Beijing, 8 Dec (Xinhua) -- In a testimony submitted to the British Parliament on 7 December, Raphael Marshall, who served in the British Foreign Office, slammed the British foreign service for bureaucracy, poor functioning, lack of planning, and other problems, which led to the chaos and failure of the evacuation of civilians from Afghanistan.
Major British media outlets referred to Marshall as a whistleblower and reported the news on the front page of the day. In the 40-page testimony to the House of Commons Foreign Relations Task Force, Marshall said the number of unread emails in the British Foreign Office's mailbox dealing with Letters for Help from Afghanistan had been at around 5,000 in August. He estimated that only 5 per cent of the Afghans who applied to evacuate with the British side were helped.
On August 22, a large crowd gathered outside the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. (Xinhua News Agency, photo by Rahmatura Arizada)
According to the British "Guardian" report, Marshall graduated from Oxford University in the United Kingdom, served in the diplomatic service for 3 years, and during the British evacuation operation from Afghanistan, he voluntarily applied to work in the special project team of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Marshall said no one in the project team had studied or worked there, and there was a lack of detailed knowledge of that country, and the screening criteria given by the Foreign Ministry were too subjective and unreliable, leading to less senior diplomats in the project team "beating drums" about who would decide who would go.
Marshall also criticized the bureaucratic style of the British Foreign Office. In his testimony, he said that the foreign ministry worked 5 days a week, 8 hours a day, and even in the face of emergency mass evacuations, the ministry could only expect employees to work overtime voluntarily, not ask them to work overtime.
For example, he said, there were five consecutive days when no one in the special project team worked the night shift.
In addition, Marshall also criticized British Prime Minister Boris Johnson for stepping in during the evacuation operation, instructing the front to "spend a lot of effort" to help a charitable organization transport animals back to the UK, squeezing out the already scarce transportation resources. The British side's move caused criticism in British domestic public opinion in August this year.
Marshall submitted the problems he had identified in the project team to Philip Barton, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at the end of August, which initiated an internal investigation. Marshall left the British Foreign Office in September.
Speaking about the evacuation, the British government said it had transported more than 15,000 people out of Afghanistan in two weeks by air, second only to the United States.
According to the Guardian, Britain's foreign secretary Dominique Raab's transfer to justice in September may be related to Marshall's report submitted late August and the launch of an internal investigation by the Foreign Office.
Raab was interviewed by the BBC on the 7th in response to the whistleblower's words and said that some criticisms were out of touch with reality. The criticism comes from relatively low-ranking, office-sitting diplomats, whose local situation in Afghanistan is much more difficult than they thought, "and the main challenge comes from how to verify the identity of applicants ahead and transport them safely to Kabul airport, rather than deciding in Whitehall (who to take with them)".
Whitehall is a street in the center of London, England, is the seat of many government offices in the United Kingdom, people often use Whitehall to refer to the British government departments. (Guo Qian)
Source: Xinhua News Agency