Exiled to Afghanistan, years before the Taliban came to power (Munich, February 22, 2017)
For the first time since the Taliban came to power, Germany has again deported people to Afghanistan. How do you assess the human rights situation there?
This is the first deportation since the return of the Taliban, but it is not a real turning point. Just before August 2021, Germany and other EU countries were deporting people to Afghanistan and were completely unconcerned about the destructive security situation there. Today, the situation is still destructive. The only change is the type of human rights violations, since this classic war is no longer being waged, but the Taliban are now busy with a totalitarian dictatorship. And there are no human rights there. Prisons are full of dissidents, ordinary people imprisoned for their Facebook comments, media workers, human rights activists. Ex-military people in particular are hunted, killed, lynched, tortured. But this usually happens far from Kabul, because no one really sees Kabul. The “Kabulization” of the media coverage has been with us for the past 20 years, so we have not noticed that NATO and Co. are flattening the rural areas of Afghanistan and radicalizing the population there through their war policies.
Just before being expelled, the Taliban passed a ‘virtue law’. What’s in it?
What has been part of everyday life for two or three years is now codified as the “Law of Virtue.” What critics call gender discrimination. Women are no longer allowed to speak loudly or sing in public. In contrast, a campaign has taken to social media: Afghan women film themselves singing and use this act to defend themselves against the “Law of Virtue.” But men are also subject to new rules. Those who work in public spaces must wear traditional Afghan dress and grow beards. Taxi drivers are prohibited from taking unmarried women on board, and there is also a music ban.
And in Germany the first deportation flight was met with great applause from all parties and factions.
The discourse in Germany has become clearly racist. Politics is being done here at the expense of Afghans. People across party lines think this is somehow a way to siphon off votes from the right, and it has now reached a level of utter disgust.
Joachim Stamp, the FDP’s federal immigration commissioner, announced over the weekend that he was willing to talk directly with the Taliban about future deportations. Does that amount to at least an indirect recognition of their regime?
The Taliban have not been officially recognized by any government to this day. However, the isolation of the regime is incomparable to that of the 1990s. Today, many countries are indirectly talking to the Taliban and allowing them to occupy their embassies and consulates. And if Stamp’s proposal for direct talks were implemented, it would be recognition of the regime. There were situations where it was possible to negotiate with the Taliban “on merits.” For example, what was it like a year or two ago when the question was how to save millions of Afghans from hunger and other evils that plagued the country? But you don’t have that. Such talks only take place when they are supposedly about their own security, domestic politics, or deportation. There has never been and will never be anything about the welfare of the Afghan people. It is in the EU’s interest to conclude an expulsion agreement with the Taliban for the return of all EU countries, as was the case with the pro-Western Afghan government in October 2016. And perhaps the country that will ultimately be the first to recognize the Taliban regime will be the one with a “feminist foreign policy.”
