The face of Farkhunda Malikzada, lynched by an angry mob in 2015, confronts Kabul citizens near the site of her murder.
Since late August, more than 2,000 Afghans and their families—including prominent female leaders, journalists and civil-society activists—have been evacuated to Albania by third-party nongovernmental organizations, such as the Afghan Future Fund [and the National Endowment for Democracy], notes Vance Serchuk, executive director of the KKR Global Institute and an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.
At a time when many Americans have lost faith in their ability to change the world for the better, Albania’s leadership should be instructive, he writes for The Wall Street Journal:
A quarter century ago, the U.S. successfully rallied the trans-Atlantic democracies to end the genocidal violence tearing apart the former Yugoslavia. Now the Western Balkans can help remind a demoralized West what principled world leadership should look like—and why it is still necessary.
Hallam Ferguson, a Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson Center, found himself in Tirana, as a volunteer with the International Republican institute (IRI), welcoming a straggling line of Afghans as they were processed by Albanian municipal officials, then sent to dormitory rooms only recently commandeered from incoming university students.
The NED family of NGOs, including IRI, the Center for International Private Enterprise, and the National Democratic Institute, or NDI, had marshalled resources in the U.S. and around the world to arrange a series of flights for their former staff and families from Kabul to Abu Dhabi and then on to Albania, where they had negotiated landing rights and accommodations directly with the Albanian government, he writes in a must-read essay for The Wilson Quarterly. RTWT
@hallamferguson, fmr staffer w @NEDemocracy partner @IRIglobal details a painful trajectory for the @TheWilsonCenter‘s @wilsonquarterly https://t.co/ctDCYDdYR3
— Democracy Digest (@demdigest) December 28, 2021
