Minister born in Iran, not Afghanistan
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 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 learned that she was born 200 kilometres from the Afghan border in Mashhad, Iran, in 1984.
The revelation prompted NDP immigration critic Jenny Kwan to question 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.”
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 in Atlantic Canada on Thursday, was not immediately available for an interview.
But her public statement laid out the broad strokes of a life story that’s remained consistent since she began her meteoric ascent as the rookie Liberal candidate in the formerly Conservative riding of Peterborough, Ont.
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.
After her father died, Monsef’s statement said, her mother never talked about “the unspeakable pain” of those early years. That silence ended when Monsef was confronted with a reporter’s inquiries about where she was born and she in turn confronted her mother.
“She told us she did not think it mattered,” Monsef said of her mother, Soriya Basir.
“We were Afghan citizens, as we were born to Afghan parents, and under Iranian law, we would not be considered Iranian citizens despite being born in that country.”