Canada’s help was a shell game
Planes taking off from Kabul at least half-empty
It was a complex operation that would have rescued nearly 300 young Afghan musicians who might have found their way to Canada if Justin Trudeau’s government had only been paying attention. Estonian, Portuguese and Ukrainian military officials had offered to partner with Ottawa to make the rescue possible. It never happened.
In the case of a Canadianfunded non-governmental organization that has run schools, literacy centres and adult-education programs in Afghanistan, Ottawa’s dysfunctional procedures and mixed messaging have finally caused more than 20 imperilled Afghan staff to abandon their hopes. The group has repurposed itself to the task of establishing a network of safe houses and laying the foundational tracks of an underground railroad out of the country.
The Afghan-canadian publisher of Hasht-e-sohb, a liberal Kabul daily newspaper, has been waiting for days to hear whether any of his family members even qualify for Canada’s Afghan refugee resettlement project. The Taliban aren’t only on the lookout for journalists they don’t like — they’re also hunting journalists’ family members.
Two relatives of an Afghan Deutsche Welle editor who had already relocated to Germany were shot by the Taliban last month. One of them was killed. Three weeks ago, a Kabul radio station manager was assassinated, a journalist in Helmand was kidnapped, and Amdadullah Hamdard, a prominent contributor to Germany’s Die Zeit newspaper, was murdered in Jalalabad.
The Canadian branch of PEN International, working with PEN’S Afghan centre, have provided Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada with a detailed list of 63 women among hundreds of Afghan journalists who have been identified as being in peril.
The effort has gone nowhere, mostly because each journalist has been expected to apply individually and to provide documentation in advance that is in some cases impossible to obtain — like passports — and is in any case practically impossible to transmit from the country to Ottawa.
In the case of Afghanistan’s young musicians, their cause had been taken up by several well-connected Canadians with links in Afghanistan, associated with the Ofelas Group consular consultancy. They’d hoped that the federal government would waive the nearly insurmountable technicalities involved in individual applications and agree to resettle the students and faculty of Afghanistan’s National Institute of Music, including members of the institute’s all-female orchestra, among whom is an outspoken cellist who has become a high-profile Afghan women’s rights activist.
Their future looks grim. The Taliban’s Zabihullah Mujahid, pegged as the front-runner for the Islamic Emirate’s minister of culture, has already stated his position: “Music is forbidden in Islam.”
The musicians’ rescue was advocated, at least nominally, by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and International Development Minister Karina Gould, individuals directly involved in the effort tell me. But the initiative appears to have reached a dead end with Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, whose aides said his hands were tied.
I’m also told that senior Ukrainian officials had said that if the musicians were approved for resettlement in Canada they could find a place for the musicians on a Ukrainian flight, but word from Canada never came. At one point, a senior Estonian official became involved as a kind of mediator, and the Portuguese government committed to resettling all the musicians, if only Canada could fly them out.
But the few Canadian Forces’ Globemasters flying out of Kabul were taking off from the runway at least half empty, and evacuations ground to a halt after the Aug. 26 suicide-bombing attack at the airport that killed roughly 185 people, including 13 American military personnel.
As for the 63 women journalists PEN Canada is hoping to get resettled in Canada, efforts on their behalf have also gone nowhere. “These are women who are manifestly at risk,” Grace Westcott, president of PEN Canada, told me. “These women could have easily been issued temporary visas and travel documents, and then have the women processed in Canada or in a third country if that could not have been done. But the federal government would not do that.”
Like several other NGOS and networks that have been jumping through hoops trying to rescue Afghans and help them find their way to Canada, Westcott says her organization is now pinning its hopes on the resumption of commercial flights out of Kabul, and on the Taliban’s dubious assurances that Afghans who want to relocate in foreign countries will be allowed to leave unmolested.
“We’re hoping that the Canadian government will step up in a way that they could not step up — they certainly did not step up — before the 26th of August, and issue those emergency visas and give that chance of escape to those folks.”
Fen Osler Hampson, the Carleton University Professor who serves as the president of the World Refugee and Migration Council, says Ottawa’s apparent paralysis appears at least partly due to Liberal leader Justin Trudeau’s preoccupation with election campaigning. Canada should be among the leading NATO countries in preparing for a massive refugee crisis comparable to the ongoing Syrian catastrophe. But Canada is otherwise engaged at the moment.
A proper response would mean pouring resources into the UN’S ill-funded refugee capacity in Iran and Pakistan and replicating aspects of the Vietnamese “boat people” crisis of the 1970s and the 2006 Lebanese crisis, which required the evacuation of 30,000 Canadians from that country. “We can’t just put our heads in the sand,” Hampson said. The announcement that we’re going to take 20,000 Afghan refugees is certainly not going to solve the problem.
Hampson described Ottawa’s Aug. 13 refugee-target pledge as a “quota shell game.”
Ottawa announced two resettlement streams for Afghans following U.S. President Joe Biden’s peace-deal capitulation to the so-called Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, the collapse of the Afghan National Defence and Security Forces and the Taliban’s occupation of Kabul. A July 22 initiative involved the evacuation of embassy staff, interpreters and other Afghans who worked directly alongside Canadians in the country over the years. On Aug. 13, a second stream was opened for “20,000 vulnerable Afghans threatened by the Taliban and forced to flee Afghanistan.” This is what Hampson called a “shell game.”
The Aug. 13 announcement gave the impression that the resettlement scheme was aimed at “women leaders, human rights defenders, journalists, persecuted religious minorities, LGBT individuals” who were at risk in Afghanistan, but strictly speaking, the number referred to Afghans who could find their way out of the country, or who already had.
On Tuesday, for instance, Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino announced that the government was “pulling out all the stops to help as many Afghans as possible who want to make their home in Canada,” but the 5,000 Afghans mentioned in his announcement had already been evacuated to the United States.
Only 2,000 Afghans have been evacuated from the July 23 initiative, along with 1,700 Canadians. Those Afghans had been directly involved in assisting the Canadian military and Canadian diplomats. Hundreds of Afghans who are believed to qualify for resettlement from that initial program are believed to have been left behind.
“We are seeing before our very eyes a major unfolding tragedy, driven by politics and bad guys,” Hampson told me. It’s not just the American capitulation that triggered the refugee disaster. “I think it’s very difficult to say we’ve done an exemplary job on this. Everyone gets a failing grade here, ourselves included.”
IN THE CASE OF AFGHANISTAN’S YOUNG MUSICIANS, THEIR CAUSE HAD BEEN TAKEN UP BY SEVERAL WELL-CONNECTED CANADIANS WITH LINKS IN AFGHANISTAN.