Subcommittee on International Human Rights Committee on Oct. 24th, 2023

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

I call this meeting to order.

Welcome to meeting No. 36 of the House of Commons Subcommittee on International Human Rights of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

Today's meeting is taking place in a hybrid format. Members are attending in person in the room and remotely using the Zoom application.

I would like to make a few comments for the benefit of the witnesses and members.

Please wait until I recognize you by name before speaking. For those participating by video conference, click on the microphone icon to activate your mic. Please mute it when you are not speaking.

Interpretation for those on Zoom—you have the choice, at the bottom of your screen, of either floor, English or French. For those in the room, you can use the earpiece and select the desired channel.

For members in the room, if you wish to speak, please raise your hand. For members on Zoom, please use the “raise hand” function. The clerk and I will manage the speaking order as best we can, and we appreciate your patience and understanding in this regard.

In accordance with the subcommittee's routine motion concerning connection tests for witnesses, I am informing the subcommittee that all witnesses have completed the required connection tests in advance of the meeting.

Today, we are meeting to resume our study on the situation of the Hazaras in Afghanistan.

It is my great pleasure to welcome the witnesses who have joined us this morning.

We have Ms. Soomaya Javadi, a human rights activist, by video conference. From Amnesty International, we have Zaman Sultani, South Asia researcher, by video conference. From Genocide Watch, we have Gregory Stanton, president, by video conference.

You will have a maximum of five minutes for your opening remarks. We will then go to questions from subcommittee members. I will let you know when you have one minute left.

Thank you for agreeing to appear today.

We will start with Soomaya Javadi.

Please, you have the floor for five minutes for your opening remarks.

[Soomaya Javadi, As an Individual]

Thank you.

Dear members of the committee, witnesses and everyone, I am honoured to be here today to testify on the conditions of the Hazara people in Afghanistan.

My name is Soomaya. I am a Hazara woman. My people have suffered from the Hazara genocide throughout generations. In the late 19th century, 60% to 65% of the Hazara population had vanished due to systemic killings, starvation, being sold into slavery and displacement by Amir Abdur Rahman Khan's army. His famous quote is, “Hazaras' heads are mine. Their wives, lands and children are yours.”

My great-grandfather was forced to leave his homeland in central Afghanistan when he was around 12, and his family was killed by the amir's army. Today I stand before you, having been forced to leave my home by the same people who forced my great-grandfather to leave his more than a hundred years ago.

This is a genocide. To this day, this genocide has not stopped. In 1993, the mujahedeen government commanded their army to attack civilians in Afshar, a Hazara-populated neighbourhood in Kabul. They started a killing frenzy—beheading, dismembering, raping, setting homes on fire, kidnapping and cutting people's genitalia. In 1997, months after I was born, the Taliban killed about 70 Hazaras including children in Qezelabad village near Mazar-i-Sharif. To demonstrate their hatred towards Hazaras, they decapitated children and gouged their eyes out.

In 1998, the Taliban attacked Mazar-i-Sharif. Based on different reports, 2,000 to 8,000 Hazaras were killed over three days. The Taliban did not allow people to bury their loves ones, and the corpses of Hazara civilians were on the streets for days. In 1999, the Taliban abducted hundreds of Hazara people—men, women, children and elderly—and burned about 200 homes in various villages in Bamiyan province. They confiscated Hazara lands and encouraged Pashtun nomads, Kuchis, to settle there.

After the 2001 international intervention in Afghanistan, this genocide found a new face. The Taliban and other terrorist groups have targeted Hazaras in their places of worship, in sport clubs, maternity hospitals, schools, educational centres, ceremonies, gatherings and peaceful protests.

On July 23, 2016, thousands of Hazara people, mostly university students, went on the streets of Kabul to peacefully protest a discriminatory policy of Ghani's government. I was 19 years old, and we were marching with friends and family when suicide bombers attacked the crowd. Eighty-six people were killed, and 400 were injured. I had a friend who was very close to the incident, and he could not eat meat for years, having witnessed burned human flesh. Our protests were ignored, and not a single person was prosecuted for committing that crime.

In the years before the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, there were many attacks from 2019 to the middle of 2021. Before the fall, the UN documented 40 terrorist attacks targeting Hazaras, resulting in almost 1,300 casualties. In 2020, a maternity hospital in Dasht-e-Barchi, Kabul, a Hazara-populated area, was attacked by the terrorists, and 16 people were shot dead including doctors, mothers about to give birth and two newborns. In May 2021, Sayed Ul-Shuhada high school, a girls school in Dasht-e-Barchi, was attacked by the terrorists. Around 90 students were killed, and 240 others were injured.

On August 15, 2021, at 6 p.m., I realized that Afghanistan had fallen to the Taliban. I was an educated Hazara Shia woman. I belonged to the ethnicity, gender and religion most hated by the Taliban. People like me still in Afghanistan—if not dead yet—are now totally excluded from every aspect of life outside the home. I had already faced gender-based and racial discrimination at the university and workplace. I knew the history, and I knew what was coming next.

Since then many terrorist attacks have targeted Hazara communities across Afghanistan. On September 20, 2022, there was an attack on the Kaaj Educational Center. Fifty-five high school students, mostly girls, were killed, and 124 others were injured. Marzia was a teenaged girl who was killed at Kaaj Educational Centre. Her diary was widely shared on social media. She had written about her dreams—riding a bicycle while listening to music, playing guitar, writing a novel. She was killed because she was a young woman in the pursuit of knowledge, culture and art, and because she was a Hazara with almond eyes, daring to dream of a future of equality and justice.

The Taliban explicitly supports the confiscation of Hazara lands and properties and the unlawful extortion of agricultural Hazara communities. International humanitarian aid does not reach Hazara areas. To date, for people who have directly committed this genocide and people who have indirectly benefited from it—

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Would you please wrap it up? The time is up.

[Soomaya Javadi]

Yes.

There was no single prosecution done by any act of government.

I came to Canada on October 15, 2021. At the Calgary airport, another Afghan, non-Hazara family refused to stand in line behind Hazara families, and the Canadian police warned them and told them to get back in line. That was the first time in my life I felt I was equal.

I would like to use this opportunity to thank the great nation of Canada for welcoming 40,000 Afghans and more. Within the borders of Canada, I am equal, free and included, and my voice matters.

I wish this upon every Afghan and, especially, upon every Hazara. I am appealing to you to recognize the Hazara genocide on behalf of my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents and me; on behalf of Marzia and all women in pursuit of equality; and on behalf of Hazara people across Afghanistan who are being forced to leave their land and give it away. We simply want acknowledgement and justice.

I am appealing to you to support a thorough investigation into the genocide of the Hazaras through the International Criminal Court. I am appealing to you to take away the Taliban's and its allies' impunity in committing genocide and crimes against humanity. The first step—

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Ms. Javadi. We'll give you a chance when answering questions, because you are over by more than one minute.

[Soomaya Javadi]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Mr. Zaman Sultani, take the floor for five minutes, please.

[Zaman Sultani, South Asia Researcher, Amnesty International]

Thank you, Mr. Chair, for the invitation to appear before this committee.

I would like to start by noting how timely your study is.

For more than a century, the Hazaras have been facing continual and systematic discrimination in their own homeland of Afghanistan. Since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, Amnesty International has documented several massacres of civilian Hazaras or Shia Hazaras in the Ghazni, Daykundi and Ghor provinces of Afghanistan. After the Taliban returned, the Hazaras faced forced evictions in several provinces of Afghanistan, including Daykundi. No one has been held accountable for these crimes and killings.

For example, in June 2022, Taliban forces, in a night raid, killed six Hazaras. That night, the Taliban attacked the house of former Hazara security officer Mohamad Muradi in Ghor province, which led to the Taliban killing him and three other men in his house. Two of the three other men were also former members of the security forces. In addition, in this attack, two of Muradi's daughters were killed, one of whom was only 12 years old. Muradi's son, who was 17 years old, barely survived the injuries he sustained during the attack. Muradi's stepmother was slightly wounded.

In August 2021, Taliban forces killed 13 Hazaras, 11 of whom were former members of the security forces. They were told to surrender to the Taliban and hand over their weapons. In addition to these 11 former security officers, two others who had no security background were killed by Taliban forces. One of them was a 17-year-old girl. Nine of the 11 members of the security forces were shot dead after they had surrendered to the Taliban. The execution of soldiers who are surrendering is a war crime.

In July 2021, Taliban forces, after taking control of the Malistan district in Ghazni province, massacred nine Hazaras from Mundarakht village. Six of them were shot. Three others were tortured to death, including one who was strangled with his own scarf. At that time, due to the Taliban takeover, the villagers fled from their homes to iloks, their summer grazing lands. Some of those killed were detained and tortured to death upon returning to their village to collect food—as they had little food for 30 families—while others were ambushed, arrested and killed by the Taliban at their check-posts. One of the victims, who had been suffering from depression, was not able to leave the village before the Taliban took over. He was killed in the village.

At the same time, in October 2021, Human Rights Watch reported on the forced eviction of Hazaras or Shia Hazaras from at least five provinces of Afghanistan. The forced evictions that targeted the Hazaras and former government employees were based on ethnicity and political opinion. Those forced evictions were conducted with a few days' notice and no opportunity to present legal documents. According to HRW, 2,800 residents were evicted in September 2021 alone from 15 villages in the Daykundi and Uruzgan provinces.

Despite this tragic situation, the Shia or the Shia Hazaras have also been facing widespread and continued attacks by the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, as well as by other armed groups across the country. Since 2015, Hazaras have been a target at schools, on public transport, at mosques, during prayers, at sport clubs, at hospitals, at wedding ceremonies and during religious rituals. These attacks target civilians in civilian places. In some cases, each of these attacks left over a hundred or more casualties. One example of that is the Kaaj tuition centre, which Ms. Javadi just mentioned. Another is the attack that happened a few days ago, which left dozens of people and worshippers killed or wounded in Baghlan province.

The former government failed to protect the Hazaras against these attacks, and the situation is extremely grim under the Taliban. This includes the fact that the survivors' and victims' families have faced restrictions in accessing hospitals, clinics or their own wounded relatives. The Taliban is also putting restrictions in place on media coverage of such attacks.

With the Taliban back in power, Hazaras have been increasingly marginalized from decision-making processes and representation. The Taliban has replaced some of the former government employees in Hazara-populated areas, such as Bamiyan, Ghor and Daykundi provinces, mainly due to their ethnicity, according to the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Afghanistan. There is no Hazara representation in the Taliban's cabinet.

I'll stop here and would be happy to expand upon this further during the question period.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Mr. Sultani.

Now, I would like to invite Mr. Stanton to take the floor for five minutes.

[Dr. Gregory Stanton, President, Genocide Watch]

Thank you.

It's a great honour for me to be here with you today. I speak behalf of Genocide Watch and the World Hazara Council, which approved my statement.

The Hazaras are the Jews of Afghanistan. The Taliban and ISIS have marked them for extermination. The Hazara people are among the most persecuted peoples in the world. The Hazara are an ethnic and religious minority who have been facing systematic persecution and genocide in Afghanistan for over 100 years.

The Hazara make up a quarter of the population of Afghanistan. Outside Afghanistan, Hazaras are one of the largest Afghan refugee groups in the world. UNHCR in Afghanistan favours Sunni Muslims, so very few Hazaras have been sponsored for resettlement in nations that rely on the UN refugee system, including Canada and the U.S.

Afghanistan is a country of minorities with none of its ethnic groups making a majority. However, the Hazara people, predominantly Shia Muslims, are a religious minority in a Sunni Muslim majority country. The Hazara have faced for many years—at least a century—relentless, systematic, genocidal massacres based on their ethnic and religious identity.

In the late 19th century, as one of our previous speakers mentioned, the Afghan ruler Abdur Rahman, who united Afghanistan, also waged a brutal war against the Hazaras that killed 62% of Afghanistan's Hazara population. That is called genocide.

The persecution of the Hazaras continued into the 20th century. In the 1970s, the Afghan government did not allow Hazara people any access to higher education, especially in universities that trained candidates for army and government jobs. The killing of the Hazara people has been preached as a key to paradise by some Sunni Muslim clerics.

In the 1990s, there were at least nine genocidal massacres of Hazaras by the Taliban government and al Qaeda. Taliban commanders publicly proclaimed this slogan: “Tajiks to Tajikistan, Uzbeks to Uzbekistan and Hazaras to goristan”.Goristan is the Afghan Dari word for “graveyard”.

In August 1998, in just a few days, the Taliban massacred 8,000 Hazaras in Mazar-i-Sharif.

In 2002, the Hazara people of Afghanistan suffered over 300 targeted massacres. Since 2015, the Islamic State-Khorasan Province, ISKP, affiliated with the Haqqani Network, and it has claimed responsibility for some of these massacres, giving the Taliban a way to deny responsibility, even though the Haqqani Network is part of the Taliban government. To date, none of these crimes carried out against the Hazara people have been investigated.

These massacres have all of the elements of the crime of genocide in article II of the 1948 genocide convention. They include killings of members of the group, creating serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group and creating conditions of life calculated to destroy the group. Under Taliban rule since August 2021, genocidal attacks against Hazaras have increased significantly. Hazaras have been attacked in educational centres, places of worship, maternity hospitals, sporting facilities, public gatherings and wedding halls. There was a genocidal attack on a Hazara girls school that murdered 58 Hazara girl students, yet the UN and the international press nearly always refuse to identify the victims as Hazaras and fail to note the ethnically and religiously targeted nature of this genocide. This is called genocide denial.

The Hazara people are enduring a continuous slow-motion genocide by attrition in Afghanistan. Urgent Canadian and international action is needed to protect the Hazaras of Afghanistan.

I conclude with the following recommendations: the UN, U.S., EU, U.K, journalists and human rights organizations must recognize that these systematically targeted attacks against the Hazara people in Afghanistan meet the definition of genocide—the intentional destruction of a substantial part of an ethnic and religious group as such.

The UN and national governments should initiate urgent consultations with Hazara organizations for the protection on the Hazara people. The UN Human Rights Council should establish an independent fact-finding mission to investigate the ongoing systematic attacks on Hazara people. The International Criminal Court should expand the scope of its authorized investigation into war crimes in Afghanistan to include cases of crimes against humanity and genocide against the Hazara people.

Finally, and this is the most important recommendation of all for the Canadian Parliament, we urge all refugee resettling countries, especially Canada, the United States and Australia, to prioritize Hazara refugees for asylum and resettlement. Canada must increase the number of visas for asylum seekers for Hazara people, specifically.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Mr. Stanton. Thank you for agreeing to appear today.

I will now open the floor for questions, but before that, I would like to ask the committee if, instead of having seven minutes in round one and five minutes in round two, due to the restriction of time, is it possible to have four minutes or five minutes in each round? What do you prefer, please?

I would like to start with Mr. Genuis.

You have the floor for four minutes, Mr. Genuis.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you for your testimony. I'm going to rip through quickly then.

Ms. Javadi, I have been told that the National Resistance Front is inclusive of people from different ethnic groups and religious backgrounds. I've been advocating for greater engagement by our government with the National Resistance Front. From your perspective, is there a constructive relationship between the Hazara community and the National Resistance Front?

Would it be in the interest of Hazara people for western governments to provide more support to this and/or other resistance organizations in Afghanistan?

[Soomaya Javadi]

I'm not an expert on this, but from what I know, they do not represent Hazara people obviously. However, I support the organizations and people who resist the Taliban. Whoever is against the Taliban is with us.

That's my answer. Thank you.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

Thank you.

Do any of the other witnesses want to weigh in on the relationship between Hazaras and the NRF or other resistance groups, and the wisdom of western governments engaging with resistance groups?

Okay. Thank you.

If I think about what we can do in response to the horrific violations of human rights against Hazaras, many of the types of measures this committee would recommend—sanctions, for example, or speaking out—given that the de facto authority in Afghanistan, the Taliban, are already a listed terrorist organization in Canada, it's challenging for me to identify what further actions we could take in the direction of isolating or holding the Taliban accountable. Listing as a terrorist organization is probably the furthest one can go in that sense.

There's possible engagement with the opposition and proposals have been made around immigration measures, but beyond that what could we be concretely recommending in response to these events?

That question is for anybody who wants to engage on that.

[Dr. Gregory Stanton]

I was legal adviser to the Ukrainian independence movement, Rukh, back between 1988 and 1992. Doesn't that sound like a long time ago?

I am strong believer in having diaspora communities support the overthrow of tyrannical governments. It can make a huge difference. I know that because they had that effect in Ukraine. In fact, I know some of the Ukrainians in Canada who made that happen. One of them was your foreign minister. The same was true here in the United States.

I strongly believe if more visas are given to Hazaras to come to Canada to resettle, even temporarily, it will have a big impact inside Afghanistan.

My major recommendation, as I said in the talk I just gave, is to greatly increase the number of visas that you specifically earmark for Hazaras from Afghanistan to come to Canada—that has not been done yet—specifically recognizing them as a religious and ethnically persecuted community, just the way the Jews were during the Holocaust.

[Garnett Genuis, Conservative, Sherwood Park—Fort Saskatchewan, AB]

I think we're out of time, but if the other witnesses have further responses to that, maybe others will raise it.

I also welcome your feedback in writing with those specific suggestions.

Thanks.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Mr. Genuis.

Now I would like to invite Ms. Vandenbeld to take the floor for four minutes, please.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much, Chair.

I want to thank all our witnesses.

Just before I start my questions, Ms. Javadi, at the end you didn't get a chance to finish your remarks with recommendations to the committee. I'll just give you a few minutes to do so.

[Soomaya Javadi]

Thank you very much.

We simply want acknowledgement and justice. I am appealing to you to support the thorough investigation of the Hazara genocide by the International Criminal Court.

I am appealing to you to take away the Taliban's and their allies' impunity in committing genocide and crimes against humanity. The first step in doing so is to recognize the Hazara genocide.

Thank you.

[Anita Vandenbeld, Liberal, Ottawa West—Nepean, ON]

Thank you very much.

I'll pose my first question to Mr. Sultani first, but Ms. Javadi, can also respond if she'd like.

Certainly when there are situations where a group is not only marginalized and oppressed but also silenced, the possibility of getting information out to the rest of the world about what is happening in real time becomes extremely difficult. In that regard, I'm very pleased you're here and able to testify, but I notice that a lot of what you're talking about happened in 2021, 2022 or previously in history.

I wonder if you could tell us about what is happening right now in this moment. What do you know and how might we be able to learn more about the current situation, which I understand to be quite tragic and dismal?

I'll go to Mr. Sultani first.

[Zaman Sultani]

Thank you. Thank you for these questions.

Unfortunately, the situation to get information out of Afghanistan is very difficult, particularly from rural areas and from many others where the Hazaras are living. It is near to impossible to hear about or to collect and verify information on the atrocities that are happening in those areas. It is very difficult.

As I said in my statement today, the Hazara representations, in terms of the decision-making or the structure of the government whereby they can protect themselves, are the same. There is no change. Additionally, this year, we saw the Taliban put additional restrictions on the Shia Hazaras in terms of their religious rituals in general from the beginning, and then additional restrictions were introduced at the provincial level, as you can see from UNAMA's report that was mentioned today.

The situation involving forced evictions continues. In one case, it was reported without their being very specific in terms of who the perpetrator was and how it happened. In just the past few months, I think six people, Hazaras in Khas Uruzgan were killed. Several houses and properties were destroyed. When it comes to accountability, unfortunately, we don't see any accountability by the Taliban with respect to what they are doing. That is a very difficult situation.

I want to add another point. The situation of Hazaras is unfortunately one in which we and everyone else in the international community are asking the oppressors to protect the victims. If you look at the background of the Taliban, they massacred Hazaras in the 1990s. A key example of that was Mazar-i-Sharif, which could be considered genocide. It was so horrible. They did that in Bamiyan and several other areas. Some of that we have investigated. Amnesty International has investigated and verified and reported on this.

[The Chair, Liberal, Fayçal El-Khoury]

Thank you, Mr. Sultani. I'm sorry but the time is up.

Thank you, Ms. Vandenbeld.

Go ahead, Mr. Trudel. You have four minutes.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

I would like to thank the witnesses for their very touching remarks about everything that's happening in Afghanistan right now.

My first question is for all three of you. I would like to go back to what happened from 1891 to 1893 in Afghanistan. You said, but I would still like you to repeat it, in turn: Do you consider what happened from 1891 to 1893 in Afghanistan to be genocide?

[Dr. Gregory Stanton]

Yes, definitely. The definition of genocide doesn't depend on the number of people killed. It is a legal term that is defined by the intent of the perpetrators. During that period and in 1991 to 1993, when the Taliban was killing Hazaras, the Hazaras were targeted because they were Hazaras. That is called genocidal intent. Definitely, it was genocide.

[Denis Trudel, Bloc, Longueuil—Saint-Hubert, QC]

Dr. Stanton and Ms. Javadi, what do you think about it?