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When the Taliban came to power last week, Afghans working for the United Nations saw many foreign colleagues boarding planes to leave the country.
But increasingly desperate demands for assistance – or at least somewhere to be safe from the Taliban’s work for an international organization – are being scrapped, according to interviews and emails seen by BuzzFeed News.
Current and former workers were outraged that the UN, which has operated in Afghanistan since 2002, said it had no plans to leave the country with workers made up of thousands of Afghan citizens and few alternatives to stay at home while militants could stay. looking for them.
In phone calls and text messages, four Afghan citizens working at the UN told BuzzFeed News that the UN has not provided them with safe housing in Kabul, and left some who were seeking refuge with relatives. They point out that Afghans working at the UN are taking greater risks in the country in exchange for lower wages than their international counterparts, and that it could harm their jobs. Reuters reported Tuesday The Taliban has been exploring multiple UN compounds since it came to power last week.
“They are very, very impressive in the communities,” said a former UN international staff member who asked for anonymity. “The Taliban know exactly who these people are.”
The UN did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Spokesman for General Secretary Stéphane Dujarric said in August. 18 at the press conference, the UN could not easily remove Afghan citizens from the country, “because it is not a visa-free nation.”
He added that the UN is doing “what it can” for national workers and their families. “There are all sorts of administrative barriers that need to be negotiated and discussed,” Dujarric said. “But national employees are at the forefront of what we’re trying to do every day.”
Organization has about 300 international staff and 3,000 national staff from Afghanistan in Afghanistan, working in agencies such as the UN Mission in the country and the UN Development Program and UN Women. The organization said on August 18 that about 100 of those international workers would be moving to Kazakhstan temporarily.
UN-focused PassBlue news site he reported on Friday that Afghan citizens working in the organization felt “alone and petrified”. The new details in this story about Afghan workers who do not demand unnecessary help from the Taliban — even when they heard that militants in their neighborhood were wondering where they were — raises further questions about whether the UN planned to protect local workers properly. The Taliban intensified a military offensive against the Afghan government beginning in May.
“They have had months to prepare for that,” the former international worker said.
An Afghan official working in the operations department of a UN agency said he and his colleagues had repeatedly raised the issue of evacuations in a chat box with Zoom colleagues and superiors last week, but received no response. (BuzzFeed News hides the identification data of four Afghan workers interviewed for this article to avoid endangering them.)
“They usually read the chat box,” he said. “This time they were watching chats but trying to change the subject and finish everything.”
The worker said he had asked his superiors if the UN would help him and other Afghan workers with valid international visas. But he was told he could only try to get the organization out, forcing him to leave his wife and small child behind.
“How does that make sense?” he said. “How can I leave my family behind when I leave the country behind? It’s not acceptable to me or the national staff; it is against humanitarian values, it is against human values. ”
Other workers in Afghanistan described similar meetings.
“They’re playing a game with us. There is a weekly meeting where they say they are ‘doing our best’, ”said another Afghan staff member at the UN Development Project working on gender equality. “What is this trying to do? Small embassies can evacuate workers, why not the UN? ”
It is unclear how many UN international workers have been evacuated from Afghanistan, but the four workers told BuzzFeed News that they had evacuated high-level international workers and it appeared that they were mostly Afghans.
Liam McDowall, spokesperson for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (Unama). he told PassBlue The UN urged other countries to accept visa applications and temporary residency applications from Afghan workers and their families.
Unama did not respond to calls or emails from this article.
Staff interviewed by BuzzFeed News also said UN officials said they were campaigning for a visa application so they could relocate to other countries, but some said it was too little, that it was too late.
“This is not the time to get visas,” said an Afghan worker working with UNDP. “We have UN identity documents that can be discussed with other countries for immediate evacuation.”
A UN staff member who has called on the UN to evacuate Afghan women workers concerned about the abuse of women by the Taliban told BuzzFeed News that it has called on Afghan workers to help with town hall meetings and local and global workers ’associations.
“No one heard us,” he said. “No one listens.”
“They told us we had to stay and hand them over,” he added, citing a slogan about the UN’s presence in Afghanistan.
As reported by the UN he moved some its Afghan workers to reduce the risk to Kabul, but it has not put these people in safe places.
“They have not been accommodated in a fort, they have left them on their own,” said the former international worker, who spoke directly with Afghan workers.
World Bank evacuate All its employees in Afghanistan, Reuters reported on August 20.
A group of UN trade unions and workers’ associations he began a request The UN Secretary-General has called for “all necessary measures” to be taken, including an evacuation to protect workers. It has nearly 5,300 signatures by Tuesday evening.
“We need to protect everyone’s human rights, and now we are leaving it to ourselves to fix it on our own,” said UN inspector Arora Akanksha, who is campaigning for the next secretary-general. “Shameful UN and its leadership.”
“All this ‘stay and give’ message that the UN is promoting, we should ask who will stay?” he added.
He was hidden in a remote location, an Unama employee told BuzzFeed News that Taliban militants were asking neighbors about their whereabouts. He has been involved in sensitive political projects and believes he could be a target.
“Everyone here knows I’m working with Unama,” he said. “I’m famous.”
He told BuzzFeed News that he had asked his department to take him to a safer place where militants would find it more difficult to identify him by talking to locals a few days before Kabul fell to the Taliban. A few days later, when the militant group seized power, a response came in urging them to hide in the house, according to emails they shared with BuzzFeed News.
“I’m like an detainee,” he said. “I can’t go outside, I can’t see anyone. How long can I stay here like this? ”
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