The Austrian crisis team, which is supposed to support compatriots who are still in Afghanistan as well as local workers when they leave, is now in Tashkent, the capital of neighboring Uzbekistan, as the Foreign Ministry announced yesterday. The team should now fly to Kabul as quickly as possible in a plane belonging to the German Bundeswehr.
So far 50 Austrians with Afghan roots are said to have reported either to the Auenamt or to the responsible embassy in Islamabad (Pakistan) with a request to leave the country. Two people could be flown out on Thursday.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International Austria strongly criticized Interior Minister Karl Nehammer (VP), who wants to hold on to deportations of Afghans “if possible under European law”. That Nehammer is thinking out loud about how to “circumvent the limits of the human rights convention is shocking,” said Amnesty’s Annemarie Schlack. Instead, Austria should advocate safe departure and protection for people at risk in the EU.
At a rally with the Afghan ambassador Manizha Bakhtari, SP women’s leader Eva-Maria Holzleitner appealed to “the international community” to protect Afghan women and girls.
Upper Austria’s governor Thomas Stelzer (VP) received encouragement for Nehammer. It is regrettable that the interior minister’s proposal to set up aid and deportation centers in the region around Afghanistan did not make it onto the EU agenda. Only in this way would it be possible to help refugees quickly and to “deport offending migrants quickly,” said Stelzer.
FP security spokesman Hannes Amesbauer asked Nehammer to “finally pour pure wine for the population”. In fact, the minister had long since stopped deportation. Amesbauer said that he would ask for the latest figures on the deportation of Afghans to be presented in a parliamentary question.
