August 11, 2021

Treatment of Afghan refugees highlights inhumane asylum policy in Russia

topic:	Refugees and Asylum
located:	Russia, Afghanistan, Ukraine
editor:	Andrew Getto

In June and July, St. Petersburg brushed off coronavirus concerns and welcomed tens of thousands of spectators for the Euro 2020 football tournament. But not all of the visitors were primarily sports fans; some used the opportunity to escape certain death at home.

Despite the fact that Russia is home to some of the world’s most famous sights, a trip there is hardly a flawless experience. Even EU and US citizens, who enjoy barrier-free travel to much of the world, not only need a visa, but receive one only for the exact duration of their stay, as confirmed by a hotel. This Soviet-era practice was waived for football fans, who came en masse for the 2018 FIFA World Cup and for this year’s tournament.

Because of the coronavirus, the FanID system has become the only feasible way of getting to Russia for many nations. The Russian embassy in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is rapidly gaining ground and over 1,600 civilians were killed just this year, has stopped issuing almost all visas. The urge to leave as soon as possible is huge: some 30 000 are leaving the country every week, mostly to Turkey through Iran. A few of them have chosen Russia as their destination; the decision was not the brightest move.

Javad Musavi, 27, fulfilled two of his dreams at a time: to go to St. Petersburg and to attend a big football game. As he was having the time of his life, his wife called him and said that the Taliban were rounding up and shooting all law enforcement in Northern Afghanistan. Musavi is a police officer, which makes him a dead man as soon as he comes back.

He reached out to the local diaspora and rushed to a government office dealing with refugees. He would go there almost every day, and every time they found a reason not to register his request: he didn’t have this or that paper or there was no translator. Finally, he was told to come on 20 July, along with a few other Afghans, reassured that a translator will finally be present. Instead, the six refugees were greeted by police officers, handcuffed and delivered to a detention facility.

The diaspora has stressed that the men had actual reasons to fear for their lives, but a court swiftly ordered to deport all but one of them back to Afghanistan, right into the hands of the Taliban. 

Their situation was completely neglected. One of the requests was denied because it, take a deep breath, “didn’t state which body it was addressing, and also lacked any marks about the request’s acceptance for consideration by a territorial body of an executive federal body in the domain of interior affairs in an order, set by law.” Translated from bureaucratic lingo, it means that the Afghans had failed to get the extremely murky paper process right - a situation, painfully familiar to any Russian who needs something from the government.

One might object, saying that refugees are getting deported everywhere all the time, but Russia’s case is quite different. Even though Russia signed the 1951 UN Convention and the subsequent 1967 protocol, in practice the authorities are doing everything to deny refugee status to those who need it. For an enormous country in the crossroads between the West and the East, the number of refugees in Russia is inconceivably small: just 455.

Another 42,000 have temporary asylum status that requires renewal every year; the vast majority of them are Ukrainians. The case with Ukrainians is exclusive, as for a short time there was political will to accept and naturalise Ukrainians after Russia occupied Crimea and started a war in Eastern Ukraine. Other nations were not so lucky. Russia has positioned itself as a saviour of Syria in the fight against jihadists, yet only two Syrians are registered as refugees in Russia.

The reasons for that inhumane policy are fairly obvious to me. To take in refugees, you need to screen them, provide them with livable conditions and integrate them into the society. This takes money, time and, most of all, effort. In the meantime, taking shelter in Russia is an incomprehensible process. It starts at the border, where no information for refugees is available, and goes all the way to the court, which almost never considers reasons that cause people to take the huge risk of leaving their homes for an unknown land.

According to translator Fayim Feroz with the Russian charity Civil Facilitation, the trip to Russia cost the Afghans $1,500-4,000; a huge amount for one of the world’s poorest countries. The Afghan diaspora stresses that the refugees admit they had breached the law, but did so because they didn’t have other options, except being shot by the Taliban. 

The five men are waiting for their appeals in a grim 8-storey building below St. Petersburg, along with dozens of people from Central Asia and Africa, many of whom have been there for years. Russia now has a chance to prove it maintains the slightest adherence to international standards. It can’t adopt a refugee system adequate for one of the world’s top 20 economies, but can it at least not let people die because of red tape?

Image: Алексей Малышев.