Ione made it out of Afghanistan but is barely surviving in a park in Islamabad despite being seven months pregnant. The other has taken refuge in Iran, but faces imminent deportation to Kabul because her Iranian visa has expired and her French visa application has been pending for… more than a year. A third writes to inform us that she plans to sell a kidney to feed her children. Twenty-two months after the capture of Kabul by the Taliban, what is France doing for these Afghan women who fled their country?
Even if each week brings us some good news − one that finally obtained an appointment at the French consulate in Islamabad, another arrival in France thanks to a visa issued after months of waiting −, the generosity of France in favor of Afghan women who have fled their country remains extremely parsimonious. At best, a few dozen of them have obtained an asylum visa out of thousands forced to leave their families, prohibited from work, studies, resources, and threatened in their lives by the fury and obscurantism of the Taliban. .
Many of these Afghan women, targeted on two counts as women and as journalists, judges, lawyers, defenders of human rights and women’s rights, artists or intellectuals, have crossed the border into a neighboring country, Pakistan and Iran above all, where the luckiest have obtained a local residence visa that has now expired or is in the process of being so. Unable to work, and therefore to meet their needs, often alone, with families or pregnant, they suffer this exile in unworthy conditions, deprived of everything, and under the threat of being sent back to Afghanistan.
Unanswered appointments
Many believed that France, still crowned abroad with its prestige as a “country of human rights”, could be a land of welcome. And they filed an asylum application, fully justified by the risks incurred in Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban. However, few Western countries do as little as France for these women. The examples of Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada and even Australia attest to this.
Our government’s attitude to these cries for help, to which President Macron pledged to respond in August 2021, is more than cautious: it is unworthy. Consular representations, or the dispensaries that take their place, take months to grant these refugees an appointment with a view to compiling a visa file. These organizations require the purchase of a return plane ticket – although this is excluded – or proof of means of subsistence in France, or the commitment to welcome them from a family, sometimes going as far as to assimilate − ” by mistake “ we are assured − these requests for asylum to simple requests for tourist visas.
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