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  • Strangers in a Homeland
  • May Jeong (bio) and Sally Deng (bio)

Repatriation, Asylum, Immigration, Iran, Afghanistan, Migration, Deportation, Europe, Refugees, Sweden


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In Kabul, one of the world's most dangerous cities, one man works to help Afghan migrants return to a place they never knew.

In Febuary 2019, after his third attempt and as many failures to secure asylum in Sweden, Alijan Safari, along with a dozen other deportees, was put on a flight bound for Kabul, Afghanistan. Safari grew up in the Behsud district of the Maidan Wardak province, ninety miles south of Kabul, but had only been to the capital once in passing, at the age of ten. Now, nearly a decade later, he was flying back to a city he barely knew, one that, while in his home country, was all but foreign to him.

In 2001, when Safari was still a toddler, US-led NATO forces invaded and toppled the Taliban-run government of Afghanistan. By summer 2009, in the power vacuum created by the Taliban's removal, violent clashes between two of the country's ethnic-minority groups—the Hazaras, which included Safari's family, and the Kuchi tribe—reached a crescendo, displacing more than 2,500 families from the area. Safari's father was killed in the fighting. His mother, fearing for his life, decided he would be safer in Europe and entrusted him to neighbors who hoped to settle there. With the help of a loose network of migrant smugglers, the group left for Iran, then traveled to Turkey, where Safari set off on his own for Greece, selling the bangles his mother had packed for him to help pay the rest of his way. Safari traveled by car, on the subway, on trains, by foot—from Hungary to Serbia to Austria to Germany. He headed for Sweden, where his father's second cousin lived and promised to help Safari reach his intended destination—Canada—where Afghan asylum seekers often achieved more favorable outcomes with their cases.

Safari arrived in Malmö, Sweden, in 2012. He stayed with his father's second cousin and prepared for his journey onward to North America, but the smuggler with whom they had made arrangements was arrested and the trip never took place. To his surprise, Safari was barred from seeking asylum in Sweden. Following the European Union's Dublin Regulation, migrants can only apply for asylum in the country where they register their arrival in Europe—in Safari's case, Hungary, where his fingerprints had been collected. Nonetheless, he remained in Sweden. Then, in 2015, the EU temporarily suspended this requirement, paving the way for Safari's application in Sweden, where he had by then learned to speak the language. According to Safari, his first application was rejected on the grounds that he was unable to prove that he was indeed an Afghan, and allegations of misrepresenting his age. He appealed the decision and was denied again in September 2018, with authorities again questioning his country of origin, and determining that his asylum claim lacked merit. His second appeal was rejected in January 2019.

With no further recourse through the immigration courts, Safari had to make a decision: risk deportation, along with a possible reentry ban, or return to Afghanistan of his own volition, under the EU's Assisted Voluntary Return program, qualifying him to receive funds to help him reintegrate back in Afghanistan. Safari opted to return voluntarily, with plans to use the money to head for Europe again.

The year prior to Safari's return, the United Nations office in Afghanistan logged the country's highest-ever recorded number of civilian deaths in the country—nearly eleven thousand—along with the highest number of child fatalities. In June 2019, the Institute for Economics and Peace, an Australian nonpartisan think tank, labeled Afghanistan the world's "least peaceful" country, overtaking Syria. Kabul, meanwhile, remained the country's most violent city.

Descending into Kabul, Safari felt nothing but dread. His mother and brother were surviving on the charity of others in the city; now, [End Page 86] Safari would be an added burden. He worried...

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