They call for an “emergency humanitarian shelter program” for Afghan women. In a column published Friday, April 21 in Le Monde, 300 personalities call on the French authorities to take up the fate of women in Afghanistan. The signatories – journalists, academics, feminists or specialists in Afghanistan – have signed this appeal to the initiative of France Terre d’asile.
In their text, the authors call for the establishment of humanitarian aid in countries bordering Afghanistan for women fleeing the Taliban regime, the acceleration of visa issuance for France and a reception system reinforced upon their arrival on French territory.
“Since the fall of Kabul, France has welcomed a few thousand Afghans, former collaborators of the French authorities or human rights defenders. However, we see that this program is running out of steam today and we cannot accept that France considers that it has fulfilled its role,” they write. “We are calling on France to put in place the feminist diplomacy that it claims to lead,” the director general of France Terre d’asile, Delphine Rouilleault, told Agence France-Presse, adding that “putting in place a feminist diplomacy today ‘today is thinking about ways to protect girls and women fleeing dictatorship’.
Few Afghan women take the dangerous paths to Europe despite being the target of repressive laws in their country that ban them from working and studying, among other things.
During the evacuations carried out in the fall of 2021, “women, in particular single women who did not have the necessary interpersonal skills, were largely neglected”, underlines the text.
The latest initiatives to evacuate these threatened women have been carried out “in dribs and drabs” and “often at arm’s length by journalists, researchers, organizations”, adds the column signed in particular by the artist Agnès Jaoui, the author Virginie Despentes and journalist Hervé Brusini. In September 2021, MEPs had already called for a special visa program for Afghan women. A call that has so far gone unanswered.