A foreign whistle blower has exposed the UK for evacuating literal animals over Afghan refugees after the Taliban takeover, and if that isn’t reflective of the racism this western world is built on, I don’t know what is.
While giving evidence to the Foreign Affairs Select Committee on Tuesday (local time) for an investigation into Britain’s departure of Afghanistan, former Foreign Office desk officer Raphael Marshall detailed how UK Prime Minister and fungal wart Boris Johnson abandoned thousands of Afghans.
Marshall said that the UK government’s system for who they chose to evacuate was “arbitrary and dysfunctional”, per The Age.
He estimated that less than 5% of the 75,000 to 150,000 people that applied for evacuation were actually assisted. On top of that, Marshall revealed that Afghans who served the UK government and were in danger of being murdered were refused visas while animal sanctuary staff were provided policy exceptions and even assisted in their evacuation. This was despite there being no evidence that the Taliban would target animal rights charities.
This is horrifying: “My colleagues and I eliminated thousands of Afghan friends of the UK at risk of murder from the evacuation list. We were instructed to do this due to lack of capacity to process people at the airport. This capacity was subsequently used to transport animals.” pic.twitter.com/BJyUYWrA01
— Dr Saphia Fleury (@SaphiaFleury) December 7, 2021
“There were usually over 5000 unread emails in the inbox at any given moment, including many unread emails dating from early in August,” Marshall said, per The Age.
“These emails were desperate and urgent. I was struck by many titles including phrases such as ‘please save my children’. It is clear that some of those left behind have since been murdered by the Taliban.”
If all of that wasn’t already fucked up enough, Marshall then revealed that the Prime Minister gave a direct order to use “considerable capacity” to evacuate… animals. Who were obviously not under religious persecution. Because they’re animals.
“There was a direct trade-off between transporting Nowzad’s animals and evacuating British nationals and Afghans evacuees, including Afghans who had served with British soldiers,” Marshall told the committee regarding former Royal Marine Paul Farthing‘s operation to evacuate animals at the Nowzad animal sanctuary.
They abandoned Afghans to airlift dogs, on the orders of the Prime Minister, because there’s a significant portion of the Conservative Party who consider animals more human than brown people.
— Ash Sarkar (@AyoCaesar) December 7, 2021
Yes. Boris Johnson, human embodiment of the soap scum collecting in my drain pipes, chose animals over Afghan refugees.
I wish I was shocked by this. I truly do. But as a Muslim, I’m aware of how dehumanised Afghans and other Muslim-majority nations are in the west, no matter what country we come from, and no matter whose side we are on. To the point where animals are shown more compassion than Afghan refugees could even hope for.
To think that people were fearing for their lives because they assisted western forces like Britain, only to be abandoned and for some, condemned to death, causes such an immense sense of anger and grief that it’s hard to even form the words to explain how fucked that is.
Like, what will it take for Afghans to be seen as people?
Johnson obviously dismissed the testimony as “nonsense”, per The Age, and Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab defended the government by saying that they did “everything we could” by evacuating 15,000 people.
But when you consider that this was 15,000 out of potentially 150,000 people, and that animals were prioritised, well it’s not as much of a brag is it?
