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The End of the German Airlift: What Will Become of the Afghans Left Behind?

  • August 27, 2021

When contacted for comment about the GIZ offer, the German Development Ministry, which is the aid organization’s primary contractor, said that GIZ local hires were being given “unbureaucratic support.” That means “assistance with accommodations, leaving the country and – if they want to remain in the country – financial help equal to one year’s pay to help with the difficult situation.”

To help with the difficult situation. It seems an odd formulation in these days of chaos.

The Development Ministry has rejected the accusations of coldness: Local hires for GIZ, they say, cannot be compared with those of the German military or police. The assumption was that developmental cooperation would continue even after the withdrawal of Western troops. Until the eve of the fall of Kabul, the ministry says, fewer than 100 local GIZ hires had contacted the Germans. Most of the around 1,800 men and women wanted to remain in the country. Then, the situation grew drastically worse and the number of people wanting to leave spiked dramatically.

What unbureaucratic assistance from GIZ looks like in practice can be read in an email from the organization to a young Afghan woman who worked on a water project. In response to the desperate email from her brother, who wanted to know if his sister qualified for help, her former project leader sent a brief reply.

Unfortunately, he cannot help her since she wasn’t directly employed by GIZ and because her activities for the project run by the German organization does not “put her in danger.” Instead, the GIZ man in faraway German recommended that she remain in Afghanistan “to help with reconstruction.” The mail ended with a cynical salutation: “Running away is not a solution.”

The crisis team in the Foreign Ministry has been working day and night, with 130,000 emails flooding the ministry in just one week. To manage the workload, diplomats have been pulled into Berlin from foreign postings, while others have delayed their departures to foreign missions. Almost the entire 2021 graduating class of attachés, almost 80 budding diplomats, are answering the phones in shifts. Foreign Minister Heiko Maas is personally leading every meeting of the crisis team.

The Foreign Ministry is working to set up two possible escape routes for the period after the U.S. withdrawal and the closure of the military airport. For as long as the airport is unavailable, one plan calls for endangered Afghans to travel overland to Pakistan in secure bus convoys. The hope is that the civilian part of the Kabul airport will also resume operations, but that will take some time given the significant damage it sustained in Thursday’s blasts. It also isn’t clear who will be operating the airport in the future.

But the German Foreign Ministry doesn’t have the best reputation in Kabul at the moment. Prior to the end of the airlift on Thursday, the ministry urged people not to make their way to the airport. Those who were on the fly-out list would be contacted, the ministry said.

Many people never received the call. And some who went to the airport despite the warning ended up making it onto a plane anyway. Those who believed the promises from the Germans were left behind.

It is a fate even experienced by people who worked directly for the German military. People like Hussain Ahmad. His name has been changed for this article due to the danger he is in, despite the fact that he worked for the Bundeswehr several years ago.

Ahmad has a paper proving his employment with the Bundeswehr, and he sent a copy to DER SPIEGEL as proof of the veracity of his story. In the document, a German brigadier general wrote that on missions, Ahmad had “lent him his voice and his ear” and that he had worked for the Bundeswehr in 2008 as an interpreter. The document is dated June 1, 2021, and carries the signature of the brigadier general and a major general.

The document testifies that Ahmad, 34, worked in the area of Kunduz and elsewhere for the German military, and he also still has a proof of employment from 2008. It has faded somewhat, but the signature can still be easily read.

Article source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/the-end-of-the-german-airlift-what-will-become-of-the-afghans-left-behind-a-f34b21d9-c0be-499e-a8c7-dc778a3bb7bf#ref=rss

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