After Kabul attack, Germany halts Afghan deportations — for now
Germany and some other European nations have been deporting Afghan migrants by the planeload, arguing the country is perfectly safe. But advocates say Wednesday's deadly explosion in one of Kabul's most secure neighbourhoods proves otherwise.
Germany temporarily halted its "collective deportations" of Afghans in light of the attack, postponing a deportation flight that was scheduled for Wednesday. Advocates have called on Sweden to follow suit.
"There is war in Afghanistan and you shouldn't deport anyone to that country," Sarmina Stuman of the Afghan Refugees Movement told As It Happens host Carol Off from the Frankfurt airport, where protesters gathered Wednesday to demand a permanent end to the country's Afghan deportation policy.
"One of the areas that's supposed to be safe is Kabul, but as we have seen today, Kabul is not safe at all."
A massive suicide car bombing rocked Wazir Akbar Khan, a highly secure diplomatic area of the city, on Wednesday morning, killing at least 90 people and wounding more than 400.
No group immediately claimed responsibility for the blast, but both the Taliban and ISIS have staged large-scale attacks in the Afghan capital in the past.
Despite Wednesday's change in schedule, the German policy of deporting Afghan migrants who do not qualify as refugees — which began in December amid tensions over rising numbers of migrants and refugees in the country — remains in place.
According to German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, Germany denied more than half of all asylum applications from Afghanistan in the first two months of 2017, alone. The country charters one plane per month from Frankfurt to Kabul to return rejected Afghan asylum seekers, the broadcaster reports.
"They don't tell the people when they're going to be deported, so they want to surprise them so they can't hide from the deportation. So they just go to the schools or turn up in the middle of the night or at work to pick up the people," Stuman said.
"As far as I know, some have already left the country again. Others have gone to their family. Others have no place to go."
A German official told the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper this month's deportation flight has been postponed for "the next few days" because "employees [at the embassy in Kabul] have more important things to do than to prepare the organisational measures needed."
Stuman says that statement is very telling.
"They're not really taking it seriously, these deportations. They don't know what it means for people. They're not just paperwork; they're people," she said.
"You can't treat people like that, and you can't say, 'Oh, today there's a bomb so we'll just deport you the next day."
With files from CBC News and Associated Press