In November, 28 former female MPs gathered in Greece. They’d fled the Taliban in dramatic trend, and have been now reunited in a group centre run by Melissa Community, a grassroots organisation for female migrants and refugees that performed a task in their evacuation.
The journalist Amie Ferris-Rotman was there; she tells Nosheen Iqbal in regards to the emotional first assembly of the Afghan girls’s parliament in exile in Athens. There, the ladies – some junior politicians, some elder stateswomen, some from distinguished rich political households, some from poorer backgrounds – traded tales of their escapes and shared hopes for the country they left behind. Shagufa Noorzai, 22, who had been the youngest member of parliament earlier than the Afghan authorities fell, says she desires the ladies left behind in Afghanistan to know they haven’t been forgotten.
Greece, with its personal difficult political relationship with immigration, is in some methods an unlikely haven for these girls, however for now, it’s the place they’ve discovered security. Whereas the ladies wait to see if they are going to be granted asylum in locations reminiscent of Canada, the US and Britain, they’re drafting coverage proposals on all the pieces from combating starvation to educating girls – and try to make their voices heard.
{Photograph}: Joel van Houdt/The Guardian
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