A day before Kabul fell to the Taliban, Manizha Bakhtari asked Afghanistan’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Haneef Atmar: “What will we do if the government falls?” “The government won’t fall,” Atmar assured his ambassador to Austria.

Manizha Bakhtari, the Afghan Ambassador to Austria(Golden Girls Film)

Hours later, Taliban troops walked into the capital after America pulled its last forces out of Afghanistan. The Foreign Minister soon fled the country, seeking refuge in Turkey. Bakhtari didn’t. Defying the Taliban’s order dismissing her, she remained in the embassy and still continues to represent her country in Vienna while fighting for the rights of women and girls in Afghanistan as the last Afghan woman envoy in the world.

Last week, Bakhtari, 52, was given a standing ovation by the audience at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX) in Denmark where a new documentary on her had its world premiere. The Last Ambassador, directed by Austrian filmmaker Natalie Halla, shows a determined diplomat refusing to give up and launching a lasting resistance against the Taliban on the global stage.

The Last Ambassador, a new documentary on Manizha Bakhtari, premiered at the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival in Denmark on March 22 (Golden Girls Film)

The 80-minute film, which premiered at CPH:DOX on March 22, spans the long journey of Bakhtari from her position as an envoy of the Ashraf Ghani government in Afghanistan to an ambassador that the Taliban doesn’t want. As she campaigns against international recognition for the Taliban regime, Bakhtari also sets up a clandestine learning network in Afghanistan for girls banned from schools.

Austrian lawyer-turned-filmmaker Natalie Halla, the director of The Last Ambassador (Amina Stelle Steiner)

“Manizha Bakhtari is still the Ambassador of Afghanistan to Austria. She is also still the representative of Afghanistan before the United Nations and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD),” says Halla, a lawyer-turned filmmaker who first saw Bakhtari on television news as she called the Taliban terrorists a few days after the fall of Kabul on August 15, 2021.

The Taliban takeover in 2021 left Afghan embassies worldwide in a legal limbo as some envoys started cooperating with them while others refused. A few others dared to openly oppose the Taliban. Among them was Afghanistan’s last remaining woman ambassador, Bakhtari. It was a move that would invite swift punishment from the Taliban.

Soon Bakhtari received a letter signed by a Human Resources director in Kabul relieving her of duties. Her response too was prompt: “I am not taking orders from you, Mister,” she told herself, characterising the HR director as “probably a Taliban gunman”.

Manizha Bakhtari, the Afghan Ambassador to Austria and the country’s last woman envoy, refused to resign after the Taliban takeover in 2021 (Golden Girls Film)

Situated on a busy thoroughfare, the Afghan embassy in Vienna was like any other mission until August 2021. The embassy would go on to pay a heavy price for its defiance. Several employees were let go after the Taliban stopped the flow of funds, forcing embassy drivers to cover vacant posts.

In the days following their proclamation to the world, women in Afghanistan began protesting they weren’t allowed back to work and girls crying they were denied entry to schools.

Managing mission

Bakhtari, a former ambassador to the Nordic countries, was watching the events back home with rapt attention. Five months after the Taliban takeover, she moved the embassy to an affordable house in Vienna, managing the mission with income from consular services. She also launched a campaign in Afghanistan called Dukhtaran, which means daughters in Persian, to secretly provide lessons to girls banned from schools.

Raising the pitch of resistance, Bakhtari also hosted a summit, called Vienna Conference, gathering Afghan representatives from all ethnic and religious groups in the Austrian capital in April 2023 to forge a united strategy against the Taliban. Among them were many women activists as well as Ahmad Massoud, the son of Ahmad Shah Massoud, who fought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

More than three years after leading resistance against the Taliban, Bakhtari, who taught journalism at the Kabul University before joining the Afghan Foreign Ministry as Chief of Staff in 2007, is optimistic. “Our efforts have prevented international recognition of the Taliban regime,” beams Bakhtari, who became Afghan’s ambassador to the Nordic countries in 2009. “The Taliban won’t stay forever. They will be gone one day.”

Raising resistance

Bakhtari, one of three daughters of well-respected Afghan poet Wasef Bakhtari, found herself on the side of those resisting fundamentalism early in her life following an arranged marriage at 19 to businessman Naser Hotaki. When her father published his new book of poetry in exile in the US, he dedicated it to her. “For my daughter, who is better than 100 sons,” read the dedication.

“Peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice,” Bakhtari is shown saying in the film, which she didn’t want to be made initially. “When I first approached her with the idea of a documentary on her, she said very diplomatically and politely, ‘No,'” recalls the film’s director Halla.