As the long-wave broadcast crackled over the radio, my grandmother trembled, listening to the endless list of names pouring through the speakers. Then, she began to scream, and didn’t stop for two days – the news of her youngest son’s execution in Iran sinking in.
When Islamic fundamentalists had taken over the country by force, my uncle had become a political prisoner. Later, he was executed by firing squad in one of Tehran’s notorious prisons. His crime? Allegedly giving food and shelter to citizens who’d been displaced or were being hunted by the new government. Why? Because they disagreed politically with the undemocratically installed Islamic forces now ruling over their once modern, prosperous and liberal Middle Eastern nation.
Does that sound familiar?
My uncle wasn’t given access to a lawyer, his family or a trial. Instead, he’d been arrested on his doorstep, and suffered god knows what before a hail of automatic rifle gunfire had ended his life.
The night my uncle was killed, my dad says he experienced his brother’s life flashing before his eyes before feeling the sensation of a bullet hitting him in the forehead. Somehow, he says, he had felt the moment of his younger brother’s execution. He knew the next morning his name would be called out on the radio.
My grandmother’s grief was so terrible, raw and agonising that she permanently lost her hearing. I’m told she was like a rabid animal, and nobody could go near her for days as she was so deranged with pain.
Pain and politics
This week, as the news came of the rapid fall of Afghanistan’s government, and the Taliban’s lightning quick ascent to power, I felt a horrible déjà vu. The way civilians are stuck there amid a deluge of terror, left to helplessly watch as their country spirals out of control and basic human rights, especially for women, are stripped away, is unimaginable.
But my heartbreak for Afghanistan has been coupled with disgust at the reactions of my fellow Brits. The lack of compassion and human decency shown by thousands online as this humanitarian crisis deepens has been staggering.
While councils nationwide have each pledged resources to take in refugees from Afghanistan, the comments sections under news articles are riddled with racist, disconnected Brits whining about guarding the U.K. borders. I find it disgusting, as well as painfully ignorant.
Unless you’ve been in a country plunged into horrific and extremist rule overnight, you’ll likely never comprehend the full scale of depravity and human rights violations the people of Afghanistan face.
When my uncle was executed for his political beliefs, my father and his brothers lost their sibling, and my mother, her best friend. She escaped Iran on one of the last commercial flights, with ground to air missiles strikes exploding around her like fireworks in the midnight sky.
She found safety in the U.K. But she’d left behind her entire family – and peace – unable to make contact with them for years. Iran’s new leaders intercepted post, halted air traffic and cut down telephone lines. She didn’t know if her loved ones were dead or alive and sank into an awful and soul-gripping depression.
Women and children last
As a parent myself, the utter terror the people of Afghanistan must be feeling for their children – their young daughters especially – is hard to fathom. But you can see it. The pictures of desperate parents handing babies over barbed wire to strangers at the airport hoping their children will be flown to safety show their abject terror.
It’s a terror that’s hard to imagine whilst sat safely behind your keyboard in this democratic country. But I’ve heard the horrific stories of entire families in Iran, including children, wiped out by clandestine cyanide poisoning – dropping dead mid-dinner in what should have been the safety of their home because of one relative’s political beliefs. I’ve heard of women raped by multiple men before execution because ‘virgins shouldn’t be executed’.
I’ve heard of passports of dual nationals seized at the boarding gate, and seen quietly circulated videos of women being flogged for attending a football match. Young women dragged off the street because their hijab was loose, or they dared to wear lip gloss or paint their nails. Men hung by their necks from cranes in the middle of the city for who knows what.
The speed of the Taliban’s taking of power in Afghanistan is a horrifying factor too. During the Iranian Revolution, women who had once studied at university, dressed as they pleased, listened to the Bee Gees and danced in night clubs holding hands with their boyfriends were stripped overnight of many freedoms and rights.
All were forced to wear a full hijab regardless of their religious or personal beliefs, and prevented from going out in public with a man they weren’t related or married to. Students were gunned down for simply being at university, the bodies piled up behind classroom doors.
Anyone who resisted was stripped of their money, passport, liberty – their every right. Anyone with any link to the Shah woke up to find their bank accounts emptied. Innocent people were whipped, arrested, tortured or, like my uncle, executed. Is it any wonder people flee?
My grandparents had long since left Iran and had implored my uncle to do the same. He’d refused, telling them he wouldn’t abandon the country he loved so much. For his ‘crimes,’ he was murdered by firing squad in the middle of the night – but the suffering didn’t stop there.
For years, any markers used to indicate the mass grave he was dumped in were smashed by guards, families denied the small dignity of remembrance. It’s been turned into a commercial landfill now. Imagine that.
Life after loss
Inhumanity like this is what the Afghan people are suffering right now. Women and young girls are being ripped away from their families for a life of sexual servitude to Taliban men. Honourable men are killed while trying to protect their families in a state where all infrastructure, including transport and healthcare, has collapsed. Teenagers are falling from the sky after hanging on to taxiing mercy flights taking off from Kabul.
And yet, troll-tastic Brits are online, hammering their idiotic ‘no migrants, no refugees, no asylum seekers’ rhetoric.
They drone on about ‘charity starting at home’ but what if their home turned into hell overnight? Wouldn’t they bolt? Expect other nations to help? Wouldn’t they decry the inhumanity of countries that closed their borders or built a wall to keep out their desperate family?
Many online this week bemoaned why surrounding countries don’t take the influx of Afghanistan’s refugees instead. The answer should be obvious – they are themselves recovering from, or enduring, humanitarian crisis, poverty or instability.
Which country in that region can help? Iran? Iraq? Pakistan? Afghanistan’s neighbours don’t have the resources or infrastructure. We do. Europe does. America does. Australia does. It’s our duty as fellow human beings to help them.
We should all be showing the innocent people of Afghanistan caught in this nightmarish reality every compassion imaginable, even if it means finding homes and resources for 25,000 refugees – or more – here on our shores.
Late last week, a British newspaper published an image of a father holding his dead child in his arms, blood gushing from the little boy’s forehead, hit by a Taliban bullet outside Kabul airport. Of thousands of comments, I saw only two that were truly compassionate. The rest were at best dismissive of the plight of these poor people, at worst vile and racist.
In the UK, we are blessed with democracy and human rights. So please, less merciless trolling, and more plain mercy.
The writer’s name has been withheld for her family’s safety