Since the fall of Kabul last August, the Taliban’s message to women in Afghanistan has been clear: your rights will continue to exist — but only on paper. And anyone who objects will be subject to beatings, disappearance, and murder.
Thousands of Afghan women have been waiting over half a year for clarity on Canada’s commitment to resettle 40,000 refugees fleeing the Taliban. On March 3, Ottawa announced waiving normal visa requirements for an unlimited number of Ukrainians. Though a welcome move, it must have nonetheless felt like a Taliban-inspired reminder that their lives are not worthy of urgent action.
For Farzana Adell, a leading Afghan women’s rights activist now in hiding due to Taliban death threats, it is completely understandable that Canada would be fast-tracking Ukrainian refugees. But why hasn’t a similar sense of urgency been attached to the many cases like hers, where the risk of persecution, torture, and death remains high?
Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Minister Sean Fraser insists Afghans remain a priority (even as he concedes they can expect up to an additional 2-year wait for processing). Yet Adell and countless others in her shoes have found the path to safety in Canada littered with bureaucratic bafflegab and needlessly obstructive barriers.
Adell meets all eligibility criteria for entry to Canada under the “special humanitarian program to resettle vulnerable Afghan nationals outside of Afghanistan.” She’s a women’s rights leader, a human rights defender, and a member of a persecuted religious group and ethnic minority. She is an Ismaili Muslim and an ethnic Hazara, both groups persecuted by the Taliban. She is also unable to access health care where she now lives. She is a severe diabetic with unstable vision, stomach and kidney pains, and ongoing physical and emotional trauma from life-threatening beatings she endured at the hands of the Taliban.
But like many Afghans, she meets the definition of individuals in desperate need of protection, some fine-print details make it literally impossible for her to access Canada’s immigration system.
Unnecessary barriers
The most serious obstacle is the need to be referred as a refugee by one of the following: the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), a host country, or one of two human rights organizations that have partnered with Ottawa. However, accessing any of these options has proven an almost insurmountable barrier.
Last November, a group of former Canadian government officials and human rights advocates released an open letter to the Canadian government bemoaning Ottawa’s cement-headed approach to the crisis facing Afghan refugees. In addition to calling on IRCC to eliminate the requirement for UNHCR referral and devoting increased resources to caseworkers, it also called on immigration bureaucrats to recognize the crisis as a prima facie refugee situation.
This, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, translates into a blanket recognition of someone’s refugee status “on the basis of readily apparent, objective circumstances in the country of origin or, in the case of stateless asylum seekers, their country of former habitual residence. A prima facie approach acknowledges that those fleeing these circumstances are at risk of harm that brings them within the applicable refugee definition.”
Adell’s difficult journey illustrates just how such requirements doom her unless there is ministerial intervention to grant her a temporary resident permit to enter Canada. She has been offered free room and board by an Ottawa Emerita Professor and support from a well-connected network of women’s rights activists in Canada.
Adell’s attempts to be recognized as a women’s rights defender with one of the two other human rights organizations has been squelched by ridiculously low quotas. One program was fully subscribed in January 2022. She has not heard back from the other, which is likely at capacity as well.
The chances of UNHCR, the UN High Commission for Refugees, being able to handle Adell’s case within a reasonable amount of time would have been remote. In 2018, the UNHCR reported that it was “facing an unprecedented caseload.” with processing capacity continuing to “fall far short of the needs.”
The UNHCR also reported, “In the most extreme cases, new applicants receive appointments for (Refugee Status Determination, RSD) interviews 5 years or more away. In such circumstances, RSD may become meaningless as a protection tool, especially in situations where people are not well protected as asylum seekers.”
Differential treatment
IRCC Minister Sean Fraser insists that getting Afghans to Canada is complicated because of the security situation in Kabul. But it’s a red herring rationale that distracts from the fact that tens of thousands of Afghans are already outside of their home country, waiting in a lengthy list of countries for an opening that will find them permanent safety.
The snail’s pace at which Afghans are getting to Canada stands in stark contrast to the speed with which Ukrainians have been arriving. Indeed, in the seven months since the August 21, 2021 seizure of power by the Taliban, IRCC reports 8,680 Afghans getting to Canada. In contrast, over 6,100 Ukrainians have arrived since January 1, 2022.
While advocates welcome the open arms approach for those fleeing the Russian war, they cannot help but wonder about the racism which underscores such differential treatment. Indeed, as almost 3 million white refugees have been able to cross borders out of Ukraine, African students studying there have been kicked off of evacuation trains and turned away at the Polish border. A similar fate has befallen Afghan refugees in Ukraine who escaped the war zone of their own country only to face another six months later.
Neither group is allowed to come to Canada under the current Ukrainian refugee program. (Notably, the overworked Montreal IRCC call centre handling calls from Afghanistan is now the subject of an investigation into a racist work environment.)
Even the language used by the Canadian government illustrates two very different approaches. While a statement on the IRCC website states we welcome “those fleeing the war in Ukraine,” the emboldened terror of the Taliban is encapsulated on the anodyne-sounding page named “Canada’s response to the situation in Afghanistan.”
Naming it “a situation” fails to do justice to the reality on the ground in Afghanistan. Human Rights Watch reports summary executions, Taliban raids on the homes of journalists, activists, and human rights defenders, brutal violence to break up women-led protests, disappearances of women’s right leaders, mass firings of women, and further restrictions on girls accessing education.
In addition, those who, like Adell, are women’s rights activists, have been the subject of threats and attacks in Afghanistan. On January 20, 2022, the Guardian reported, “Taliban gunmen have raided the homes of women’s rights activists in Kabul, beating and arresting female campaigners in a string of actions apparently triggered by recent demonstrations.”
Also in January, a group of 36 United Nations experts issued a statement expressing concern “about the continuous and systematic efforts to exclude women from the social, economic, and political spheres across the country.” The experts added such concerns “are exacerbated in the cases of women from ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities such as the Hazara, Tajik, Hindu and other communities whose differences or visibility make them even more vulnerable in Afghanistan.” As noted above, Adell is Hazara, and her family have been targeted historically for violence as a result.
On January 21, 2022, Amnesty International demanded to know the whereabouts of Hazara prison official Alia Azizi, who had been missing for three months after reporting one day for duty at the Herat Women’s Prison. Nine days after the collapse of the former Afghan government, she had returned to her job at the prison in possession of a letter of amnesty from the Taliban, but that failed to protect her.
“It’s been more than three months since Alia Azizi disappeared and her family still remains completely in the dark about her whereabouts. Her apparent abduction takes place within the context of the Taliban illegally detaining members of the former government, journalists, and assorted critics across the country,” said Zaman Sultani, Amnesty International’s South Asia Researcher.
On February 3 2022, BBC reported that the Taliban had arrested women’s rights activist Mursal Ayar after she took part in rallies demanding equal rights for women. She was, the BBC noted, the 6th women’s rights activist to “vanish.”
Devastating impact on women and girls
The Taliban’s offer of amnesty to former government officials has little value as well. Many Afghans find themselves in a Catch-22 where, regardless of what they do, they are targeted by the Taliban. As Human Rights Watch points out, “Many Afghans interviewed expressed fear that if they register with the Taliban to receive the amnesty letter, they might be identified or recognized and face violent retaliation. At the same time, the Taliban have also searched for and detained people who failed to register.”
That bleak assessment was confirmed by a joint Human Rights Watch/San Jose State University (SJSU) study in January, 2022. The study found, “Taliban rule has had a devastating impact on Afghan women and girls.” It added, “…the Taliban have imposed rights-violating policies that have created huge barriers to women’s and girls’ health and education, curtailed freedom of movement, expression, and association, and deprived many of earned income.”
In an introduction to that report, Halima Kazem-Stojanovic, a core faculty member of SJSU’s Human Rights Institute and a scholar on Afghanistan, pointed out: “Afghan women and girls are facing both the collapse of their rights and dreams and risks to their basic survival. They are caught between Taliban abuses and actions by the international community that are pushing Afghans further into desperation every day.”
Those conditions have been exacerbated by a bumbling and vindictive Biden administration whose refusal to return $7 billion in Afghan assets held by the U.S. will inevitably increase the risks of mass starvation, which the UN predicts could claim the lives of 1 million children. To pay for food and fuel, some families have been forced to sell their children into marriage.
As she documents the devastating impacts of Taliban rule in her homeland, Adell, who co-founded the Gender Equality Rights Organization Afghanistan (GEROA), sadly reflects on the reversal of the limited but significant gains that were made over the past two decades.
A member of the Afghan Women’s Network almost from its inception, she worked in former President Ghani’s office as the Chief of Staff for the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women from 2016-2017. She was also the Corporate Social Responsibility Manager for Afghan Telecom, where she was responsible for supporting girls’ and women’s projects. Her work involved building seven high schools and primary schools for girls, establishing nearly twenty playgrounds for children and creating e-learning centres for girls deprived of school under the Taliban. Her work also included building water wells in communities where women could access them to bring clean drinking water to their homes, and developing three maternity hospitals.
Unfortunately, due to this work, the Taliban started threatening and harassing her in Afghanistan. On several occasions she was beaten by them, at one point so severely she was left to die. She suffers intense leg and back pain from the ruptured discs she suffered in the last attack.
“They will kill me”
“My people are persecuted aggressively in Afghanistan, and 20 years ago, the Taliban had killed many of my relatives for following the Ismaili religion in Afghanistan,” she says.
Meanwhile, IRCC Minister Fraser seems convinced his department is doing stellar work, telling CBC Radio that per capita, the number of Afghans received represents “the most generous resettlement effort.” Fraser adds, “When there are particularly troublesome cases or cohorts of individuals who are facing a potential expiry of their travel documents, we reach out to our partners in the region to help ensure that those people, which Canada has a responsibility to, will not be sent back to Afghanistan, where they may face persecution or torture or worse.”
Fraser’s comment could perfectly describe Farzana Adell’s current conundrum. But so far, there has been no indication from IRCC that they are willing to reach out to the Rural Refugee Rights Network, which is advocating with Adell, to secure her safe passage to Canada. The network has suggested any one of a number of permits could be immediately issued to end her nightmarish limbo, all of them perfectly legal and, in fact, mandated by immigration legislation.
In the meantime, the stress on Adell grows daily. “The Taliban knows who I am, and they have my entire file from the Presidential Palace now,” she says. “I don’t leave my room now, except to buy food on the corner, as I am so afraid they will find me. They know who I am and know that I am a women’s rights advocate. I am not healthy and worried that I could not take care of myself because I cannot leave my room safely. I cannot build a life or get healthy under these circumstances, and I am at risk of death if found. They will kill me if I enter Afghanistan under any circumstances.”
Editor’s Note: This article has been updated to remove references to Farzana Adell’s location out of fears for her safety.
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