For Afghan refugees, a combination of luxury and trauma on the beaches of Albania

SHENGJIN, Albania – Medical student, in a trauma-induced trance after a week under the Taliban government and three days of terror awaiting a flight out of Kabul airport, looked out the window on his first day in his new home and saw the Statue of Liberty.

“I thought for a moment that maybe I was in New York,” said Tahera, a 21-year-old student. But the statue, made of plaster instead of copper and located in northern Albania, a fiercely pro-American country, was “much shorter than the real one,” he added, summoning a sense of ironic humor despite the its hard test.

The statue was an involuntarily mocking decoration, a kitsch bloom on the grounds of an Albanian beach resort that housed more than 440 Afghans who fled Kabul after the city fell to the Taliban on August 15.

Before flying last week to Albania, a country he had never heard of, Tahera hoped to flee to the United States or Britain, where he has an uncle. (The New York Times uses only Tahera’s first name to protect her family still in Afghanistan.) But with those rich countries and other nations wary of taking in refugees, she has found refuge in what may be the camp. of the world’s strangest and most luxurious refugees. .

Albania, one of the poorest nations in Europe, has pledged to host up to 4,000 refugees from Afghanistan, more than any other country. The 677 who have arrived, including about 250 children, are staying in resorts on the Adriatic coast, a practice based on an emergency response approach that Albania developed after a devastating earthquake in 2019, when they accommodated people on the beach in beach hotels. .

While Afghans appreciate the accommodation, the touch of luxury rings is a bit empty for many.

Parwarish, an Afghan women activist who worked on projects funded by the United States Agency for International Development, said she was affected by the kindness of the Albanians, but that she slept well and had nightmares.

“I see my family dying in my dreams,” he said. “All this luxury is fantastic if you have peace of mind. I do not “.

The decision to welcome the Afghans seems popular in Albania, a country with a long history of their flight. Providing refugees “is the right and natural thing,” Prime Minister Edi Rama said in an interview in Tirana, the capital.

While opposition politicians in France, Germany and other European nations regularly raise fears of refugees and migrants to pressure government leaders, Rama’s opponents have remained silent or supported his welcome to the Afghans. .

“We don’t put people in camps. They are dehumanizing and where all the problems start psychologically “, said the prime minister. “We have been like them many times in our own history. They’re just trying to escape hell. “

Tahera, the medical student, shares a room with an Afghan woman who lost both hands in a bomb attack in Afghanistan. Now, in a complex with three swimming pools and a long sandy beach, Tahera wants to learn to swim, wanting to get her mind out of the traumas. She also hopes to learn to ride a bike, a form of exercise that conservative and patriarchal society in Afghanistan faces for women.

Determined to keep her medical career planned, she follows a first aid course that an Afghan doctor in London offers her at the resort.

Albania, a NATO member that sent troops to Afghanistan to join the U.S.-led effort to keep the Taliban at bay, has long helped people the United States does not want or does not want. they know what to do.

When in 2006 the U.S. military decided that a group of Chinese Uighurs who had been held captive for four years in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were not dangerous terrorists as China had been held, Albania agreed to give them a place to live.

But Mr Rama said he welcomed the Afghans: “We don’t do it because the Americans asked us to.”

Feeling that the U.S.-backed government in Kabul would not last long when U.S. troops completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan, Rama offered for the first time at a NATO summit in June to help with what he feared it would be a flood of Afghan refugees. He urged other leaders to do the same. (A senior US diplomat in Tirana confirmed Mr. Rama’s account).

But NATO leaders saw little reason to worry immediately. They held on to Washington’s optimistic view that the Taliban were months or even years away from victory.

Two months later, Afghanistan fell into the hands of the Taliban, prompting the exodus of women activists, civil society workers, journalists and other Afghans who fear the Taliban.

In Albania, at the Rafaelo Resort, a group of four- and five-star hotels near the city of Lezhe, Afghan evacuees eat at a separate restaurant serving halal food, but mingle in the pool with tourists, mostly Albanians. of neighboring ethnicity. Kosovo.

The room and council of Afghans are covered by foreign organizations such as the National Endowment for Democracy and the Yalda Hakim Foundation, which was set up by a BBC journalist of Afghan descent. George Soros Open Society foundations pay 135 Afghans who worked with the organization in Afghanistan to stay in a high-end hotel and spa on the coast. (The organization negotiated a big discount).

The presence of veiled Afghan women in sun loungers by the pool at the Rafaelo Resort has come as a surprise to guests who have paid, but no one cared.

“I had no idea there were so many Afghans here, but I don’t mind,” said Besnik Zeqiri, a Kosovo Albanian immigrant to the United States. “They are all human and need to be protected.”

Liri Gezon, another tourist, said she had seen terrorized Afghans at Kabul airport on television and was happy to see them safe in Albania. “They are not creating any problems for us and they deserve to live as we do,” he said, recalling how hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians had fled Kosovo to flee the Serb forces that marked the late 1990s and knew the trauma. of the escape.

Albania’s Foreign Minister Olta Xhacka said in an interview that Afghan evacuees were initially expected to stay for a couple of months while their visas for the United States were processed. “But now we are working on the premise that they will stay in Albania for at least a year, maybe more,” he said, adding that those who cannot obtain visas to move elsewhere would be welcome to stay in Albania.

Wahab, a journalist who helped run a U.S.-funded news agency that dealt with women’s issues in the western Afghan city of Herat, said she had never expected such luxury facilities. He fled Afghanistan with his wife and three children, with the help of the National Endowment for Democracy.

“We are luxury refugees,” he joked. “We go to the beach and see half-naked women. We sleep, eat and go to the beach. For most people, that would seem like a paradise. “

But Afghanistan continues to meddle. He can’t stop thinking about the eight Taliban checkpoints that stopped the bus he was traveling with his family from Herat to Kabul, or seeing the Afghan capital perhaps for the last time when the flight left. evacuation. Kabul, which the Taliban had seized a few days earlier, “seemed very, very dark,” he said.

An editor, who asked not to be named because her family has received threats from the Taliban, said she had “lost all hope in Afghanistan” and believed the United States “had some reason to leave our country, because there was really nothing changing. “

As a fiercely independent journalist who grew up in a Pashtun family, the most conservative and numerous ethnic group in Afghanistan, she herself was proof that some things could change. But the rapid return of the Pashtun-dominated Taliban sounded the whisper of their media outfit.

“Now any change we’ve achieved has multiplied by zero,” he said. “We’re not back to anything.”

Tahera, the medical student, avoids discussions about why his world exploded so quickly.

She had never planned to leave Afghanistan, but as a woman and member of the Hazara minority, often persecuted, she decided that there was no future for her in a Taliban-ruled nation.

“I always told my family and friends,‘ I will never leave my country, ’” he said. Still, her father urged her to go when the Yalda Hakim Foundation offered her the chance to go out, even though it meant leaving behind her parents, five sisters and a younger brother.

“I miss my family,” he said. “I miss my university. I miss Afghanistan. I worry all the time. There are too many questions I don’t know the answer to. “