Helena Kennedy evacuated more than 500 people from Afghanistan in 2021, but is still in contact with some of those she had to leave behind.
A leading human rights lawyer has told how she still receives “tragic, terrible text messages” from women hiding from the Taliban in Afghanistan, nearly two years after she managed to evacuate more than 500 people from the conflict-torn country.
Baroness Helena Kennedy KC organised the evacuation of 103 women who were on Taliban “kill lists” in September and October 2021, flying them and their families to safety.
A total of 508 people escaped on three flights the Scottish-born Labour peer arranged – but she told how she still gets pleas for help from some women who were unable to flee at that time.
Hitting out at the UK Government, she said the Tories’ “dog whistle politics” on immigration mean she can no longer bring people to safety in Britain.
Speaking to the PA news agency, she said: “It was possible then, then of course it wasn’t possible any more.
“I have still got women sending me the most tragic, terrible text messages and phoning me at all hours, saying ‘please help me, I am hiding in my basement, I didn’t get on your planes in 2021 because my mother was dying, I couldn’t leave at the time, but now they are after me’.
“But all I can say is ‘I’m sorry, they don’t provide visas to Britain from Afghanistan, you have to go to another country, Pakistan is the nearest, you have to get your kids across that border’.”
Baroness Kennedy described the evacuation she organised in 2021 as “one of the crazier things I have done in my life”, but also “one of the things I feel was absolutely the right thing to do”.
[…]
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/afghan-rishi-sunak-government-hazara-scottish-b2363684.html
https://www.arabnews.com/node/2327801/world
UK: Baroness tells of ‘terrible texts’ from trapped Afghan women pleading for help
