Kabul airport, Author: Eliezer Gabriel
350 artists, filmmakers and performers signed an open letter to the U.S. government requesting that it aid Afghans fleeing their country after the Taliban takeover.
Arts for Afghanistan wrote the letter. It calls upon the U.S. government "to do everything in its power to facilitate the departure of Afghanistan's at-risk Afghans and to include artists and filmmakers, performers and writers in that group."
The signatories include Coco Fusco, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Teju Cole, Lynne Tillman, Joshua Cohen, Rivka Galchen, and dozens of others.
According to the letter's authors, culture workers were taking great risks when depicting the experiences of Afghans and articulating their aspirations. This was often done with the encouragement and support of the U.S. government.
Eric Gottesman (political scientist and one of the authors of the letter) said that art is a proxy to humanity. "The voices of artists can be seen in Afghanistan and around the globe as they speak truth to power, which is why we consider them dangerous," said Eric Gottesman, one of the letter's authors.
The letter asks that the U.S. government speed up visa processing for cultural workers, and eliminate the requirement that visas must be processed in a third nation.
"In addition to these demands, we call upon governments of all countries to facilitate the evacuation of Afghan refugees by offering asylum, aid, and to provide assistance," the letter states. "We insist on the protection for all who have dedicated themselves to fostering freedom of expression and civil society"
"We are desperately worried for our friends, colleagues, and peers in Afghanistan, and we do not want them to be forgotten," filmmaker Mariam Ghani (daughter of now-deposed Afghan president Ashraf Ghani) added. "We were deeply disturbed by the exclusion of artists and cultural workers from State Department categories of at risk Afghans prioritized for evacuation, despite the Taliban’s long and well-known history in targeting art, artists, cultural heritage, and culture."
According to the group, they are also for removing any limits on the number of Afghan refugees allowed into the U.S. and stopping all deportations of Afghan refugees currently in progress.
Read the open letter: here
Jean Dubreil