Merz’s deal with the Taliban alarms Afghan dissidents in Germany

Merz’s deal with the Taliban alarms Afghan dissidents in Germany Under pressure from the rising far right, Germany is letting Taliban officials staff Afghan missions in exchange for more deportations. Afghan activists say the arrangement puts them at risk. By NETTE NÖSTLINGERin Berlin Illustration by Arnau Busquets Guàrdia/POLITICO Zarmina Paryani and her four sisters fear they may soon have to again face the persecutors they fled from in Afghanistan — and this time inside Germany. Paryani and her sisters were imprisoned twice in Kabul for protesting against the Taliban after the Afghan militants retook the capital in 2021, the 27-year-old said. After going into hiding for several months, the family eventually made their way to Germany in search of safe haven. But now, Berlin has struck a Faustian bargain that allows the Taliban to deepen its diplomatic foothold in Germany in return for cooperation on deporting Afghan migrants back to Afghanistan. For Paryani and other Afghan activists who resisted the Taliban at home, the arrangement is giving their former persecutors new leverage over their lives in exile. Advertisement “It’s hard to accept that my fate and my affairs are being discussed with the very same representatives whose oppression, prisons, whippings and violence I fled from,” Paryani, who worked as a midwife in Kabul and now lives in western Germany, told POLITICO. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government first struck a deal with the Afghan government announced last October that gives Taliban officials control of diplomatic missions in Berlin and Bonn in exchange for permission to return Afghan migrants directly to Afghanistan. That cooperation was deepened early this summer with a deal that allows more Taliban officials to work in Germany in return for cooperation on additional deportation flights — now up to three per month. Under the new deal, Germany has expanded deportations to include not only Afghan men convicted of crimes, but also, more broadly, Afghan men with no protected status or legal right to remain in Germany. The agreement with the Taliban makes Germany an outlier in Europe, making it the first EU country to allow Taliban-appointed officials to work in diplomatic missions inside the country. Before the agreement, Western-oriented Afghan officials representing the former government in Afghanistan had remained in charge. The arrangement comes as Merz’s government grapples with rock-bottom approval ratings and the rise of the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, now the country’s most popular political force, according to polls. The AfD’s surge comes ahead of two elections in the former East Germany, where the far-right party is ahead in polls by wide margins. In one of those states, Saxony-Anhalt, the party may take real governing power for the first time since it was founded in 2013, a result that would serve as a great humiliation for the conservative Merz, who was elected chancellor last year partly on a promise to crack down on migration. Advertisement The AfD’s rise is piling pressure on the chancellor to deliver on his election pledge to deport more migrants — even as he insists that working with the Taliban does not legitimize a regime notorious for its human rights abuses. Overall, Afghans are the third-largest group of refugees or people who have fled war to come to Germany, behind Ukrainians and Syrians. “We are not extending a hand to this Taliban regime,” Merz said in the German parliament in June. “Rather, we are seeking cooperation at the necessary technical level, which is in our country’s national interest.” ‘Nightmares’ and ‘psychological distress’ For Afghan rights activists in Germany, one of the worst consequences of Berlin’s deal with the Taliban is that it may particularly put at risk some 35,000 Afghans who came to Germany under special humanitarian programs for people deemed especially vulnerable to the Taliban. They