SHËNGJIN, Albania (AP) — The 21-year-old college student didn’t realize it at the time, but he received the plane from Afghanistan.
How does he – or one of the other 780 Afghans who come on their first birthday at this Albanian hotel – know then what they know now?
What I knew last August was that amid the Taliban’s return to strength and the chaos of the U. S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, an escape was an escape. An evacuation plane was an evacuation plane. A position was a position.
And it still is. Certainly, here, on the soft, sunny Adriatic Sea coast, in a small European country more than 2600 miles from home where, unlike many larger countries, the government and network have welcomed Afghans with open arms. But a year after the valiant efforts of so many others helped tens of thousands of Afghans flee their country when their government collapsed, much more is clear.
For one thing, an evacuation is not necessarily a path to a safe haven in the United States, as many expected. And that would possibly never be the case for thousands of evacuees the government believes boarded charter flights when they fled and landed in other countries such as Albania, the United Arab Emirates, Iraq, Mexico, Greece and Uzbekistan.
The Biden administration, which has been harshly criticized for the way it ended the U. S. war in Afghanistan and failed to evacuate many of its Afghan allies, says it never promised to provide a safe haven for all. This reaction does not please evacuees and their supporters who point out that President Joe Biden has said the United States will not abandon its Afghan allies.
The most important thing in determining which Afghan evacuees found fast routes to the United States is not the strength of their relationship with the United States. The question of whether they arrived in what government officials call a “gray tail,” a U. S. Army plane. As opposed to a “white tail,” an advertisement, or a chartered plane; a general aircraft.
Still, more than 76,000 Afghans landed at U. S. military bases last fall and were flown to the United States for resettlement, in an effort the leadership has dubbed “Operation Allies Welcome. “
Most of the Afghans who boarded “white tails” did not land at U. S. bases. They landed in other countries. It is the initial act of a year-long bureaucratic mess that is only now heading towards a solution, for some.
For the student, his brothers and many like them who were taken to Albania, a country they had never heard of, and nothing less than a seaside resort, it is the strangest limbo.
For almost a year, they have been living in an extensive beach hotel in Shëngjin, a beach hotel with a long, wide strip of sand on Albania’s northern coast, more than an hour’s drive from the capital, Tirana.
“The food is smart and the room is smart,” said the student, whose brother had worked for the Americans, and who spoke on condition of anonymity to protect his relatives in Afghanistan from imaginable taliban retaliation. “But we’re in a criminal state of mind” because we don’t know what’s going to happen. “
Afghanistan is not Albania’s war, and Albania is not an apparent destination for fleeing Afghans.
During its 20-year war in Afghanistan, the U. S. governmentThe U. S. spent billions of dollars to build a government, civil society and armed forces in the Central Asian country. It had deployed some 800,000 U. S. troops and thousands of other government workers and contractors.
The student’s brother had served as an interpreter for U. S. special forces. He had a U. S. citizen. Her sister ran a school for women belonging to the devout Hazara minority, funded by foreign aid money. establishments that America had brought.
The student did not remember an Afghan America. And America is where he, and many other evacuees, who had worked for American organizations, studied at American universities, or gained education funded through the U. S. government, thought they were headed.
As one of NATO’s smallest and poorest member states, Albania has sent just over 4100 troops over 20 years to Afghanistan. But at the start of the U. S. -led evacuation, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said his country, a staunch ally of a position to house thousands of fleeing Afghans.
“NATO member states want to take care of the other people who were there for us and worked for us, believed in what we brought there and aligned with what we were looking for for the long term of Afghanistan,” he said in an interview this week. month. ” And 30 years ago, frankly, we were like the Afghans. We escaped and sought refuge, and we were safe.
There were more attempts to flee Afghanistan in the last three frantic weeks of the US withdrawal. U. S. U. S. military seats on U. S. Military flights. In the U. S. , if only at the airport.
Thus, U. S. nonprofits and veteran teams suffering from evacuating their Afghan partners turned to the handful of other countries that had agreed to accept them.
Many Rama.
Within a few months, Albania had taken in some 2,500 Afghans.
Evacuation organizations had hoped Albania would be a stopover, a temporary airstrip while evacuees were being treated for permanent resettlement in the United States, representatives of the teams said in interviews.
“Our expectation, given our conversations with the Department of Homeland Security Array . . . that everyone who passes by faints in the first two weeks of December,” said Jason Kander, an Afghanistan veteran and former Missouri secretary of state, adding that the Afghan Rescue Project evacuated 380 Afghans to Albania.
I had some other clever explanation for why I think so. Operation Welcome Allies in early autumn began resettling the 76,000 gray-tailed Afghans. Among them were not only some of America’s allies and partners, but also taxi drivers, shoemakers and businessmen who had just controlled their way through the chaos to enter the airport. at the right time.
Certainly, the teams that arrived in Albania would be resettled in the same way, Kander explained.
Rama, who first said Albania would serve as a “transit point for a number of Afghan political migrants who have the United States as their final destination,” said later that a timetable for those departures had never been agreed.
But from the beginning he said he wasn’t going to put them in a refugee camp. He sought to give them dignity and tranquility, he says. He sought to give them “what we were looking for when we were Afghans once. “
Shëngjin’s booster beach hotels, which empty in the winter months, looked perfect. And the Rafaelo Resort, a sprawling haven of five buildings and three pools on the water that seats 2300 guests, said it would house the most of them.
Conditional accommodation. The Rafaelos signed agreements with U. S. nonprofits and affiliates. The U. S. department of state brought Afghans to Albania, and each organization pledged to cover the room and food of its evacuees for a daily fee of around $30 per day.
Organizations ranged from Vital Voices, founded through Hillary Clinton, to the National Endowment for Democracy, Spirit of America, a best friend of the U. S. military, and even FIFA.
By December, 485 of the Rafaelo’s 657 rooms were occupied by more than 1,700 Afghans, said Bledar Shima, the hotel’s general manager, and the Rafaelo looked like a confined Afghan community.
It’s their “kind of village,” said Alyse Nelson, president and CEO of Vital Voices, who visited her organization’s organization of about 1100 Afghans at the hotel last November.
The youngsters kicked soccer balls on the pool deck. Families walked along the empty promenade and shopped in the vicinity of the town of Lezhë.
The university student, who shared a suite with his brother, sister and sister-in-law, befriended other young Afghans. Several organizations have established a fitness clinic as well as education and counseling on the ground floor of the hotel.
For a while, the Rafaelo was just a relief. The Afghans had escaped from the Taliban. They had food, shelter and security.
An evacuee in her twenties began teaching the hotel’s young men how to skateboard. The artists worked on murals. Teachers conducted categories for evacuated youth and adults. And some culinary vendors promoted prepared food in the city.
But months passed and no one in the Rafaelo could be “treated” for his new life in the United States.
Then, in December, the State Department announced the news: Anyone who left Afghanistan with a letter before August 31 and waited in Albania or some other country would be included in Operation Welcome to the Allies, meaning they were eligible for resettlement in the United States.
But the news only reached a minority of Rafaelo’s Afghans. Most had left Afghanistan on charter flights after August 31, when army flights were no longer an option. If they wanted to come to america, they would have to try their luck through the complex and backward American immigration formula or the refugee program.
Suddenly, many, as well as the sponsors of his organization, learned that they did not have a transparent trail to the United States.
The news coincided with a sudden and tragic death in the student’s circle of relatives in Afghanistan, and the young organization felt hopeless and frightened. It was his first time away from home. All were under the age of 25.
“We didn’t know what we deserved to do,” he said. His sister began to sob sobbing so uncontrollably that they made several trips to the nearby public hospital in Lezhë, and his brother an American citizen recovered the cash to make a stopover in them. in albania
Despair reverberated at the resort.
“What happens if our instances are rejected?We lost everything,” said Parigul Nabizadah, an instructor who had worked for a D. C. -based nonprofit, the American Councils for International Education, and evacuated with her husband and two young children. “What will happen to us if we come back?
Soon after, Kander’s Afghan ransom assignment announced at the hotel that he had run out of and had stopped paying his bills.
“To be clear: everyone knew this was going to happen. We had a limited amount of money,” said Javad Khazaeli, the class lawyer.
The hotel says the Afghan Rescue Project now owes it more than $2 million for the other 380 people it pledged to sponsor. The Afghan Rescue Project says the U. S. government, which in December approved a $7 bill to fund the resettlement of Afghans, is guilty of the bill. And the State Department said that wouldn’t happen.
“The U. S. government has no duty to those people,” said a senior State Department official who spoke on condition of anonymity in accordance with rules set by the department. The organizations signed letters for their evacuees in Albania, the official said. the taxpayer is not going to take over. “
“What do we deserve us to do, should we give them just one meal a day?” said Shima, the hotel’s manager. That wouldn’t be fair, he says. ” They are also victims. “But there is also a limit. Can someone give away hotel [rooms] for free?”
Biden’s management says he never encouraged U. S. teams to take their other friends to Albania, and that he sent a clear message last fall that any private entity evacuating Afghans would take up the duty, and that Afghans would have no guaranteed trail. to the United States.
But the veterans, the U. S. military. and others, including officials, who were involved in the evacuation, said the collaboration of others within the government and the civilian sector amid the rush of the evacuation also clouded expectations.
“We were all using our contacts in those networks of other people, whether internal and external to the government, who were coming together to get other people out of Kabul,” said Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich. , a former CIA and Pentagon official. “Those days were so chaotic. . . there were only other people around the world looking to do something smart through other people who risked their lives to help us. “
In his fight to evacuate the Afghans he had worked with, Slotkin asked one member to “google all the ambassadors” in the few countries that were receiving Afghans.
The U. S. Ambassador Yuri Kim had worked with Slotkin in Iraq. Then Slotkin called her and pleaded, “Yuri, you have to help me here. I heard that Albania is in a position to take them,” the MP said.
The ambassador connected Slotkin with Rama. Slotkin collaborated with former national security adviser H. R. McMaster to arrange a charter flight. Kim and Albania’s foreign minister then met with the flight on the tarmac, Slotkin said.
During the summer months, Shëngjin Beach is filled with sun loungers and umbrellas stacked from side to side. Tourists in tight bathing suits flood the resorts. Pop and techno music resonates at constant heights from restaurant speakers, selling sun hats and inflatable tubes for dolphins and turtles. In the evening, tourists flock to the promenade, enjoying glaciers, carnival games and live music.
Shëngjin has long since lost the environment of an Afghan village. More than a portion of the original evacuated population from Rafaelo is now gone, and Slotkin’s group joins, who won resettlement through Operation Allies Welcome because they left Afghanistan before August 31.
Even so, most of those who left the Rafaelo went to Canada. Even some with strong U. S. immigration cases. The U. S. found that Canada was faster than the U. S. The U. S. Department of Homeland Security to offer them permanent resettlement, the evacuees and their sponsors said.
More than two dozen young children have been born in Albania since the group’s arrival. At least one user has died. And at least two families have defected and returned to Afghanistan, the groups’ coordinators said.
Soon, the tourist season will give way to Shëngjin’s calm winter, and evacuees wonder how many of them will still be there to see it.
On August 15, the anniversary of Afghanistan’s fall to the Taliban, state and security officials held a telephone convention with organizations that still sponsor Afghans at the hotel.
“We told them we had to expand eligibility for the U. S. frontal exam. “Said Elizabeth Jones, the State Department’s coordinator for resettlement efforts in Afghanistan. The deadline was no longer August 31. A team of officials will reportedly arrive in Albania in September. to begin processing the remaining Afghans.
Management expects the maximum to be in the United States until June 2023.