The cabinet hopes to bring all 942 Afghans who are still on the list to be evacuated to the Netherlands before the beginning of September. Minister Wopke Hoekstra (Foreign Affairs, CDA) announced this on Thursday a letter inform the House of Representatives. Neighboring Pakistan, as was the case before, is prepared to allow Afghans without passports to cross the border “in an organized manner”, Hoekstra wrote. Most of the people on the evacuation list are still in Afghanistan.
A problem for many Afghans who want to leave the country is that they do not have valid travel documents. Obtaining a travel document is virtually impossible, because the evacuees, who have performed work for the Netherlands, fear contact with the Taliban. Afghanistan would also suffer from a lack of empty passports. Now that Pakistan is removing the barrier, the difficulty is in leaving the country. Hoekstra writes that last week it turned out that the first border crossings showed that the Taliban “is not just willing to let people leave”.
Hoekstra further writes that the Afghans who are likely to come to the Netherlands in the next two months will put “extra pressure” on the already overloaded asylum reception. Because of “the personal safety of the Afghans” and “the presumably one-off offer from Pakistan”, the cabinet wants to transfer the Afghans to the Netherlands “soon”, according to Hoekstra.
Insufficient urgency
Last summer, the Taliban took over the capital, Kabul. In the week after the capture, 1,860 people were flown to the Netherlands during a chaotic and late military evacuation. Since then, another 1,801 people have come over from Afghanistan at various times. The previous cabinet received a lot of criticism about how it had handled the evacuation operation in Afghanistan. The House of Representatives stated that the cabinet had reacted too slowly and with insufficient urgency to the advance of the Taliban in Afghanistan. Thousands of people who were eligible for evacuation were forced to stay behind.
The then Minister of Foreign Affairs Sigrid Kaag (D66), who had to oversee the evacuation operation, and the then Minister of Defense Affairs Ank Bijleveld (CDA) were forced to resign in September last year after the criticism. The Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Defense and Justice and Security have launched an investigation into the course of the operation, led by former top official Maarten Ruys. The results of this will be presented by May 2023 at the latest.