He fled Afghanistan with $100 in his pocket
Nighttime protected Shafiqullah Akbari as he climbed up his home’s rooftop with the exhaust pipe of his fireplace in hand. Overlooking the pitch-black, Soviet-patrolled streets of Kabul, the distant mountains barely a shadow, the 17-yearold boy took a deep breath, held up the pipe as a megaphone and called out “Allahu akbar.”
Boys on every other rooftop followed suit, one after another, and then altogether.
That night in 1979, the rooftops rung with the hopeful echoes of a prayer — a simple act of defiance against the Russian invaders.
“When you would hear this it would make you understand that the whole country is against Russia,” said Akbari, 55. He spoke softly, pausing as if hearing the sounds of their voices in his Brampton home.
Days after that night in Kabul, with only $100 (U.S.) in his pocket and a shawl the colour of sand wrapped around him, Akbari left his family and his city and walked 10 hours to Wardak province, his ancestral home, and then 10 days to Peshawar, Pakistan, to escape the war.
In the past 30 years, Afghan refugees have consistently streamed into Canada, more so than any other country, including Syria. A total of 37,265 Afghans have arrived since 1991.
“You look at the world, everything is different. They are not running away for fun, they are running away because there is no future there as long as there is a war.” SHAFIQULLAH AKBARI AFGHAN REFUGEE
The Star spoke to three generations of Afghan-Canadian refugees who fled during the Soviet-led war and during the ongoing U.S.-led war against the Taliban that began in 2001, of which Canada was once a part. The numbers of Afghan refugees are expected to only grow as militant violence increases and aid groups slowly withdraw from the country.
As the war and its players have dramatically shifted over the decades, the process to seek safety as an Afghan refugee has changed — from a relatively simple process in the ’80s and ’90s to a more arduous system today.
Akbari was part of the first wave of refugees to Canada, arriving in 1988, at a time when seeking asylum was somewhat easy. In an old, black briefcase with silver clasps, he looks through faded, worn-out documents he brought with him, with great nostalgia for a past he wishes he could return to.
His old birth certificate; the albums of his six brothers and sisters that are just starting to come apart; the diplomas he has accumulated; a laminated family lineage that goes back13 generations. In a Ziploc bag, he keeps the pocket knife his mother used to peel fruit, and his father’s glasses, held together by a rubber band.
He carried this briefcase with him when he first arrived at a Montreal airport in 1988. “I got scared about my future,” he said, holding his high school report card. “I had to leave.”
Wearing a brown leather jacket, a 26-year-old Akbari prayed no one would notice him as he journeyed from India to Canada with a forged French passport, the ticket and documents provided by a friend.
He hid in the airport bathroom for hours after his arrival, waiting for his plane to return to India so that no one could force him to leave Canada.
The plane took with it every instance of hardship he suffered to get here: the time a police officer, while frisking him at the Afghan-Pakistan border, placed a stash of hashish in his jacket pocket to frame him and take all his money; the time a train conductor kicked him as he slept on a train on the way to Karachi; the Sikh security guard who let him cross over to India without a ticket after finding photos of the war he was escaping in his bag.
Akbari flushed his passport down the toilet and walked up to an airport official.
“I am refugee from Afghanistan,” he said, labelling himself as a rootless man for the first time. “I want asylum.”
The process was quick at the time, he recalls. The officer gave him a date for his refugee hearing. A kind taxi driver gave him a ride to the train station in Montreal, so he could take a train to Toronto, after hearing he was a refugee.
The entire time, he kept repeating his Toronto-based brother’s home address in his head like a mantra — 1213 Baldwin St. — in case he lost the paper on which it was written.
Noticing his dishevelled appearance, an elderly man bought him breakfast at the station. Sitting across from each other, the man told Akbari that he must work hard and stay focused to build a better life. Akbari smiles whimsically when he tells the story.
The advice and the breakfast, he said, fuelled him that first day, and continues to do so.
On his second day in Canada, Akbari bought a winter jacket and went to work in a factory in Markham, despite his brother’s insistence that he take some time to settle in first. “I wanted to work,” he said. ‘I needed to work.”
It was the first of a series of jobs he would take on to support himself and his family back home in Afghanistan: driving instructor, taxi driver, realtor.
In 1991, he became a Canadian citizen and went back to visit Afghanistan. He visits almost every year now, he said, sometimes with his three children.
And he’s personally helped sponsor several refugee families.
“I have this attachment to my coun- try,” he said, as traditional trays of corn cake and dried fruits and nuts sit on the table in his Brampton home, in a room adorned with Afghan carpets.
“I feel bad for the number of refugees that are coming here, but what can we do?” he asks.
“You look at the world, everything is different. They are not running away for fun, they are running away because there is no future there as long as there is a war.”
In Akbari’s backyard, a green, black and red Afghan flag, which he mounted and built a pole for, blows in the cold, winter air.
A dozen pigeons have settled into a coop he built. When he needs to call them home, he crushes Afghan corn cake in his hand and throws it on the grey stone ground.