(Ottawa) Shelters in Kabul that have provided protection for more than 1,700 Afghan interpreters and their families are due to close on Friday due to lack of funding, groups trying to help them say.
Veterans groups have already raised around $ 2 million in private donations, but said they would need an additional $ 5 million to keep shelters open after Friday.
The occupants of these shelters will have to find other places to stay in the Afghan capital and have made contingency plans, said retired Major General Denis Thompson, a member of a local veterans network, of refugee advocates and other volunteers working to help former interpreters.
Mr Thompson said he hoped the performers and their families could one day still be helped to flee the country. He said the safe haven option was never meant to be a long-term proposition.
He said he believed that the federal summer campaign in Canada, which plunged the federal public service into the so-called “babysitting” mode, meant that no concrete political decisions could be made by public servants to help them. Afghans. Ultimately, this resulted in high costs for the shelters.
“It’s a lot cheaper to relocate people than it is to pay for shelters,” said Thompson.
“We’re talking millions of dollars, not even tens of millions of dollars, to complete this whole relocation. It is a G7 country; these are not huge sums, ”he added.
Other veterans have lamented that the closure of shelters risks leaving the occupiers at the mercy of the new Taliban leadership, who returned to power this summer.
Retired Captain Corey Shelson said the Federal Immigration Department has been too slow to approve applications and travel documents for Afghan interpreters.
“There will be 1,700 people leaving the area… and a lot of them will probably die. I don’t know how to put it any other way, ”Mr. Shelson said.
“I can tell you that the 1,700 people who currently live in shelters will end up on the streets tomorrow due to bureaucratic inefficiencies within the Canadian government,” he said.
The federal government did not directly fund the shelters, which were seen as a temporary measure to help move vulnerable Afghans out of the country.
The Taliban’s reaction
Mr Thompson said he hoped the Taliban did not take drastic action against the occupants of the shelters as the new leaders seek international recognition as the new Afghan government and international humanitarian aid to fight hunger.
“It’s hard to say how the Taliban would react. Our assessment is that they have been cautious. ”
Some of the shelter occupants cannot return to Kandahar because the Taliban have taken over their homes, while others have received death threats over the phone, Thompson said.
Earlier Thursday, the Conservatives called on the Liberal government to give urgent funding to the groups that came together to make the shelters work.
Conservative MP James Bezan said the Trudeau government had been absent and needed to step in and fill the funding void.