Afghanistan Committee on March 28th, 2022

[Sally Armstrong]

Is it correct, Dr. Samar, to say that the majority probably can't read? But, you know what, I have grandchildren whose reading is pretty poor, but having a tablet in their hand is certainly moving them forward in reading. Look at the changes in that country. These girls are on the Internet and they're finding out the rest of the world doesn't live like this. They were prepared to make the changes their country needed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you very much, Ms. Damoff.

[Pam Damoff, Liberal, Oakville North—Burlington, ON]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Now we'll go to Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe for 90 seconds.

Please go ahead.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

I will try to ask my question quickly.

Ms. Samar, a few weeks ago I read in a newspaper that a Taliban delegation had visited Switzerland at the invitation of an NGO. The Taliban called on the international community to work with the “Islamic State of Afghanistan” and especially to respond to the need for humanitarian assistance in Afghanistan. If one takes the demands that have been made at face value, one can deduce that the Taliban want to facilitate humanitarian assistance by creating a secure corridor for goods and personnel.

Ms. Samar, what do the Taliban want from us by doing something like this?

[Sima Samar]

Well, I think they want to save their own face. Of course, if there's aid provided in the country, the Taliban is taking the responsibility, saying that they are doing it and that it's their governance, although it's not their governance.

The second point I would like to mention again is that we really need to focus on education. I insist that there are NGOs working on the ground. Everybody is not out of the country.

The third point I would like to mention is the lack of response from the Canadian immigration. I'm a recipient of the Order of Canada. They told me that I have the right to have a special immigration visa for Canada, but I didn't get a response from them, so imagine if—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Mr. Brunelle-Duceppe.

[Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc, Lac-Saint-Jean, QC]

Thank you, Ms. Samar.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

We'll move on to Ms. Kwan for 90 seconds.

Please go ahead.

[Jenny Kwan, NDP, Vancouver East, BC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I'll ask this in my last minute and a half.

It's true that we can't get everyone out, but certainly we can try to get some people out, particularly those who are so highly targeted that they are on a list to be hunted down.

One thing I think Canada can do to bring more people to safety is to extend the family reunification process for extended family sponsorship. This is something that the Canadian government has done for Ukrainians, but they have not applied that to Afghanistan.

I'd like to get comments from the witnesses on whether or not they think the Canadian government should extend this special immigration measure to Afghans.

[Sima Samar]

Of course. We're lobbying for it, from my point of view.

[Heather Barr]

Yes, absolutely. I think the contrast between how Ukrainians and Afghans have been treated has been very painful and difficult to explain, except with reference to racism and Islamophobia.

[Sally Armstrong]

I agree. Why wouldn't we do that? With Ukraine and Afghanistan, it is the classic good versus evil story, and heaven knows evil must not win.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you very much, Ms. Kwan. Your 90 seconds are up.

I want to thank Ms. Armstrong, Ms. Barr and Dr. Samar for the work they do to make vulnerable humans' lives better. On behalf of the committee members, thank you very much for your input to the committee. All the best to you.

Now we'll suspend for a few minutes to prepare for the third and last panel.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

I call the meeting back to order.

I would like to welcome our third panel this evening.

From Afghan Community Vancouver, we have Mr. Wadood Dilsoz, director. From Women Leaders of Tomorrow, welcome back, Ms. Friba Rezayee. I hope your mike and system work better this time. From the Women & Peace Studies Organization, we have Wazhma Frogh.

Welcome to each of you on behalf of the committee members. You have exactly five minutes, so please respect the time.

We will start with Mr. Wadood Dilsoz for five minutes.

Go ahead, please.

[Wadood Dilsoz, Director, Afghan Community Vancouver]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I am Wadood Dilsoz, joining you today from the traditional and unceded land of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh that people call Vancouver. I am a member of the Afghan community and have volunteered with the Afghan Canadian Association of B.C. since 2005.

I am also a community activist, mostly involved in refugee settlement support and advocacy for Afghan refugees and our community members. Our group is called Afghan Community Vancouver. It includes 1,200 families, and we also have a Facebook page that has over 4,600 followers.

Since the Taliban took over in Afghanistan, we have received hundreds of phone calls. I was in contact with the majority of these vulnerable families, men and women, requesting help from our community and our government, and we have a list of these individuals who fall into the categories that our government announced as at risk and who could be resettled to Canada, including women activists, members of parliament at the provincial councils, journalists, prosecutors, judges, female doctors and nurses who work in military hospitals, Canadian Forces contractors, Canadian embassy employees, and volunteers and officers who were trained by and worked with the Canadian military.

The local Afghan community is grateful for the solidarity and commitment received from the government. What I want to emphasize today is the need to facilitate the resettlement of those at risk. The UNHCR designation overseas that is needed for the resettlement takes a very long time. Families who have done their biometrics in Pakistan have been waiting months for the response.

As examples, I have Bizhan Aryan and Naseer Fayaz, well-known TV anchors who escaped to Pakistan and were given their first appointment with UNHCR in June of this year. That's a very long wait time.

During the Syrian crisis, sponsorship of refugees from within the country was allowed. That's not the case for Afghans. Although for both crises, resettlement of 40,000 refugees was considered, Afghanistan's population is two times higher than Syria's, and we had a military presence in Afghanistan.

The temporary resident program and the issuance of work permits and study permits are part of the response to the Ukrainian crisis, but they haven't been considered in the response to the Afghan crisis. Canadian involvement in Afghanistan has been very profound in the past 20 years, and we had a military presence in the country that has created close ties between the two countries.

The Afghan National Defense and Security Forces supported the Canadian mission and were fighting international terrorism shoulder to shoulder with Canadians. We have abandoned those soldiers and officers, who became the victims of wrong politics in Afghanistan and who have been targeted and killed on a daily basis in the past seven months. We do not have them in the at-risk category for resettlement to Canada. This could be reviewed and changed.

The Afghan community requests the following: eliminate refugee documentation requests, increase the number of refugees, ease the process of acquiring temporary resident status or work and study visas for Afghans, allow sponsorship of refugees from within Afghanistan, include military personnel in the at-risk category to be considered for resettlement, and support local Afghan organizations to become allies in refugee settlement and integration.

Last, the Afghan community of Vancouver is ready to collaborate with IRCC to provide support to new refugees on their settlement and integration journey in a culturally safe way.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you, Mr. Dilsoz.

We'll go to Ms. Friba Rezayee for five minutes.

Please go ahead.

[Friba Rezayee, Founder and Executive Director, Women Leaders of Tomorrow]

Good evening, Mr. Chair.

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak and appear before the Special Committee on Afghanistan this evening.

My name is Friba Rezayee. I was born and raised in Afghanistan. I was one of the first Afghan women to compete at the Olympic Games, in 2004 in Athens, and I am also the first Afghan woman Olympian to participate and compete in a combat sport. I am now the founder and executive director of Women Leaders of Tomorrow. We are a registered non-profit society in Vancouver, B.C. Our mandate is to empower women and girls through sports and education.

Following the return of the Taliban in August 2021, we have received countless messages from Afghan women and girls begging us to save their lives by helping them leave Afghanistan. Among them were—and still are—successful female athletes from the volleyball, cycling and judo teams. We were successful in assisting 148 Afghan women students to be evacuated to the United States, with the help of American humanitarian organizations.

However, the response from the Canadian government has been extremely disappointing. The IRCC's bureaucratic policies have made it impossible for Afghan female athletes to reach safety in Canada.

On November 25, 2021, I wrote a letter to the Right Honourable Prime Minister explaining the dire situation of our female athletes and describing the human rights violations now occurring in Afghanistan. The entire Canadian women's soccer team—gold medallists from Tokyo 2020—signed my letter.

The situation for female athletes is dire in Afghanistan. Members of our teams have been threatened by the Taliban with a punishment of 110 lashings in public or the death penalty. A female member of our volleyball team, Mahjabin Hakimi, was murdered under highly suspicious circumstances when the Taliban captured the capital.

The Taliban government forbids women in sports, as it is contrary to their strict interpretation of sharia law. They have suppressed all athletic participation of women in public. This was the Taliban's first decree. The Taliban is hunting from door to door and looking for women athletes and women who advocated for women's rights. If Canada does not evacuate them soon, they will die.

Canada played a vital role in Afghanistan by advancing women's and girls' empowerment and education. Afghans are devastated to see that our rights and freedoms were halted overnight. The Canadian government promised to evacuate women leaders, human rights defenders and women athletes. Thousands of Afghan families have been evacuated to Canada, but only 15 female athletes.

Many of our athletes are also students who want to pursue their higher education in Canada. These are the best and brightest young Afghans. Multilingual, educated and ambitious, they have overcome cultural and economic hardships—especially the women—to achieve ambitious goals. They have risked seizure, physical attacks and death to fight for equality, the right to an education and the rule of law, which Canadians take for granted here. They understand at a visceral level the fragility of democracy.

Women Leaders of Tomorrow has helped many Afghan women to obtain full-ride scholarships to Canadian universities, but their study permits and student visas have been denied by the IRCC on the grounds that they are unlikely to return to Afghanistan. Nine women engineers are completing their studies in Kazakhstan. They want to complete master's degrees at Canadian universities to qualify and work in their professions. Their non-renewable Kazakh visas will expire in August of this year. What will happen to them? They can't return home.

We call on the Canadian government to honour its long-standing promises to these Afghan women scholars, athletes and human rights defenders by actively assisting their entry into Canada and by instructing the IRCC to issue study permits to fully funded Afghan refugee students.

The U.S. Doha agreement represented—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you very much, Ms. Rezayee. We will come back to you.

[Friba Rezayee]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Now we're going to move to Ms. Wazhma Frogh for five minutes.

Go ahead.

[Wazhma Frogh, Founder, Women & Peace Studies Organization – Afghanistan]

Thank you.

I'm honoured to be part of this hearing, and I look forward to sharing my perspective from Afghanistan on what we have been going through.

I want to start with a small story from my experience. I work with a group of 200 women on a daily basis in Afghanistan. These are women peace-builders and women leaders—women who have not been in the media. These are the women who have actually stopped suicide bombers and worked with the mothers who stopped suicide bombers. These are the women who actually stopped madrasas from teaching suicide terrorism to kids, and these are the women who have gone to the Taliban jails and freed prisoners. So these are like women leaders in the provinces. I won't get into more details than that, due to concerns for their security.

The organization I run and its partnership with Canada have been waiting for so many years—at least the past six or seven years—in Afghanistan. There is one experience I would like to recall. Some Canadian military members wanted to talk to women to see how they could actually start looking at issues of women, peace and security, which is a Canadian mandate, but also as part of their engagement with Afghans. I took a group of 15 women in Kandahar by bus from the city to the airport so they could meet the members of the military. I won't go into further details. Imagine 15 women who took that risk, because going to a military airport was not just risking their lives but for a woman it was considered to be literally like prostitution, and she would literally have been stoned to death. But these women took the risk, because they were working with the mission that we needed to engage women in the security sector. That's what my organization focused on. Today, all 15 of those women are in Afghanistan and living in a very difficult situation, hiding from one province to the other.

For the past six years, through the Canada fund, my organization was able to get around 10,000 women into the Afghan police. We had a formal engagement with Canada and the Ministry of the Interior, and we got women into NATO training programs and also into the police forces. Canada has had a long-standing women, peace and security plan and mandate.

We thought this would actually continue, but I don't see what happened on August 15 as an isolated event. It didn't just happen overnight. I'm actually surprised when I hear officials and parliamentarians say that they were taken by surprise. Nobody listened to us women. We had been talking about it. We had been telling the policy-makers and the global leaders that things were going so wrong in Afghanistan and to please listen to the women and not to make deals with a group that excluded the Afghan government.

The Doha deal was the start of Afghanistan's political surrender. It was not August 15. It was the Doha deal that actually gave legitimacy to a group that did not even include the Afghan government as a signatory, and that was when things started getting much worse in local communities. As an organization working in the local communities, we started reporting on the fall of different districts and provinces, even right before August last year.

I would like to thank Canada for the announcement regarding the Afghan refugees. Some of my colleagues have made it to Canada after six or seven months of being in Albania, or having been evacuated directly from Kabul, so we are grateful for this big support, but at the same time I would also like to echo the concerns I heard from the previous panels in terms of the lack of response. My own parents had to wait for seven months, during which we never heard anything from IRCC about the status of their case.

I would also like to share the focus of the SIM, the special immigration program for Afghans. I would very much like the focus to expand beyond translators and also to see the number of women applicants, women leaders applicants...because in Afghanistan the translators have been mostly men with the military. It's important. I would very much ask for quotas and gender disaggregation, with the way Canada talks about women in leadership, as well as women, peace and security.

I come with—

[The Chair, Liberal, Sukh Dhaliwal]

Thank you very much, Ms. Frogh. We'll come back to you.

Now, we can go to the honourable members.

First, we'll go to Mr. Redekopp for six minutes. Please, go ahead.

[Brad Redekopp, Conservative, Saskatoon West, SK]

Thank you, Chair.

Ms. Frogh, one of the last things you said was to listen to the women. That's good advice at the best of times. Even here in Canada, I think all of us need to take that advice. I appreciate that, and I will work very hard in my own life to use that advice.

I'm concerned about something and it has to do with the facts. If you look at some facts, the government has promised 40,000 Afghan refugees. Immigration minister Sean Fraser told me last week at committee that we're at about 9,500 or so right now. That's in almost nine months. That's a little over 1,000 a month. He was also quite happy to tell me that there were 10,000 Ukrainians who have come to Canada in three months. That's a much higher rate.

I would like to get your opinion on this. Are we dealing with some racism issues in Canada? Is there Islamophobia? I know there are differences between people coming from Ukraine versus Afghanistan. Do you think that some of that is at play with what's going on here?

I'll start with Ms. Frogh.

[Wazhma Frogh]

I think there are a lot of operational-level challenges too, with a lack of systems to respond to people. At the same time, the third country phenomenon has been very difficult for us Afghans. Right now, my colleague has travel authorization to travel to Canada, but they do not have Pakistani visa and they cannot obtain Pakistani visa. There are also political and security risks to many Afghans travelling to Pakistan. We have had members of the Afghan security and other forces who are detained in Pakistan.

It's about the operationalization of this whole challenge. The third country is the major challenge, the system of response. At the same time, it's also about the lack of any Afghans going to other countries. It's not just Pakistan. Look at the number of embassies open in Kabul. They cannot get visas, they cannot go.... Now the Taliban has stopped women from travelling as well.

We don't have any hope of getting to the third countries.