Josie Pagani: Every kindness must be extended to Afghans

An RNZAF C130 in Kabul to evacuate a number of New Zealanders and Australians, prior to the US withdrawal. Photo / NZ Defence Force

Opinion

OPINION

Surprisingly, donations to aid charities have held up during Covid.

Kiwis may feel an inexplicable need to throw a punch to reach the toilet paper in aisle five. But when we watched Delta rampage through India and then Fiji and Papua New Guinea, or a bomb blast go off in Lebanon, or saw that vaccines weren't reaching the poorest countries, our better selves took over, and we did the only thing possible with closed borders.

We gave money - $198 million went to New Zealand charities working in these countries in 2020.

We care. The public expects us to do more to help Afghans who have worked with our Defence Force and our aid charities over 20 years, at huge personal risk.

Lockdown hasn't stopped nearly 30,000 people signing a petition in less than a week to bring more Afghan refugees to New Zealand now.

In 2015, when the Key Government hesitated to increase refugee numbers for Syrian families fleeing the bombs, communities stepped up. Like my mum's Catholic church group who raised enough to sponsor a family. Mayors across the country increased their popularity by offering sanctuary. Finally, the Government offered 750 extra visas to fleeing Syrians.

This time it's more personal. New Zealand blood has been spilt in Afghanistan. We know the mountains; and the people of Bamyan as friends and colleagues.

A group of New Zealand visa holders, faces blurred for their safety, crossed a sewage-filled canal outside Kabul's airport in an attempt to reach an evacuation flight. Photo / Supplied

That's why the Government should agree to a one-off increase to our refugee quota of 1000 Afghan refugees, and back Turkey's offer to the Taliban to run Kabul airport for charter flights to continue evacuations and get aid in.

Second, just as the United Kingdom has done, New Zealand needs to double aid to Afghan community organisations now. These are the local people who have made the tough call to stay and distribute food and shelter. They depend on aid.

Then we have to get our heads around what happens next for a small country like ours if America continues its retreat from the world.

Biden's disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan shows he has every intention of honouring Trump's "America First" foreign policy.

The only surprise is that people were so surprised.

Many on the left have campaigned against America's self-appointed role as "policeman of the world" since the Vietnam War. American foreign policy debacles gave them good reason. But it should give them pause that they're now joined by Trump supporters in QAnon and the racist Proud Boys who agree, America's "Liberal interventionism" and its "forever wars", need to end. That includes interventions to prevent crimes against humanity.

The images from Kabul airport are what it looks like when America goes home. Clearly the opposite of intervention isn't peace.

Bill Clinton said that one of his deepest regrets as president was the failure to prevent a genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda. Nearly a million people were slaughtered in 100 days when the United Nations failed to act.

So what happens next time there is the threat of a state-sanctioned genocide?

It's possible we'll look back on the humiliating fall of Kabul as the moment when America's decline as a superpower crystallised.

This will challenge New Zealand, caught between our ties to the United States and China. We depend on a global system of rules for trade, as well as for human rights and conflict.

That's why we're strong advocates for multilateral trade deals rather than just bilaterals. On our own we struggle to bring enough to the negotiating table.

It's why we were a loud and lonely voice at the United Nations sounding the alarm about impending genocide in Rwanda when America was silent. We too depend on an international community willing to intervene.

Josie Pagani. Photo / Mark Mitchell, File

Without rules, small countries like us get caught up in superpower struggles.

Looking to our past can help us now. We should be proud that New Zealand was one of the original architects of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle in international law after the horrors of Rwanda and the massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica. It has our name on it, and commits us and every signatory country to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

New Zealand must keep speaking out against the retreat of big countries behind their own borders, in favour of an international community willing to uphold the rules and the rights of citizens to be free of harm.

As the last American planes left, Beijing looked likely to formally recognise the Taliban Government. Russia could follow. Superpower dynamics are shifting.

New Zealand must be ready. We can start by showing that we are independent and still a strong advocate for international rules.

And we can reserve more MIQ rooms now for Afghan families who worked with us.

• Josie Pagani is executive director of the Council for International Development.