In a recent interview with the BBC, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said that he had no sympathy for those Afghan refugees who have already left the war-torn country to seek a better life. He, the leader of country which has faced war for almost 40 years, argued that most people are leaving the country for personal reasons and not for war. Thereby, Ghani maintained, all these Afghans cannot be considered "real refugees."
He, of all people, who has spent many years of his life in the United States. Indeed, lot of Ghani's family members, including his own children, are still living there.
OPINION:
President Ghani himself is a result of migration. Without this migration, in his case to the United States, he would not be the person he is today. Meanwhile, he is denying his own people the fundamental right to leave. For that reason, many Afghans are outraged. At the moment, Afghans represent the second largest group of refugees after people from Syria.
More than 10 percent of the entire Afghan population is on the run. Before the war in Syria started, Afghans were the biggest group of refugees worldwide. And of course, there are also a lot of good reasons to leave Afghanistan these days. According to the latest report of the United Missions Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), more than 11,000 civilians were killed or wounded in the country in 2015. The culprits of the mass slaughter were not just insurgent groups like the Taliban, but also the Afghan army, pro-government militias and international forces.
As a result of the decade-long war, Afghanistan's economy is practically non-existent. The country is highly dependent on foreign aid, which most of the time ends up in the pockets of deeply corrupt politicians. All the Western attempts, mainly based on its own neoliberal doctrine, to integrate the country's economy into the global system have failed. Instead, social inequality in the country has grown tremendously during the last years.
Nevertheless, President Ghani is not the only person who does not want to accept this harsh reality. Since the influx of refugees has increased in Europe, the European Union is looking for ways to get rid of some of them, and Afghans have become the main target. Around 176,000 Afghans claimed asylum in the EU last year; according to an internal discussion paper, the EU plans to deport 80,000 of them, claiming they are economic migrants, not refugees.
The document discusses possible financial incentives, particularly developement aid, to make the plan viable.
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The Afghan government formally opposed the EU's plan and pointed out that it could not guarantee the safety of the deported people. Besides, resources to resettle all the refugees are not available. "Because the situation in Afghanistan is not good at the moment, we are opposing the mass deportations," said Hafiz Ahmad Miakhel, a spokesperson for Afghanistan's Refugee and Reperation ministry.
However, it is very clear that the government in Kabul does not have the upper hand. The EU paper is clear on this point: The European Commission should threaten to reduce developement aid until the Afghan government agrees to the mass removal of tens of thousands of its citizens from Europe. The paper admits that the threat, if carried through, could result in the collapse of the fragile state.
In this context, many Afghans believe that President Ghani is only saying what the elites in Brussels and elsewhere want to hear.
And in fact, some leading European states have already started to enforce the deportation plan. Last month, Theresa May, the United Kingdom's Home Secretary, won a significant legal battle to resume deportations of failed asylum seekers to Afghanistan. The Court of Appeal overturned an injuction imposed last year amid concerns the country was too dangerous.
The latest ruling could see hundreds of failed asylum seekers, including those who arrived in the United Kingdom as unaccompanied children years ago, deported on special charter flights from London.
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Germany, which initiated a so-called information campaign on the streets of Afghanistan and social media platforms months ago to discourage Afghans from migrating to the country, had already deported 125 Afghan refugees by the end of February. The German government repeatedly insisted there are enough safe havens inside Afghanistan itself.
Ghani and his government, still one of the most corrupt in the world, have become the stooges in this theatre. Because their salaries are paid with Western money, Afghan offiials are willing to support a dirty deal at the expense of the Afghan people.
At the same time, European states still have their troops deployed in Afghanistan. Many of them, like those of Germany, France or the United Kingdom, have participated in various war crimes while cooperating with bloody warlords and drug bosses.
It is too obvious that the West is a significant part of the problem in Afghanistan, not just for the past few decades but centuries, considering the remnants of Western colonialism in the region. And while the West remains there, worsening the situation, it is slamming the door on the refugees it has created — and is still creating.