Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on June 22nd, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We're going to get this started.

Welcome to all our witnesses, of course, and welcome, colleagues. This is meeting number 25 of the Subcommittee on International Human Rights. Today we meet for a briefing on the persecution of religious and ethnic minorities in Afghanistan.

To ensure an orderly meeting, I would encourage all participants to mute their microphones when they're not speaking and to address all comments through the chair. When you have 30 seconds left in your questioning time, I'll raise a 30-second note, just so you're aware. Interpretation is available to everyone through the globe icon at the bottom of your screen. It's available in English or French, and you can select one. If you are bilingual, you don't have to do anything. If you're not, select the one that would work best for you.

Our witnesses for the two hours are the following.

We have, from the World Sikh Organization of Canada, Balpreet Singh, legal counsel. From the United Sikhs, we have Sukhwinder Singh, national director, and Gurvinder Singh, director, international humanitarian aid. From the Manmeet Singh Bhullar Foundation, we have Tarjinder Kaur Bhullar, director, and Jasjeet S. Ajimal, co-chair of the Save Afghan Minorities project. From the Canadian Hazara Humanitarian Services, we have Ali Mirzad, senior adviser; Niamatullah Ibrahimi, lecturer, international relations, La Trobe University, Australia; Melissa Kerr Chiovenda, assistant professor, anthropology, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; and finally, William Maley, emeritus professor at Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.

Witnesses, each of your particular groups will have up to six minutes to make opening statements or remarks.

We are going to start with the World Sikh Organization of Canada.

I'd ask you to please go ahead for six minutes. Thank you.

[Balpreet Singh, Legal Counsel, World Sikh Organization of Canada]

Good evening. Thank you.

I'm a legal counsel with the World Sikh Organization of Canada. We're a non-profit human rights organization established in 1984 with a mandate to promote and protect the interests of Canadian Sikhs as well as to protect the human rights of all individuals.

Almost exactly five years ago, I testified in front of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration on a similar topic to this, and I reported that Sikhs and Hindus are communities under siege in Afghanistan and face an immediate threat to their lives. They numbered approximately 2,000 at that time, from an original population that was estimated to be in the tens of thousands prior to 1992.

Today, as a result of ongoing persecution and several deadly attacks, the number has dwindled to approximately 200. Those who remain in Afghanistan are in constant danger, and those who have fled live in precarious and troubled conditions in India, with no real prospects of permanent settlement.

As a matter of background, my experience with the Afghan Sikh community began in November 2014 when I received a desperate series of messages from a remote Afghan Sikh community in Helmand province who were facing imminent danger. Their homes had been stoned, and their businesses had been publicly boycotted. At that time, Manmeet Singh Bhullar was a friend of mine, and I spoke to him about the situation. He made it his life's work to save that community until his tragic death in November 2015.

The current situation for Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan is one of fear, persecution and imminent threat. They are unable to freely leave their homes, find employment or attend schools. Women are unable to leave their homes unaccompanied and are in constant fear of kidnapping. The remaining Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan live collectively in gurdwara, as much of their property has been taken by others. These conditions also existed in 2016. What's changed is that the situation has gotten much worse with the community being actively targeted with attacks by Daesh, who vowed to drive them out of Afghanistan.

On July 1, 2018, the entire leadership of the Sikh and Hindu community was killed in a suicide bombing. Fifteen Sikhs and four Hindus, who were on their way to a meeting with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, lost their lives. Daesh took responsibility for that attack.

On March 25, 2020, just a little over a year ago, in another Daesh suicide attack, Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib was attacked in Kabul, where 25 Sikhs lost their lives, including four-year-old Tanya Kaur. The funeral for the victims of this attack the following day was also targeted with a bombing attack.

In June 2020, Nidan Singh was abducted from a gurdwara and held for almost a month until his rescue. On July 18, 2020, 13-year-old Salmeet Kaur, who lost her father in the March attack, was kidnapped from another gurdwara in Kabul. On February 2, 2021, a series of bomb attacks killed one Sikh and injured two others in an area with several Sikh shops. The victim, Sunny Singh, never got to see his newborn son in India, and his wife watched his funeral on a video call.

With the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan being imminent, the situation promises to get much worse for minorities. A member of the Hazara minority community said it best when he said: “To be a member of minority in Afghanistan is hell; but to be a Sikh means to be in the innermost circle of hell”.

In July 2020, 429 Sikhs and Hindus fled Afghanistan for India on a special visa valid for six months. Those who fled may not face an immediate threat to their lives, but they're still suffering. There are no real permanent settlement prospects for these refugees in India, despite the claims of the Indian government. India's Hindu nationalist BJP government is playing politics as it tries to project itself as a saviour of minorities fleeing Muslim countries but, in actuality, provides no assistance to them or any options for settlement.

Families that fled last July continue to be supported by Sikh organizations and private donors. There is no access to basic services such as health care and education or even vaccination for COVID. Very few of them have found employment. Eight Afghan Sikh families recently returned to Afghanistan out of desperation, a move that was celebrated by the Afghanistan government. Most of them have now returned once again back to India. One family reported that they couldn't find a hospital to care for their daughter in New Delhi, and after receiving treatment in Kabul, they returned because they felt unsafe remaining there.

Since 2015, we've repeatedly called on the Canadian government to create a special program for Afghan Sikhs and Hindus so that they can come to safety in Canada. In July 2020, 25 Canadian MPs from the CPC, NDP and Greens wrote to the Minister of Immigration for this special program, but I'm not aware of a reply to this letter, let alone any progress in this regard.

After the March attack, there was a weekly call set up with a representative of CIC, which was then reduced to biweekly and then cancelled altogether, with no reply to our emails since August 2020.

The question isn't whether there will be another attack. The question is when the next attack will be. These are extremely vulnerable individuals who do not have a future in Afghanistan or in India. They're looking desperately to Canada to save their lives.

It's been frustrating to advocate without real results on their behalf for this long. The Sikh community is willing and able to pay for all the resettlement costs, and has done so for the small number of Sikh refugee families who have arrived from the Helmand group. We just need the government to give us the permission to bring them here.

Those are my comments for now.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

That was great. You were ahead of time. Thank you very much.

We'll move now to United Sikhs for six minutes.

[Sukhwinder Singh, National Director, United Sikhs]

Hello, respected members of the committee. Thank you for allowing United Sikhs to speak for Afghan minorities.

We are a United Nations-affiliated international non-profit NGO to empower those in need, especially disadvantaged and minority communities around the world, with humanitarian aid, advocacy and education programs. We have 10 chapters in Asia, Europe and North America. We also have an office in Peshawar, Afghanistan.

Ghazni, Jalalabad and Kabul are the three major cities in Afghanistan where minority families are concentrated in large numbers. United Sikhs has been providing legal assistance and humanitarian aid in these cities for the past many years. Our first case in Afghanistan started in 2010 with Harender Kaur and her daughter, to whom we provided help in taking asylum in Canada with the help of the Canadian government, because her husband was kidnapped and then beheaded.

After that, so many times minorities were attacked brutally. They were forced to pay jeziah. They had verbal and written threats, including ultimatums to leave the country, and social boycotts, not even drinking the water from the fountains in front of their shops and in front of their houses. They were called Kafirs. Kids couldn't go to school. Women and young girls couldn't go out because of kidnapping threats. This was the life they were living in Afghanistan.

Then there was the gurdwara attack in 2020. That was the day when all the NGOs and Afghan Sikhs and Hindus decided to move temporarily to India so that we could bring them to safe places like Canada and the U.S.A. As Balpreet said, a total of 95 families have reached New Delhi, India, from different parts of Afghanistan. United Sikhs and other NGOs are the only help for them. They have no help from the Indian government, and not even their IDs.

Last year United Sikhs started a helpdesk in New Delhi for these families. They getting medical treatment, including special tests as needed; the urgent assistance needed by pregnant mothers in government hospitals; assistance with the life-sustaining needs of newborn babies, including immunization; emergency medical procedures; the facilitation of UNHCR-related issues, such as the issuing of refugee cards and the renewal of cards for previously Afghan nationals in New Delhi; ration distribution to needy Afghan families; COVID-19 rapid tests; and assistance with temporary settlement of Afghan families in India.

What are the challenges they have now? They do not have any identification. If they make any identification, then they cannot get their refugee cards and refugee status. They are just in between. The UNHCR says they came to India on a visa, which is not suitable to get refugee status. These are their challenges. Their kids cannot get education. They have no jobs. They're not getting proper medical treatment.

Their only hope is us—the Canadian government—so I will make this request of the Canadian government: Please stop a cultural genocide.

I will ask Gurvinder Singh to add a few more points, please, and then wrap it up.

Thank you.

[Gurvinder Singh, Director, International Humanitarian Aid, United Sikhs]

First and foremost, we thank everyone for allowing us this gathering and for listening to this testimony about what is happening and what has transpired over the past many years.

There are a few numbers that I think are striking. Over 100,000 Sikhs and Hindus resided in Afghanistan just a few decades ago. That number dwindled down to 626 prior to the Kabul attack. That number is now below 100. This goes to show that a vibrant, robust community, which has its cultural heritage, which has its religious heritage and which has its economic structure embedded in the nation, is gone. It has been dismantled. It has had a genocide perpetrated against it.

We're concerned about our religious institutions and about our cultural institutions, which are hundreds of years old, and the caretaking of those. We're concerned about the safety and security of the community. If the Canadian government does not step up, then this will be known in history as a time when a minority was forcefully evicted, eradicated, killed and completely decimated from the map of a nation. I think it inherently behooves us to step up and really provide assistance to those who—literally—have no one else to turn to.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you.

Now we will hear from the Manmeet Singh Bhullar Foundation for six minutes.

[Tarjinder Kaur Bhullar, Director, Manmeet Singh Bhullar Foundation]

Thank you to all of you.

Thank you to the witnesses who spoke before me.

The invitation to appear before this committee is important for us. I appreciate the efforts made to have us a part of this.

For some of you this may be the first time that you are hearing about the Manmeet Singh Bhullar Foundation. Ours is an existence that is equally filled with pride and with pain. This foundation is in honour of a man whose presence is missed by his community, and most of all by his family. Not a single day goes by when we do not wish that he was still here with us, that he was speaking to you. What we do carry with us are his values and his work, and they are a guiding force for us.

In late 2014 Manmeet began the Save Afghan Minorities project, as Balpreet mentioned. As his sister, I was used to his bold ideas, his chicken scratches on a notepad that made no sense to anyone else but gave him the clarity that he needed in order to get something done. I knew his ability to engross others in his plans and his perseverance. Every single step back for him was a reminder to fight harder, think bigger. Most of all, I was used to his singular focus on serving others. It was his mantra, his faith, his purpose.

He took meetings across cities in Canada. He travelled to India. He went to countries in Europe, relentless in his pursuit to find a viable solution for Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan who lived a daily reality void of religious freedom, having no access to education, no safety and definitely no peace. The only constant for them was danger. Time and time again, no matter what solution he pursued, no matter where he went, he knew that the country best-suited to help these children, men and women, and elderly was his own country. Canada was the place that could and should serve as a beacon of hope for these families, as it has for my own family, his family, and for countless others who have shown that, through the course of time, Canada is the place where you can make a life that allows you to thrive.

Calling it his life's most important work and making it his primary focus every waking moment, Manmeet charted a path for these families. First, the goal was to get them out of Afghanistan and imminent danger, and then to find them a way to get refugee status granted and, eventually, a new home and a new life here in Canada.

The first handful of families were guided out of Afghanistan through his coordination of every small or big logistical detail that needed to be done. Then Manmeet's own life was taken in his final act of kindness toward another human being.

For anyone who has experienced the sudden and traumatic loss of a loved one, my heart holds your pain and shares your grief. In losing Manmeet it became clear that while our lives would never be the same again, the lives of others were in jeopardy, complete strangers who were relying on him to survive. The profound responsibility he felt was now the responsibility that we had to carry on for him and because of him.

Since Manmeet's passing, this work has been all-consuming, with daily phone calls from families in India and Afghanistan, individuals who speak about an existence that so many of us are oblivious to or are too privileged to ever know anything about. A visit by someone to the market in Afghanistan leads to hot oil being spilled on their body. A death of a family member means funeral rites cannot be performed as per their faith. A woman walking with her child must hide her own identity and conform to the religious identity of others. Families are in dire need of basic medical attention for their elderly parents.

We have worked with the Canadian government since 2015, after Manmeet's passing, to settle 74 individuals here in Canada, with 111 in the queue. These people have come from the Helmand province. At that point, they were the most in danger and in dire need of assistance. This is not a task we have done alone. It is because of community members, organizations, donors and volunteers that we have been able to do this. We have been focused on the approach that first we make sure these individuals survive, and then we enable them to thrive.

Each arrival of a family renews our commitments to Manmeet's vision of giving these families and these children a fighting chance. We see them attending school, getting a driver's licence, taking English classes and volunteering themselves. It provides us with the solid belief that we must continue this work and we must help the families that are remaining.

At every turn I have worked with ministers in this government. I advocate to them, they advocate for us and we have made progress. I've been raised to give credit where credit is due, and so Minister Sajjan, Minister Mendicino and Minister Bains as well as many other people across the aisle and within the Liberal caucus have championed this.

Soon the remaining families that first went to India will be eligible to settle here in Canada. The last [Technical difficulty—Editor] pandemic has brought with it its own challenges, many beyond anyone's control. Through it all, we have had a steady and consistent communication with the government, finding a viable way through this all, and we will make sure that this work is done.

We owe it to fellow members of humanity and I owe it to my brother.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you for those remarks.

We are going to hear now from the Canadian Hazara Humanitarian Services for up to six minutes.

I believe Ali Mirzad is going to be speaking.

[Ali Mirzad, Senior Advisor, Canadian Hazara Humanitarian Services]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On behalf of the Canadian Hazara Humanitarian Services, I thank this committee and the Canadian Parliament for granting us this opportunity to raise the voices of the many thousands of Hazara victims who have perished in Afghanistan and the many thousands more who continue—

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

I have a point of order, Mr. Chair.

I think the channels are crossed.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

We have some challenges with the interpretation. The English and the French are crossed over.

I apologize to our witness. Could we just start from the beginning once again?

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Mr. Chair, it might be the setting at the bottom. He may have it in French.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Mr. Mirzad, if you could just check your settings on the globe icon at the bottom. You have to select the language that you are comfortable with and that you prefer: English, French or, if you're bilingual, you can leave it without selecting either.

[Ali Mirzad]

Yes, I have it as neither. It's off.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

It's off. Okay. Are you bilingual? Do you speak French?

[Ali Mirzad]

Yes.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Okay. Let's try that one more time.

Thank you, MP Sidhu, for that. We'll take it from the start, please.

[Ali Mirzad]

It's no problem. Give me two minutes extra, please.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

On behalf of the Canadian Hazara Humanitarian Services, I thank this committee and the Canadian Parliament for granting us the opportunity to raise the voices of the many thousands of Hazara victims who have perished in Afghanistan and the many thousands more who continue to suffer systemic persecution.

The Hazara people have suffered more than a century of constant persecution because of their religious beliefs, their ethnicity and their—

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Excuse me, I....

Oh, now I'm hearing it. I wasn't getting the interpretation either.

[Ali Mirzad]

Should I continue? Okay.

The Hazara people have suffered more than a century of constant persecution because of their religious beliefs, their ethnicity and their physical and facial characteristics.

At the end of the 19th century, thousands, if not millions, of Hazara were massacred, forcibly uprooted and sold into slavery by the Emir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan.

Through royal decrees, he openly labelled Hazaras as “heretic foreigners”. This paved the way for persecution that continues to this day.

In 1998, the Taliban issued a similar decree continuing that campaign by killing thousands of Hazaras in the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamiyan alone.

In post-9/11 Afghanistan, Hazaras continue to be the subject of daily attacks, be it within the sanctuary of religious places, in gymnasiums, in the streets or on public buses. Attacks such as the May 2020 assault on the Médecins sans frontières maternity ward in Kabul's Dasht-e-Barchi, where infants still in incubators were targeted, or the May 2021 attack on the Sayed Al-Shuhada, all-girls school where as many as 94 young girls died, have proven that Hazaras are a target regardless of age or gender.

To put it simply, the life of a Hazara in Afghanistan is that of a death row inmate living on borrowed time, awaiting an impending execution.

For years around the globe and indeed across this nation, coast to coast to coast, Hazaras have cried for help. We humbly request to this committee, and through it, the Canadian Parliament, to, first, formally recognize the 1891-93 ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Hazara as a genocide; second, designate September 25 as a Hazara genocide memorial day; and, third, support Bill C-287 to ensure that all development assistance sent from Canada to Afghanistan is contributing to the peace and security of the region for all peoples.

At this point, Mr. Chair, I would like to thank the committee once more for giving me the opportunity to testify before you today.

My thanks also go to the three highly distinguished individuals representing our association. We have with us Dr. Melissa Kerr Chiovenda, assistant professor of anthropology, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and Dr. William Maley, emeritus professor of diplomacy at the Australian National University.

We also have Dr. Niamatullah Ibrahimi, lecturer in international relations at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Peter Fonseca]

Thank you.

Thank you to the organizations and your spokespersons who made the opening statements and to all the witnesses who are with us here today.

We are now going to move to the members' question time. We'll start with the first round. The first round will be seven minutes for each member who will be questioning.

We are going to start with MP Sidhu for seven minutes.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I was fortunate enough to know Manmeet Singh Bhullar before he passed. His dedication to service is a model for all of us here who are working to make Canada and the world a better place. In light of that, I want to talk about the success that the Manmeet Singh Bhullar Foundation has achieved in his memory.

Of those Afghan Sikhs who have so far arrived in Canada, can you please outline how they are doing?

Mr. Chair, through you, this question is for the Manmeet Singh Bhullar Foundation.

[Tarjinder Kaur Bhullar]

Thank you, MP Sidhu.

I would be remiss if I gave up this opportunity to say that Manmeet would be incredibly overjoyed to see you as a member of Parliament. I think he would want to answer this question himself.

The families are thriving. That is the ultimate goal that guides us through this work.

It is not easy work. It is not work that we can shy away from.

Many of them have long-term full-time jobs. These are families who now have children going to school for the first time. They are taking English classes. They have a robust connection to the gurdwara in northeast Calgary, as well as the gurdwaras in Surrey, where they are residing. They constantly keep in contact and talk about what they can do next, about what is their future. It sounds simple to us, but it's remarkable when you think about where they came from.

The biggest thing, I think, is that you see the measure of this project and the measure of the lifelong impact we will have from the young children we are looking at. Some of them started off completely shy, too shy to even say hello. Now they are reading in English and speaking English, and genuinely, when you see them, they're coming up to you to say hello and talk to you about what their life here is all about. As cliché as it sounds, they are living a normal Canadian life. That is absolutely amazing when you think of where they were just a few short years ago.

[Maninder Sidhu, Liberal, Brampton East, ON]

Thank you for that answer, Ms. Bhullar. Definitely, I really appreciate all your hard work. It's great to hear that the Afghan Sikh community is settling in well.

Ms. Bhullar, over the past year, I think we can all understand that the COVID-19 crisis has slowed down your work to welcome members of the Afghan Sikh community to Canada. I would like to get a better understanding of what work the Manmeet Singh Bhullar Foundation has done in partnership with the Government of Canada over the past year. In your opening statement, you mentioned that there will be a path forward once conditions allow for it.

First, I want to thank you again for your advocacy, as well as all the work over the past number of years that the Manmeet Singh Bhullar Foundation has done to help Afghan Sikhs resettle, and for your support here in Canada.

For this program, are you the sole partner with the government? Will it be an effective path for you to continue welcoming members of the Afghan Sikh community to Canada?

[Tarjinder Kaur Bhullar]

Yes, there's no doubt that every single part of our lives has been impacted by COVID. This project is no different.

When we look at what is happening in India and when we see that people are fighting for even the basics such as access to oxygen, we understand that offices can't work like they used to, but make no mistake: There has been work done behind the scenes, between us as the foundation and the Government of Canada, to make sure we are in a place such that when those restrictions for travel are lifted and when India is in a better place to process these applications and it is safe to do so, we will see an influx of the remaining families from the cohort that arrived from Helmand making their way into Canada.

That has involved our not stopping our pursuit of constantly being in touch and making sure that we have a process in place that allows us to have, basically, everything done besides getting these individuals on a plane when it is safe to do so. We also have to keep in mind that a lot of the challenges we face are from a government or a country that is.... India is dealing with its own challenges at the moment. All of these factor in.

In no way have we stalled or said that we are on pause. In fact, what we have made very clear is how we can work together to make sure that we get everything set in motion so that really the only thing left, once we are in a better place with the pandemic, is to be at the airport, meeting these people as they arrive.