The Taliban have taken over the guarding of project sites and offices of the German Society for International Cooperation (GIZ) in Afghanistan.
“They want us to continue on site,” said Julius Spatz, Head of the Afghanistan and Pakistan Department at GIZ in Eschborn.
GIZ Board Member and Labor Director Thorsten Schäfer-Gümbel and senior managers briefed the staff on Friday afternoon about the video program they had bought in-house, including staff in Afghanistan.
So far there have been practically no attacks there, it said.
Christoph Hein
Business correspondent for South Asia / Pacific based in Singapore.
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In the past few days there had been a lot of resentment among GIZ employees themselves about how they dealt with their local staff. The news channel Al Jazeera quoted an “Afghan GIZ employee” who harshly criticized: “German soldiers who go to the airport refuse to take the local GIZ employees with them. You only take those with German passports or visas with you. And our organization has not issued any visas for us, ”criticized the employee. Of course, GIZ cannot issue visas.
Schäfer-Gümbel emphasized on Friday that the definition of the “nuclear family” used by GIZ, whose members have the right to come to Germany, stems from immigration law.
His house, whose main client is the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), has no way of expanding the circle of those to be rescued.
However, the Afghan employees were offered an advance of six months' salary.
"Due to the existing restrictions in payment transactions, a discount of up to 100,000 Afghani is currently being paid out," said a spokeswoman on Sunday.
It remains to be seen how many employees have already received the equivalent of 1011.71 euros in a logistical hussar piece.
Disappointment and horror among the employees
In-house debates show that dozens of GIZ employees were disappointed with the behavior of their employer, and some were appalled. Many colleagues spontaneously offered help, such as housing in Germany, should they leave the country. On Friday lunchtime it was said that more than a thousand local staff from the "implementing organization for German development cooperation" were still stuck in Afghanistan. 13 German employees were flown out via the airlift. So far, only more than 20 of the Afghan employees have been evacuated by plane, including their family members around a hundred people. Another 20 or so employees are said to have fled to neighboring countries by land. They would be looked after there by the respective GIZ country offices.