A year later, Afghan feminists in exile mourn lost ambitions

Landing in Paris on a flight from Kabul in the summer of 2021, Farzana Farazo vowed never to give up her feminist struggle for Afghanistan, even from exile.

But a year later, she admits to feeling “depressed.”

Like many activists fleeing Afghanistan, their hopes for the future quickly met an integration process fraught with obstacles.

AFP journalists first met Farazo, a former police officer, days after arriving in France.

At the time, she was driven by her belief in fighting for the rights of Afghan women.

And she was convinced she could make it from afar, having fled for her life after the Taliban’s stunning takeover of Kabul, which ousted the country’s Western-backed leaders.

In the 20 years between the two Taliban rulers, girls were allowed to go to school and women were allowed to work in all fields – although advances in women’s rights in the deeply conservative country were largely confined to the urban centers.

For Farazo, being in Afghanistan posed a double threat to her security – putting her on an evacuation priority list.

As a police officer, she faced retaliation from Taliban militants that the government had long pursued.

She also belongs to the Hazara minority, who are being persecuted in the Sunni-majority country for being Shiites.

Farazo, who now lives in a charity worker’s home near Paris, said she lost the energy she felt when she first arrived in France.

For months she could hardly sleep at night, she said.

“To be honest, I wasn’t particularly active,” said the 29-year-old. “Firstly because I don’t speak French well enough, but also because of the different approach to activism. There’s a lot of talking here.”

In the past year she has taken French lessons, met regularly with a social worker and is now awaiting approval for her own apartment.

“I encountered many difficulties,” she said.

“When you’re not feeling good, it’s hard to focus,” she added. “Like many others, I was independent in Afghanistan. I had a job, I have an education. So being in France without anything makes things difficult and that can throw you into depression.”

The road to integration is a long and difficult process for activists’ arrivals, and one year is simply not enough, said Didier Leschi, head of France’s Immigration and Integrations Agency.

“But thanks to their cultural and professional networks, they get more help than other Afghans who depend solely on the government,” he said.

Mursal Sayas, a journalist and feminist activist, said she was “lucky” when a publisher asked her to write a book about women in Afghanistan.

“We lost everything, our country, our freedom, our achievements,” she said. “We were suddenly propelled into a country where we had to start from scratch.”

But Sayas said she was aware that she and her fellow exiles “have freedom of speech and the girls in Afghanistan don’t,” which makes it “our duty to continue campaigning” and “denounce injustice, inequality and apartheid.” against women”.

At home in Afghanistan, women organized demonstrations in the first months after the Taliban takeover.

But such rallies have become rare after many of the protesters were arrested and severely beaten in prison, according to testimonies collected by Amnesty International.

Women who made it out of Afghanistan “are a source of positive energy for us,” a woman in Kabul who asked not to be identified told AFP. “We know that they will not forget the women in Afghanistan.”

In hindsight, did Sayas make the right decision to leave her country?

“Every morning when I wake up I feel the pain of not being with my loved ones,” she replied. “But it would have been worse to be captured by the Taliban and never speak to my sisters again.”

As if being uprooted and facing integration problems wasn’t enough, these women also find that they are perceived as less valuable in their new country than at home.

“I fell into an identity crisis,” said Rada Akbar, a graphic artist who came to France a year ago.

“It will take time to get through this, I can’t just become a new person overnight,” said the 34-year-old, who wants to highlight “the unseen losses” of Afghan culture under the Taliban.

The fight goes on, although her dreams have turned into “a nightmare,” she said.

Since August 2021, the French government has flown 4,340 people from Afghanistan to France, according to the Interior Ministry.

The evacuations are continuing “to protect vulnerable Afghans,” a ministry official said.

According to the OFPRA refugee agency, more than 13,000 Afghans applied for asylum in France in 2021 – including people who had gone their own way.

But NGOs say the ongoing bureaucracy is making it difficult not only for individual refugees to get to France, but also for their families to follow – with perhaps thousands waiting for their loved ones to obtain French visas.

“It really should be a very simple process, but the authorities are very strict about proving a family connection and the need for birth certificates, which Afghan authorities cannot always provide,” said Salome Cohen, a lawyer for The Safe Passage charity.