Stories like Monsef’s common: advocate
Details of past hidden by family to protect them
OTTAWA • A longtime refugee advocate says stories such as that of Liberal MP Maryam Monsef are not uncommon as families fleeing war and violence reconstruct their past in a new land.
Monsef, widely touted as Canada’s first Afghan-born cabinet minister, caused a stir in the capital Thursday when she issued a statement saying she only recently learned from her mother that she was in fact born in Iran.
The 31-year-old minister of democratic institutions says she and her two sisters never held Iranian citizenship and were always considered Afghan citizens, but she was not born in Herat, Afghanistan, “as I was led to believe for my whole life.”
“It’s fair to say I have experienced a range of emotions over the past few days as I have tried to understand this with my family,” said the statement.
Monsef said she’s learned she was actually born 200 kilometres from the Afghan border in Mashhad, Iran, in 1984.
The revelation prompted NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan to question what she called the “troubling” Liberal cabinet vetting process.
But Janet Dench, the executive director of the Canadian Council for Refugees, told The Canadian Press that after years of refugee work, “I really don’t understand the significance.”
“To me it’s like, ‘Oh, she was born in a different month than she thought she was.’ Why is this so exciting for us all?”
Unlike Canada, in most countries birth doesn’t automatically confer citizenship, said Dench, and refugee movements back and forth across borders are simply a matter of survival.
“Seems to me that’s part of the refugee experience,” she said. “You’re on the move, you have to hide certain things, stories are painful to tell.”
Monsef, who was travelling Thursday in Atlantic Canada, was not immediately available for an interview.
Profiles of Monsef since her appointment to cabinet last Nov. 4 have consistently referenced her family travelling back and forth across the Afghanistan-Iran border as the security situation allowed.
The Monsefs came to Peterborough, Ont., as refugees in 1996 when Maryam was 11 years old.
Dench, who doesn’t know the Monsefs and is not familiar with their case history, said the story seems all too common.
“Constantly you hear stories of how people, as they’re growing up, the veil is lifted on certain things and they realize that certain parts of what they’d been told may have been to protect them,” said the refugee advocate.
Monsef unwittingly listed Herat as her birthplace on her passport application, her office said Friday.
“Now that she has learned that this is incorrect, she will be taking steps to see how she can rectify this unintentional error,” spokesman Jean-Bruno Villeneuve said in an email.