Germany: Maas's visit to Afghan neighbours to focus on helping evacuations - FM spox

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German Foreign Ministry spokesperson Cristofer Burger said that the purpose of Foreign Minister Heiko Maas’s trip to Afghanistan’s neighbours was to find ways to help Afghans who Germany has a ‘responsibility’ towards leave their country.

Maas has embarked on a long foreign journey that will see him land in Turkey, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Qatar.

Another issue for the foreign minister’s trip was “the question of how it can be made possible for those people to leave Afghanistan over land route and to get a visa through our representatives on the neighboring countries. And the other topic is also how can a civil operation of the airport be resumed again,” said Burger.

Government spokesperson Steffen Seibert also spoke at the conference saying that Chancellor Angela Merkel was in favour of introducing so-called ‘3G’ rules - vaccinated, recovered, tested or geimpft, genesen, getestest in German - for domestic travel.

“The Chancellor is still of the opinion that 3G can be a possible and sensible measure on long-distance trains and on domestic flights,” Seibert said.

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SOT, Cristofer Burger, German Foreign Ministry spokesperson (German): “The focus of this trip is mainly the question of how can we help the people for whom we hold responsibility to leave the country in safety.”

SOT, Cristofer Burger, German Foreign Ministry spokesperson (German): “And then the question of how it can be made possible for those people to leave Afghanistan over land route and to get a visa through our representatives on the neighbouring countries. And the other topic is also how can a civil operation of the airport be resumed again.”

SOT, Cristofer Burger, German Foreign Ministry spokesperson (German): “And other main topic of this trip is of course the question of how the international community as a whole will deal politically with the new situation​ in Afghanistan, which expectations, which demands we pose together to the Taliban, meeting certain minimum standards as a prerequisite for starting a conversation, and Qatar traditionally plays an important role in this due to its relationship with the Taliban.​”

SOT, Cristofer Burger, German Foreign Ministry spokesperson (German): “This gives me the possibility to to counter this - on our opinion - completely unfounded accusation​ that we would hinder or block this private initiative in any way. The case is the opposite, we had actively supported this initiative since the beginning and that was a decision from Minister Maas, who himself played an active part in the process. We are glad that with the help of Qatar and of the USA if was possible to bring the people identified by the initiative in safety over the weekend. It is a group of persons who we also consider to be extremely endangered and that’s why the foreign ministry had supported this initiative since the beginning, providing all the support requested by the organisers that we could provide.”

SOT, Steffen Seibert, German government spokesperson (German): “I mentioned Friday that France is putting in practice the 3G rule for its long-distance trains and Italy will also do that from September 1, so there it is not impossible or uncontrollable. That said, the Chancellor is still of the opinion that 3G can be a possible and sensible measure on long-distance trains and on domestic flights.​”

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Video ID: 20210830-042

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