 Welcome everyone. Welcome friends of Anthony Hyman, friends of SOAS, distinguished guests and visitors, students and colleagues to the 20th annual Hyman lecture first delivered in 2003. I'm Scott Newton. I'm reader in the laws of Central Asia. I'm chair of the Center for Contemporary Central Asia and the caucuses and the head of the SOAS School of Law, Gender and Media. And I'm very pleased to be able to welcome you here in the flesh. And what we hope is the other end of this long pandemic tunnel that we entered just two years ago, actually right after the 2020 Hyman lecture, if you recall. I'm here today to introduce to you Matthew Acons, our speaker this evening author and prize winning journalists, who is going to talk to us about the refugee crisis and Afghanistan. The Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture has become an established annual event at SOAS now completing its second decade, bringing together those with an interest in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, and providing an opportunity for leading scholars opinion and journalists to reflect on issues of topical interest. The continuing success of the Anthony Hyman Memorial Lecture is a testament to the impact with which Anthony had on thinking about about Afghanistan and the affection in which he was held by his many friends and associates. Anthony, a SOAS graduate was expert on Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Central Asia and a commentator for the BBC World Service for more than 20 years. Anthony was a linguist, historian, bibliophile, art lover and traveler. Just to remind you the lecture series is sustained on the sustained on the strength of donations, as well as a contribution from our side from SOAS. So please do consider making a donation to the Anthony Hyman Memorial Fund to help cover the costs of the lecture in future. The lecture series is equally a labor of love and of fundraising, or perhaps of love manifest by fundraising, as well as attendance and support. I'm delighted to welcome Matthew tonight under even more fateful circumstances than when we first approached him with the invitation some months back on the heels of the extraordinary events. Late last summer which saw an accelerated mass exodus from Afghanistan of Afghans and foreigners both following the collapse of the Afghan government and the re-ascendancy of the Taliban. Now of course at this juncture we are all plundered into an entirely novel and until recently unimaginable refugee crisis with its center of dispersal in the middle of the European continent. The Afghan and Ukraine refugee crisis resound with assonances and dissonances and present parallels and stark contrasts in many dimensions. We in the Academy, particularly those of us who work in the field and in newsworthy contexts, especially in conflict, constantly rub elbows and share hotel space with journalists, but don't often have occasion to take their measure and significance for our own scholarly profession or the world at large, with the exception perhaps of my colleagues at the Center for Global Media and Communications, in which is part of the School of Law, Gender and Media. Matthew is a timely and instructive reminder to us of just how much journalism counts of what it alone can compass and how exceptional journalism shares so many characteristics with impactful scholarship. The marshalling and analysis of data, the assessment of sources and evidence, novelty and insight, framing and narrative drive, capacity to challenge and overturn received opinion. Indeed, the chief difference is perhaps not so much in the relative quantity of footnotes and extent of bibliography, or even the volume of material produced so much as an extraordinarily compressed timeframes and pressurized circumstances in which journalism must be produced. The academics and journalists both live and perish by deadlines, but whereas for us academics, those are set months and years in advance, for journalists they recur with daily or weekly relentlessness. Matthew has for some years been an extraordinarily perspicacious and productive reporter from the overlapping theaters of Afghan public affairs politics conflict and quotidian life. His byline has graced the pages of Rolling Stone the New York Times Magazine and the New Yorker, three of my personal paragons for good biographical reasons. There was an impressive list of diverse and insightful articles from exhaustive feature length investigative long reads to shorter pieces. He bears the marks of a journalist with significant public stature awards like the George Polk and Livingston awards and fellowships at think tanks and academic organizations, including the type media center New America the Council on Foreign Relations, and the American Academy in Berlin. His recent debut book, the naked don't fear the water, however, is an altogether singular and bureau and bravura piece of journalism, revealing a level of soul and body commitment not seen since Hunter as Thompson, but in this case with issues and circumstances of existential and global gravity. The, those of you who haven't come across it is unique in the analysis of refugee reporting and invites comparison in its immersiveness and novelistic Brio with Dave Eggers what is the what. The difference of course is that whereas Eggers imagined the journey of his subject and reconstructed it after multiple interviews. Matthew accomplished it with his subject and accompanied him every painful eventful and fearful step of the way. I will now turn the podium over to Matthew, who perhaps alone among his peers has not just the ideal journalistic CV for his chosen topic, but the street cred and the road cred as well. We're lucky to have this opportunity. So please join with me in welcoming Matthew who will will speak for about 45 minutes, after which he will entertain questions from the audience. Thank you for having me. It's an honor to be here. When I was invited to to give the lecture this year by Jonathan good hand. I took a look at the previous speakers and was a little bit intimidated because a lot of them are the scholars that I have admired and learn from over the years as a journalist including one of my mentors Barney Rubin. He was extremely influential on the topic of Afghan migration. So I certainly did not have the same scholarly credentials, but I have been there at some of these key moments and so I think my experiences are probably what is most of interest to you tonight so On that note, I went to Afghanistan in 2008, the age of 24 and as a freelancer without much experience and I quickly discovered that even though my mother is a Japanese ancestry and my father is of European ancestry and I grew up in Canada. I look very Afghan and by you know by sort of accident of genetics, and I felt very, I was very interested in the country and very fascinated by what was happening and also, you know, it was it was disturbing as well, but I ended up staying I spent. I started living in Kabul. I, and you know spent years there in essence working as a journalist and so one of the first people that I met in Afghanistan is someone who in my book I call Omar. So Omar was one of my first friends he was about the same age as me. He had grown up in exile, like millions of Afghans his mother had actually fled the Soviets when she was pregnant with him. He lived in Iran and Pakistan, and he, you know, like many Afghans dreamed of a better life elsewhere in the West. And that was a dream that became more urgent, you know as a situation in a country worsened. So Omar had actually returned after 2001 and he worked as a translator with the foreign military. Omar started to work with journalists so he'd worked with Canadians the Americans, and he had long hope to emigrate with one of these visas the American government gave to Afghan and Iraqi employees and he should have qualified, based on his service with the American military, but he didn't have all the paperwork and he was actually denied his visa was rejected his application was rejected in 2015. And this, as I'm sure you'll all recall was the year of the year migration crisis in the Mediterranean, when over the course of about a year, around a million people crossed through the Mediterranean into Europe. It was the greatest movement of refugees by sea and history. And after Syrians Afghans were the second largest number among them. So, Omar, his visa to America, you know what you should have rightfully had being denied, decided to risk his life on the smugglers wrote to Europe. I wanted to cover the crisis. I wanted to report the migration trail from the inside. So I decided to go with him. And the only way that I could do that, given the risk of being arrested and separated or kidnapped was to go undercover as an Afghan refugee myself took company Omar. And I was able to do that, as I already mentioned, because of my face and also because that I'd learned Daria, you know, fairly fluently after spending years in the country. So that, so that's, that's basically the background for the book. I mean, we didn't have leaving until 2016 that following summer after the borders already closed because Omar had been had fallen in love and he was worried that he left his father would had his beloved to another suitor in his absence but because he was rejected for being so poor and also being from a different sect he realized ultimately the only way he was going to have a chance of when your hand was to leave and go to Europe and be able to come back and bring her there. So to go to win her he had to risk losing her. So I'm just going to read an excerpt from the day of our departure for the border with Iran, where migrants crossed through the desert of Nimroz to in order to get around the border walls there. On the day of our departure, Omar took the Corolla to the used car market in Cody sanghi, where, despite his battered condition, he got 3000 bucks. It was a manly car, he told me afterward, looking for Lauren. That was it for farewells. His family was already gone. And his beloved was locked behind her father's walls. For the second time in his life, Omar was about to become a refugee. Plus Nimroz left in the early hours of the morning. When evening came I laid out the robe and pantaloons which I'd wear in the borderlands and stuff the jeans and shirt from bush bizarre into my backpack. I added some dried fruits and nuts in case we got stranded in the desert, along with a tourniquet and God's compresses, since the border guards were so trigger happy. The risks of going undercover were much higher now. The struggling gangs were notorious kidnappers and had links to the Taliban. If they found out I was a westerner, I could be worth millions of dollars to them. I was even more worried about the Iranian government. The police could be brutal during arrests, Afghan migrants were usually deported without further punishment. But the Iranians realized who I was, I would probably be accused of spying. The Americans were arrested hiking on the border with Iraq in 2009 spent a couple years in prison. Before the Iranians, before the Sultan of Oman was able to negotiate their release. I'd explained to Omar that the Iranians discovered me. He had to claim we'd met on the road and deny knowing my real identity. Otherwise he'd share my fate. But how would they know. The Iranians often travel without papers. They might be taken by robbers or the police. And Omar and I were both leaving our passports behind in Kabul. I took out the cheap smartphone that I bought for the trip and went through it carefully, deleting my call records. I checked the time. Omar wasn't picking me up until midnight. After months of waiting, it hardly seemed real that we were leaving tonight. I showered and stood in front of the mirror. The Iranians didn't have my fingerprints. I wasn't tattooed. I was circumcised. Skin is an opaque surface. Language is what betrays us. My Samsung rang. It was Omar. What's up. Oh, not much. Is it a problem if some other people come with us? What? Is it okay if Malik and Elham come with us? Malik was a shy neighbor whose father had lost his mind. Elham was Omar's maternal cousin. He explained that he'd offered to loan them the money he'd made from selling the Corolla so they could come to Turkey. They were both close to Omar and trustworthy, but it seemed last minute to say the least. Suppressing my irritation, I reminded myself that it was Omar's decision. Not mine. Do whatever you want, I said. In the end, when Omar showed up at a taxi at midnight, it was just Malik in the back seat. I got in beside him and we took off. When I greeted him, he tried to smile, but only managed a terrified grimace. I wondered if my presence as a foreigner was comforting. Probably not. Or do you think I had some special way of getting us out of trouble? Of course, Malik had already gone through the desert and knew the trials lay ahead. Omar and Malik were silent as we raced through empty streets, leaving their city behind. I breathed evenly trying to slow my pulse. The months of preparation and patience would be put to the test now. We were headed to a neighborhood on the western edge of the city called Kampani. It was a starting point for travel south along the National Ring Road, Highway 1, which curved down to Kandahar, and then back up to Herat. Company's main drag, it's asphalt shredded by truck traffic, was lined with cheap hotels called Musafir Hauna. Behind them were feedlots and slaughterhouses of livestock, a maze of mud walls by a ravine running with awful. We paid the driver and got out, making our way past families guarding piles of luggage and villagers counting sacks of grain and cans of cooking oil. You could spot the other Iran-bound migrants by their backpacks. The Musafir Hauna were lit with strings of colored lights beneath which vendors sat at their stalls, heat with nuts and cigarettes, or sauntered among the passengers with trays of wallets and prayer beads. Ticket touts cried the names along Highway 1. Wardak, Fazni, Zabel, Kandahar, Hellman, Nimroz, Herat. Beggars worked the crowd, some proud in Italy, others haggard junkies. I'm praying for you, O travelers, blessings on your voyage, O Muslims. There were many bus companies applied Highway 1, but we bought tickets from Ahmad Shah Abdali, encouraged by the relatively modern looking coach parked out front, a Mercedes 0404, a model introduced in 1991. When the gates opened at 1 a.m., we joined the crowd jostling into the bus yard. There were more than a dozen glossy 404s the cabin lights on, bound for different destinations. But where was the bus to Nimroz? Back of the lot, an employee told us. There we found a row of decrepit Mercedes 0303s, a model from 1974. Our bus had a Masha-La sticker obscuring much the cracked windshield and a biohazard decal by the door. It's side read in German, children's paradise, dobbler travel, and gave an address in lower Saxony. The bus conductor stubby with a balding fringe searched our packs and then wrote our seat numbers on them with a marker. What's he looking for? joked Omar, who I noticed had brought an extra duffle. Who takes drugs and guns to Kandahar? It was like carrying cold in Newcastle. For safety reasons, the government didn't allow the buses to leave before three in the morning. We tried snoozing upright in our seats as hawkers and beggars shuffled up and down the aisle invoking the power of God and energy drinks. While more passengers straggled in, mostly young men with backpacks. At last, the overhead lights went off. There was a coral revving and then a concatenation of horns. Starting with the newer 404s, the buses departed on mass. As we rumbled down the strip, more coaches poured from the other company's lots, forming into a single, thunderous convoy. The drivers jostled for position. They called this part Buscashie after the national sport where teams of horsemen fight for a headless goat carcass. Picking up speed on the bridge over the ravine, the bus pack cleared the edge of the power grid and plunged into darkness. So that is the start of our journey, which had many starts, many fall starts, and many twists and turns, which I won't get into here. But we did eventually end up in Europe, and along with many other refugees, and I want to return to the question situation of Afghan refugees, but first I'm going to fast forward five years to the events this summer. So I finished me more or less finished writing the book at the beginning of the summer, last summer and I went back to Afghanistan in June, planning to resume, you know, doing journalism, which had been on hold for about five years while I was writing this. And, you know, like, I think almost everybody was not expecting the end to be just so near. And events began to happen incredibly quickly. I think that we're going to be reflecting on the question of how, and why this happened, and why it happened such a shockingly quick way before the government for many years but I think it's interesting because on one hand, we, the root causes of the decline of the Afghan Republic of the failure of the international intervention, you know, were obvious. They've certainly the skeptics of, you know, the Western military intervention and I consider myself one of them. I mean, in 2010, you know, Astri Sur gave a lecture, this very lecture, you know, warning about the contradictions of the surge, arguing that less would actually be more or our book is titled when more is less. So, you know, 40 year civil war fueled by foreign superpowers, malignant corruption in the government, Pakistani militaries covert support for the Taliban. And above all the fact that the US led occupation and created a state that was completely dependent on foreign troops and money. This was obvious to us. And yet, and yet, we were all caught by surprise in a way that I think contributed to the horrifying tragedy that took place this summer. And I do think that it was related to a kind of state of denial that was actively fed by lies that were told by by many parties, I think the US military, the foreign militaries were feeding a stream of false reports about the capability of the Afghan security forces that contributed to a, you know, false impression that they would be able to stand for at least longer than than in fact they didn't even stand they didn't even last past the last four years leaving so. There was also lies that were told by the Afghan government about the depth of its support about its commitment to democracy to human rights. You know, this was a republic that was founded in the name of those things of democracy and yet it was based on impart for all the good that it did accomplish it you know this is a place where the UN had every two years put out a report on systemic torture in its prisons. You know, this is a republic that was also founded on on repression. That was was big, you know, surviving off a tremendous amount of violence inflicted by airstrikes in rural areas. Much of it, you know, almost impossible to report on the kind of airstrikes that, you know, we witnessed this summer I reported on on one this summer that was that did make headlines the drone strike that killed 10 innocent people seven of them children in Kabul, who were falsely thought to be members of the Islamic State. So, I think these lies, possibly contributed to just how how blind we were to what was coming but eventually they couldn't be sustained the truth came to Kabul in the form of the Taliban at the gates. And we saw what was a remarkably accelerating collapse as local commanders switch sides and this is of course something that we saw before in the 1990s that's how the Taliban came to power. And the in 2001 that's, that's how the Taliban collapses swiftly after the US invasion. So, there was something I think that we'd witnessed before that there's something they've been precedent for. But on the other hand, I think that the speed of, of, of flight from the Taliban the way that so many Afghan elites already had one foot out the door that they had, you know, second passports and investments overseas is very particular to our own international system you know that so called free movement of capital, you know, welcomes saw transfer of wealth out of the country, billions of dollars often in cash leaving each year. So, the Taliban understood this, and we could we saw what was a policy of Afwa, a general pardon that they began to become more and more insistent public about they were exploiting the perception of the government was going to collapse that wouldn't have the departure of the foreigners, and they began to very publicly post about how they would accept the surrender of government soldiers, give them bus fare to go home, the message was anyone who laid down their arms and accepted, you know the Islamic Emirate would be forgiven. And it was, it was, it was by and large a successful policy one that was in their interest. Now that they were about to become government, the government they had a different different set of incentives. And that was the reason why I decided to stay. I mean I could decide to stay along with my housemate who's a Belgian photographer because most of the international media organizations there were evacuating including the New York Times they pulled out their, their whole local international staff but we we could stay and we decided to because we didn't think the Taliban were going to to kill us we thought they would be true to their word that they would want to protect foreign journalists and aid workers NGOs, in order to to begin their you know kind of campaign for international legitimacy. So, I wrote a story that talks about the events that I witnessed and and also what else was happening in the background the deal between the attempted to deal between the Afghan government and the Taliban and that was by the US negotiating team in Doha. Salman Khalilzad was was the key figure in that and that was an attempt to basically halt the Taliban outside the gates of Kabul for two weeks to allow for an ordinary transfer of power that that failed. The presidents, you know President Ghani is of course panic flight from the palace that day. Ultimately of the Taliban, somewhat reluctantly the Taliban themselves had not been expecting to capture the Kabul that that quickly and they weren't ready. They, they didn't want to, they weren't ready so they didn't they actually didn't want to come into Kabul I firmly believe that they did enter the city I think with probably less than 1000 men, which is less than the number of Marines that were at the airport, and certainly less than the tens of thousands of Afghan army and police who who abandoned their posts and weapons that day. So, I'm just going to read a moment from from the story from that day on August 15. And so we, you know, we've been trying to Jim and I, my husband, my friend is a photographer. We've been trying to just understand what was happening that day as as we watch the government sort of collapse. And there were all these rumors that Taliban would enter Kabul we've been first walking around the center of town, and then bicycling. You know, seeing all these helicopters taking off in the embassy panic convoys of government officials drive to the airport soldiers, you know, putting on plain clothes and leaving their posts, long lines of prisoners walking through the streets, having an escape from police hierarchy after, you know, after the Taliban arrived. So, which is the main prison outside of Kabul. So, so we're wondering where are the Taliban. It was nearly 5pm. When Jim and I returned home on our bicycles. Our driver Akbar was waiting for us. The streets were clear. So we decided to drive to the western outskirts of the city, with a main Taliban advance would be arriving from Wardak province. Traffic was light until we hit the main arterial road that runs west, where a stream of cars was leaving the city. As Akbar crept up the on ramp, we got down and walked to the start of the driveway of the intercontinental hotel. We went into robes as well, but still had their weapons. We introduced ourselves as journalists. The war is over. One said, he laughed. We've surrendered. You surrendered I asked to who they smiled and pointed to a bearded man sitting in their midst. He had a black scarf over his head and was wearing white high tops. He carried a Kalashnikov and a radio. The first we'd seen that day. He returned our greetings gruffly. Jim asked to take a photo and he assented. He was from Wardak and spoke a little diary. How long have you been a Mujahid I asked. 18 years he said. I asked if he had anything to tell the public. Don't worry, we have no problem with ordinary people. All that's propaganda. What about the foreigners at the airport. The foreigners should go. We don't have any need of them, he said. He'd assumed I was Afghan. If you and I can make peace, then what do we need them for? The police had the giddiness of condemned men granted a reprieve. They crowded shyly around the Talib who seemed annoyed by his duty but not in the least concerned about being surrounded by our men who would have shot him a day ago. The cops wanted to pose for a photo with him. After Jim snapped it, the Talib waived us away. The leader said we're not supposed to give interviews. By now the card made it up the off ramp up the on ramp. And we got back in and headed to the western edge of the city and predominantly passed to a neighborhood called company. The area drew rural migrants, many of whom were sympathetic to the insurgents. As we approached we could see crowds gathered by the side of the road cheering. A ruthless scarf wrapped around his face stood in the intersection, waving a white banner with handwritten Arabic script. There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet. A tan Ford Ranger drove by with armed Taliban fighters sitting inside. Several more police and army vehicles followed, including Humvees and four and a half ton trucks. The Taliban on board were holding American rifles, M16s and M4s. Booty out of the city, back to their lines on the outskirts. The crowd of men, mostly young, was whistling and cheering. Packs of little children ran after the trucks trying to jump aboard the rear bumper. Jim had his camera out. The Taliban were happy to be photographed. The warfighters roared by on motorcycles, armed and blaring, auto-tuned, taranas, Islamic chants from the cell phones. At the main company roundabout, there was an immense crowd cheering. Long lived the Taliban. That was August 15 from an article I wrote for the New York Times magazine called, Inside the Fall of Kabul. So the fall of the Republic has been a catastrophe for many people. Over the course of 20 years, we created one of the most aid dependent states in history. And so the sudden, you know, cut off of development aid has had fairly predictable consequences. I think it's not fully acknowledged just how widespread malnutrition and poverty were prior to the collapse. To a large extent, you know, in the latter half of the Republic, absolute poverty increased, you know, for a combination of just violence and insecurity in rural areas that meant aid couldn't get there, corruption, you know, inefficiency and competence. But the collapse has pushed an already bad situation into, you know, the point of the point where the United Nations, this winner, estimated that half of Afghans are at risk of starvation. And that combined with the Taliban's very real, you know, repressiveness, and the fact that countries isolated has led a whole new wave of Afghans to flee their country. One of the results of the Taliban's swift rise to power has been that the fighting has stopped in much the country. The roads are secure in a way they've never been for decade for more than a decade. So I was able to drive down to Nimroz in the southwest of the country from Kabul this fall, and return to Zaranj, the provincial capital on the border with Iran. And there we interviewed smugglers and migrants and it was clear that there was numbers that they hadn't seen since the 2015 migration crisis, according to smugglers. You know, despite all the investments in border walls and defenses, there are still, there was an unprecedented number of Afghans crossing. There was an estimate of that was around a million just through that route alone over the winter. And many of those Afghans, most of them probably are going to Iran, search of work, but some will certainly go further afield to Turkey, and eventually to Europe. So, but they will face, I think a much worse, the much more difficult journey that Omar and I did and though it's the same route but since then you know there's been considerable strengthening hardening of borders. In response to the migration crisis in 2015. You know the Europe's response that has been to invest in border walls to make to make the system harsher to pay countries like Turkey to try to keep migrants from coming. Just 10 days before the fall of Kabul, six EU countries had, including Germany had urged you know the European Union not to halt deportations. On August 5 saying stopping return since the wrong signal, it is likely to motivate even more Afghan citizens to leave their home for the EU. So that it is, you know, no longer possible to deport Afghans back to Afghanistan from the EU though I'm sure that's at the top of the priority for for some European countries and an incentive to at some point resume diplomatic relations with Taliban. But for now it is true that Afghans, you know very rightfully have a much higher chance of being given asylum should they reach Europe, or the UK. And I see that's, but that's only if they can get here and fact is that the, the road has has gotten harder. And that is, you know, a deliberate system to keep refugees outside of the side of Europe. So, I'm going to conclude just by reading a passage from the book. And it's about Omar's childhood in Iran. As he grew up. Omar's looks came to resemble Jamal's more than any of the boys. He shared his father's musical tastes too, and love to listen to his cassettes. All these like Ahmed Zair but also a new generation of diaspora singers voices from the West to long for home, such as Farhad Daria, the song Kabul John was a hit for 90s. Let me sing from Iran to Pakistan. You have news from dear Kabul, beloved. Afghans were increasingly unwelcome in Iran. They became more predatory. But Omar with his light eyes had it easier than the hazards who are marked by their more Asian faces, who got followed home by bullies calling Kessafat Afghani Afghan garbage. No, his hair was brown and his accent sounded like any Shirazis, but his swagger was modeled on the angry young men in the Bollywood films he adored. He was big for his age and hot blooded. He learned how to handle a knife from the local Tufts, the bad mosh, but stay clear of the heroin that was raging through the city. He kept working right through school enough to buy himself a bicycle and a radio shine shoes and harvested pistachios. The age of 10 you could lift 50 pound tubs of ice cream at the shop. At 13 he started working in construction. But he wanted to become a doctor and help people or pilot and see the whole world. He knew there was a better life somewhere in a place where he would belong. A friend of his lived near the airport, and they go out and spend hours by the fence, watching for planes. The end of the Cold War changed how the West saw refugees. The conflicts in poor countries were no longer deemed proxy battles between superpowers and their ideologies. Terrible wars without faith or law, no less foreign to the logic of Klausowitz than to that Hegel wrote the war correspondent come philosopher Bernard Henri Levy. After the Soviets left Afghanistan in 1989. Millions of Afghans home. They all wanted to return. But Mary I'm refused. She didn't trust the fundamentals rebels to let her girls continue their education. When the communist government collapsed three years later, the Mujahideen and militias turned on each other, and the West turned away. The world has no business in that country's tribal disputes and blood feuds proclaimed the times of London. Now came the time of the warlords. Devotion died. Affection perished. The poet Hallyla Hallyla had written. We are drowning in a sea of blood. The devastation of the 90s would stand as a warning to Afghans two decades later when the Americans started to go and the government teetered. flee while you can. Kabul became a maze of ruins carved up by arm checkpoints, crossing the meant risking debt. It might be the only way to avoid starvation. From a letter, Mariam learned that some militiamen had robbed your brother and beat him until he went blind in one eye. Then the Taliban, with harsh justice as their almost singular attraction swept across the country. In 1996, they captured Kabul. Five years later, Omar's family received long awaited good news. Their brother, who'd emigrated to the United States a decade earlier, was going to sponsor their refugee application. But they had to leave Iran and go to Pakistan where there was an American consulate. They sold what they couldn't carry and went to stay with one of Jamal's sisters in Peshawar. When Mariam and Jamal went to apply at the US Embassy, they were scheduled for a follow-up interview a few months later. It was late summer, 2001. On September 11th, they watched on TV as the Twin Towers burned. The US Special Forces and their warlord allies were in Kabul by the time they returned to the embassy. The official there told them that refugee applications for Afghans are being suspended. Mariam recalled these words, your country is free now. Go home. They returned in battered Toyota pickups and Mercedes buses long retired from Germany. They came on foot and on donkey, family by family over mountain passes. And in the throngs of thousands, the great border crossings of Weish and Torch. They landed in Boeing 747s wearing suits and freshly shined shoes. They came bearing master's degrees and prosthetic limbs and red cheeked infants. Five million returned. It was the largest repatriation program in UN history. The commitment to a stable and free and peaceful Afghanistan is a long-term commitment said President George Bush standing beside the new Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai. The Taliban had prohibited music. The first song played by Radio Afghanistan was Daria's Kabul John. Do you have news from dear Kabul beloved. And have you heard from me. In the spring of 2002, Omar and his family took a bus at the hybrid pass and arrived at the border of their own country. At the crossing, the stark white banner of the Taliban have been replaced by the black, red and green of the King's time. The site of the flag filled Omar with hope. When I, when I saw, you know, the Taliban banner flying above the palace this summer. I felt, I think we all thought about how these cycles of history that come around again seem, you know, how helpless we are to prevent them. But I think it's important to remember that for Afghans, you know, we're now in their fourth decade. It's been for more than four that four decades of conflict violence our country with with no end in sight. I'm sorry to say. And, you know, one of the most important survival strategies. And, and Afghans have, as a result of these journeys these migrations which are as, as, as Alessandro Montsouris has pointed out, you know, never unidirectional they involve returns and, and, and multiple displacements they form a national community. And that diaspora is really I think something that we should bear in mind is one of the one of the last options that are available to many Afghans and the restrictive borders restricted immigration laws that choke off the life of that diaspora that make it impossible for families to reunite impossible people to study, get jobs. The crisis in Ukraine there's many things that we could we could say about that, about the difference between the treatment of Ukrainian refugees and Afghan or Syrian refugees, and perhaps we will get that in the question and answer. But I think what it's interesting is that just how it shows us how much these crises, refugee crises migration crises are caused not only by wars and other catastrophes, but by laws by systems of laws and borders. You know, Ukrainians one of the reasons why you have so many Ukrainian refugees, more than four million I believe is because they can't leave their country, they're allowed. They can travel without visas the European Union, could drive their own cars to Poland. It didn't have to hire smugglers to take them across the deserts and mountains. They didn't have to risk their lives in little boats. And that is of course the situations, situation of Afghans today. So, thank you very much.