Come hear what it is like to live in Afghanistan and try to protect human rights in the country.
Our two speakers are an Afghan who fled the country and an American who is still there. International refugees from violent and repressive regimes are a global problem. While Ukraine and Afghanistan and Syria and Venezuela are the home-countries of a large number of refugees, focus in this presentation will be on the Afghan situation, its current realities and in-country victims as well as Afghan refugees. Reporting on refugee situations is generally limited to tragic photos of isolated incidents (capsized boats, refugees in cramped camps, and fences to keep out refugees at border crossings).
Personal stories are critical to understanding the dimensions of the crisis, which impacts an estimated 100 million refugees around the world. Ensuring rule of law in nations everywhere is theoretically the approach that will staunch the flow of refugees, but that is a long-term goal. In the interim, this presentation proposes to put the spotlight on individual cases where there are efforts to move toward supporting those facing repression and human rights violations in Afghanistan, while others follow the pathway to citizenship; in Afghanistan and in other countries, like the US, we should raise awareness of the power given to refugees when they are able to pursue education that will raise up individual refugees and their families, and the overwhelming need to provide medical relief to victims of political violence.
