For four months, a group of Canadian MPs of all stripes made repeated calls to the federal immigration minister to help nine former Afghan MPs flee the Taliban regime. For four months they waited for an answer. It was finally a rifle that answered them first.
On Sunday, one of the nine women on their list, MP Mursal Nabizada, was murdered in her home in Kabul by a group of armed individuals.
The news quickly spread around the world. This is the first time that a person who sat in the Afghan Parliament, the Wolesi Jirga, has been shot since the Taliban took over power in August 2021. The crime has been decried around the world. “Shocking”. ” Horrible “. “Those responsible must face justice”, it was said in Washington as in Brussels.
Surely, Minister Sean Fraser was finally going to react to the request of the group of elected officials who have been hounding him for months, said Alexis Brunelle-Duceppe, Bloc Québécois MP who is part of the initiative with, in particular, the co-head from the Green Party, Elizabeth May, Alex Ruff from the Conservative Party, and Marcus Powlowski from the Liberal ranks.
PHOTO WAKIL KOHSAR, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Mursal Nabizada was murdered in her home in Kabul
Especially since this political rainbow had sent him an ultimatum just last Friday, telling him that if he did not move a finger, they were going to speak in public about his inaction on the file.
“I’m not sure I understand why we didn’t get a response after what we sent on Friday and after what happened this weekend,” the MP for Lac- Saint John Tuesday.
This silence is indeed more than worrying. It is outrageous.
It is also a reflection of the actions of the Canadian government since the botched withdrawal of American forces and NATO troops from Afghanistan in 2021.
The group of deputies is not the first to try to shake the chips off the minister and the department under his responsibility, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), in the Afghan file.
After successfully bringing 2,000 Afghans to safety, including many interpreters who assisted Canadian soldiers in the field, a group of veterans, the Veterans Transition Network, publicly announced last April that it was ending its efforts. The organization’s chief executive, Oliver Thorne, said his staff were suffering from burnout after struggling again and again with the cumbersome bureaucratic process in Canada.
“What we see are government policies that want to avoid risks so much that they become selfish,” he told the Globe and Mail.
At the time, his fed up didn’t surprise me. I myself hit a wall when I tried to help my former interpreter and fixer, Akbar Shinwari, in his dealings with IRCC. Employees of my MP’s office, Marc Miller, stopped responding to my emails altogether.
Ultimately, it was the United States that gave Akbar and his family asylum. I am still waiting for answers to my questions.
It cannot be said, however, that the Canadian government, which has promised to open its doors to 40,000 Afghans, has done nothing for its allies in the country. To date, 18,000 former collaborators have been able to come to the country in some 17 months. In all, 27,000 Afghans have found refuge in Canada since the followers of Mullah Omar plunged their country back into obscurantism. Among them are human rights activists, journalists and former MPs.
What is shocking is the slowness of the process. By comparison, the same ministry managed to approve 492,000 visa applications for Ukrainian nationals in less than a year. In 11 months, more than 140,000 Ukrainians landed in Canada.
With a three-year visa and a work permit, Ukrainians do not receive the same status as Afghans, who arrive as refugees. However, the Ukrainian program demonstrates that the Canadian government is capable of acting quickly in an emergency if it wants to.
Working with a non-governmental organization that has branches in Afghanistan, Canadian MPs who want to help the last elected Afghan women have planned everything. They have an escape plan. All they need are the Canadian immigration papers to put this plan into action, to extricate these women from the prison that is closing in on them. Papers that they have been waiting for too long from a government that says it bases its foreign policy on feminist ideals and that has long encouraged Afghan women to get involved in politics.
On Tuesday, Minister Fraser flashed the lights to say that he is finally looking into the matter.
Let’s hope it’s not too late.