Off Air... with Jane and Fi - OFF AIR... EXTRA (with Anu Anand and Nabila)

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

Happy Friday! We're bringing you a bonus episode this Friday featuring an interview from our Times Radio afternoon show (2-4pm, Monday to Thursday). Fi speaks to journalists Anu Anand—who is raising money to help female Afghan journalists fighting for their profession—and Nabila, a 26-year-old exiled Afghan journalist in Pakistan. Anu's GoFundMe: www.gofundme.com/f/afghan-journalist-refugees The next book club pick has been announced! Eight Months on Ghazzah Street is by Hilary Mantel. If you want to contact the show to ask a question and get involved in the conversation then please email us: [e-mail] Follow us on Instagram! @janeandfi Podcast Producer: Eve SalusburyExecutive Producer: Rosie Cutler Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Register by March 15th. Additional terms apply. Learn more at wealth give you a 1% match. Minimum $15,000 transfer. Register by March 15th. Additional terms apply. Learn more at wealthsimple.com slash match. Welcome to this extra edition of Offer the Podcast. It's Fee here. Jane is putting her feet up gently on the desk and indulging in some lovely Milka chocolate that we were given this week by a very kind listener. So into your Friday feed come a bonus interview, either a longer version of something we've played out on The Times radio show or something new all together and this is an interview that I have done with Anu Anand who is a former BBC journalist so we hope you enjoy this interview and details at the end of how you can get involved. The latest edict from the Taliban is that they cannot appear at windows for fear of being seen by men. This adds to not being allowed to train as nurses or teachers to sing or speak out loud in public to travel freely in many cities to attend school, as well as the extreme violence often meted out for absolutely no reason at

all. It is a sealed fate because the censorship of female voices means that the reporting of all of these things is impossible to do. But there are brave people dedicated to helping Afghan journalists reach places of safety to tell their stories. Anu Anand is a former BBC journalist currently teaching at the University of Gloucester. And along with her colleague, Louisa Dalgo, she's helped many women and their families leave Afghanistan, a difficult process in itself. One of those currently being helped is Nabila, who worked as a radio journalist after getting her degree in Afghanistan in 2019 and her focus was often

on women's stories. The terrors of the Taliban are very real in her life. Her dad was picked up by the Taliban in 2021 and never seen again. That has left Nabila, who's only 26, as the breadwinner for her family. She is providing for her mother and siblings, and they have all fled to safety outside of the country. More from Nabila in just a moment, but I started this interview by asking Anno to tell me a little bit more about her involvement. So it started with sort of, okay, letters of support, maybe we can help this person get a visa, maybe we can, you know, connect them to some resources on the ground. You know, I got in touch with colleagues in South Asia where I've worked,

and Pakistan and India, and it turned out people were doing the same thing that I was doing, just trying to figure out what could be done. And slowly this sort of volunteer coalition just sort of evolved where everybody was just trying to help in some small way. And my husband and I kind of, you know, wrote all these letters of support, made phone calls to all sorts of people who might be able to, you know, help get visas. We arranged, you know, for flights, raised money amongst friends and family to kind of pay for flights. And as I say, this was just happening all over the world. And that's what strikes me that even, you know, three years on, the governments have sort of done

a couple of big airlifts, but really these efforts have been lots and lots of ordinary people with any connection to Afghanistan, whether through tourism, aid, military, you know, whatever it is, they've been helping people on the ground and it's just gotten harder and harder since then. One of the people that you've been helping is Nabila who joins us today from not Afghanistan but Pakistan. Nabila, can you tell us a bit about your story as a working journalist in Afghanistan and why it became just impossible for you to stay in your country? Yeah, those who hear my voice, I'm Nabila Sadat, a reporter from Afghanistan. I'm 26 years old and I worked in various medias and most of my programs were about women's rights and we wanted to be their voice to support and defend their rights.

And I also started working in Ghor province as a radio presenter to publicize their situation through the media, especially from every human rights that they were deprived of. In most of my programs, I talked about the crimes of the Taliban such as stoning women, cutting of women's body parts, cutting of their noses, ears, lips, killing journalists. Can I just ask you because that's just such extraordinary testimony to hear, when you were reporting on those kind of cases of so much violence against women, how fearful did you have to be that the Taliban would come and harm you and your family? So they warned me several times through the head of the radio.

They even warned the head of the radio not to allow me to enter the stadium. I didn't pay attention and told the head of the radio that it's our responsibility to be right and always tell the truth. Finally, I continued and they called me and warned me through the phone and I did not pay attention. Of course, I continued until the Taliban had sent a tracing letter to me, a manager at the radio station and mentioned my name that I was blacklisted. My manager said don't come to the radio and try to find a safe

place as soon as possible. I will never be a silent in the face of the operation that we Afghan women have suffered for years from the Taliban. I decided that day to go to Kabul and my father and we came to Kabul after that. Anu, so many people in this country want to know more about what is happening to the women of Afghanistan. And as we've heard from Nabila's story, people who were trying to tell us about what was happening are no longer safe to do so. Is there any way that we can find out the reality?

Gosh, that's such a big question. And I wish I had the answer. I get scraps of information. I think there are journalists in exile who are trying to keep alive an information network. I tend to get my information from these guys, these brave young journalists who have survived and who have risked their lives to try to tell those stories

and they're just not safe enough to be inside. But they do keep in touch. They do have relatives. They do speak to people and they do have some sense of what's going on inside. It's a really tough situation. I mean, you know what it's like. The world moves on so quickly. I mean, since the Afghan, you know, the withdrawal of forces, we've had so many other conflicts and it's hard to keep up. You've had Ukraine, you've had Gaza, you know, but I think this just reminds us that there are still these very vulnerable people that need help. One of the things that's really struck me in all of this, you know, you're saying people want to know about the plight of Afghan women. What I've found over the last three years

in trying to help young journalists is that the women are harder to help. You would think that it would be very easy to go, look, I have an Afghan woman who's risked her life to cover these stories, she needs help. Can we get her out? The women have been much harder to help simply because they suffer from the same thing

that women all over the world do, which is a kind of a lack of privilege. The men have documents, they have letters, they have recommendations, they have press cards, they have all these jazzy kind of wonderful kind of, this evidence of the work they've done, which is important. I don't wanna take that away from them.

And the women have broken a lot of boundaries to do this work, even within their own societies, and have tended to do it at a lower level, as freelancers, sometimes without the kind of recognition, and because they were particularly targeted by the Taliban, very early on, even before the forces left, they were in danger. So a lot of them destroyed the evidence of their work. They

actually destroyed the very thing that should give them sanctuary. So the evidence was like, that was like the really hard big, you know, it's like we had to kind of get other colleagues, get in touch with them and sort of try to get that evidence of the work they had done and then really like stand behind them and say, no they really need this help I know it doesn't tick every box but please please you need to understand they're at more risk so I just I find that really perverse but that's the situation we're in which is why I think it's really important to listen to to young people like Nabila. Absolutely. So Nabila what happens to you and your family now? I'm feeling like a prisoner how I don't know how to tell you but I have no work here, no job here.

Also we have no right to study here and also my brother, we all have no right, any right, any human right here. We don't live, we just, I mean, right here. We don't leave, we just, I mean, life is going like I'm a prisoner inside of home, that's all. Anna, if people are listening and actually want to do something to help, what should they do? We have a GoFundMe campaign that's been going for a few years. So if you wanted to support Nabila directly, all of the money at the moment, that anything we get goes directly to help her keep a roof over her family's head and just get their visas updated. The Pakistani government now requires them to do that every 45 days, which has doubled our costs. So we are kind of looking to support her with about £700 a month. And we've identified a potential route to resettlement

that we think is going to ultimately work. It's gonna take quite a bit of, you know, graph to get there, but I think it's going to work. And a couple of colleagues and I are working on this. So if you want to donate directly to Nabila, you can do that. Look up GoFundMe, Afghan journalist refugees. If you put those words in, it's the top results on Google.

You can also give to organizations like Free Press Unlimited. That is an international press freedom organization. It has been incredibly, very directly helpful to a lot of the cases that we've dealt with. It's a registered charity and they do incredibly good work trying to protect these brave young people. Anu, Anand and Nabila and obviously we wish Nabila the very best of luck. All details that

you might need to know from that interview are available in the description that Handy Eve our handler puts up for every edition. Enjoy your weekend, we're back on Monday. Congratulations, you've staggered somehow to the end of another Off Air with Jane and Fee. Thank you. If you'd like to hear us do this live, and we do do it live, every day, Monday to Thursday, 2-4pm on Times Radio. The jeopardy is off the scale and if you listen to this you'll understand exactly why that's the case. So you can get the radio online on DAB or on the free Times Radio app. Off Air is produced by Eve Salisbury and the executive producer is Rosie Cutler.

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