afghans were then sent to the housing shelters meant for homeless people. Since the Ukrainian refugees have begun arriving in Germany, other refugees including Afghans have been treated as third-class refugees,” noted Mr. Hadizada.
Ms. Monika Hebbinghaus, the press officer for LAF, agreed that the situation could have been handled better with more advanced notice. But she notes that at the time, Berlin was receiving thousands of refugees from Ukraine at the Arrival Centre, mostly women and children, who couldn’t be asked to stay in the makeshift tents on the hospital premises when temperatures were sub-zero Celcius.
“The Afghan refugees who were evacuated were given alternative accommodations. For families who wanted to stay in the neighbourhood to ensure their children didn’t have to travel far for their schools, we also worked with the district authorities to find them hostels and homes nearby. No one was left out on the streets,” said Ms. Hebbinghaus.
According to Mr. Hadizada, the decision on asylum applications in Germany are different in each of its 16 States. In Berlin, it’s on a case-by-case basis. “60% of the asylum-seeking cases are rejected as unfounded because there is no political interest.”
Even for others who have the right visa in hand even before entering Germany, there are still a lot of bureaucratic hurdles to cross.
Mr. Haidari complained about all the documentation being in German, a language that was alien to him when he had landed here. Shortage of social workers to help with bureaucracy means long wait times for refugees.
“The government can simplify bureaucratic processes for people who don’t know the language. The other difficulty is there aren’t enough accommodations for refugees. There are some families who stay in arrival centres for years,” said Mr Haidari.
Ms Hebbinghaus of LAF acknowledges the shortage of homes. “Right now there are 32,000 refugees staying in state-run accommodation in Berlin. But we need more affordable housing for arriving refugees in Berlin,” said Ms. Hebbinghaus recalling how her colleagues had to use churches to temporarily house Ukrainian refugees last year. Many refugees end up staying in temporary accommodations such as container homes for years as a result.
Moving on, in their own ways
In addition to learning enough German to settle in, Mr. Rahmaty has also pursued courses at the Frankfurt School of Finance and Management. He continues his entrepreneurial journey that began in Kabul in 2018 and has his sights set on helping migrant entrepreneurs with small investments.
Mr. Haidari keeps in regular touch with his family, who are still in Kabul. He hopes to get them to Germany some day. His connection to his home is evident from the collage of photos from back home present in his living room. Mr. Haidari is slowly integrating within the German society and is set to appear for an advanced German language exam in mid-August. He has found a job in Berlin and also volunteers with Kabul Luftbruecke, to help Afghan refugees who were in a similar situation as him.
“The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than before. The UN should be careful and the Taliban-led government shouldn’t be recognised. Else they will get away with worse atrocities and destroy Afghanistan,” said Mr. Haidari.
Nimish Sawant is an independent journalist based in Berlin.
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