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Results: 1 - 7 of 7
Balpreet Singh
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Balpreet Singh
2021-06-22 18:40
Good evening. Thank you.
I'm a legal counsel with the World Sikh Organization of Canada. We're a non-profit human rights organization established in 1984 with a mandate to promote and protect the interests of Canadian Sikhs as well as to protect the human rights of all individuals.
Almost exactly five years ago, I testified in front of the Standing Committee on Citizenship and Immigration on a similar topic to this, and I reported that Sikhs and Hindus are communities under siege in Afghanistan and face an immediate threat to their lives. They numbered approximately 2,000 at that time, from an original population that was estimated to be in the tens of thousands prior to 1992.
Today, as a result of ongoing persecution and several deadly attacks, the number has dwindled to approximately 200. Those who remain in Afghanistan are in constant danger, and those who have fled live in precarious and troubled conditions in India, with no real prospects of permanent settlement.
As a matter of background, my experience with the Afghan Sikh community began in November 2014 when I received a desperate series of messages from a remote Afghan Sikh community in Helmand province who were facing imminent danger. Their homes had been stoned, and their businesses had been publicly boycotted. At that time, Manmeet Singh Bhullar was a friend of mine, and I spoke to him about the situation. He made it his life's work to save that community until his tragic death in November 2015.
The current situation for Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan is one of fear, persecution and imminent threat. They are unable to freely leave their homes, find employment or attend schools. Women are unable to leave their homes unaccompanied and are in constant fear of kidnapping. The remaining Sikhs and Hindus in Afghanistan live collectively in gurdwara, as much of their property has been taken by others. These conditions also existed in 2016. What's changed is that the situation has gotten much worse with the community being actively targeted with attacks by Daesh, who vowed to drive them out of Afghanistan.
On July 1, 2018, the entire leadership of the Sikh and Hindu community was killed in a suicide bombing. Fifteen Sikhs and four Hindus, who were on their way to a meeting with Afghan president Ashraf Ghani, lost their lives. Daesh took responsibility for that attack.
On March 25, 2020, just a little over a year ago, in another Daesh suicide attack, Gurdwara Har Rai Sahib was attacked in Kabul, where 25 Sikhs lost their lives, including four-year-old Tanya Kaur. The funeral for the victims of this attack the following day was also targeted with a bombing attack.
In June 2020, Nidan Singh was abducted from a gurdwara and held for almost a month until his rescue. On July 18, 2020, 13-year-old Salmeet Kaur, who lost her father in the March attack, was kidnapped from another gurdwara in Kabul. On February 2, 2021, a series of bomb attacks killed one Sikh and injured two others in an area with several Sikh shops. The victim, Sunny Singh, never got to see his newborn son in India, and his wife watched his funeral on a video call.
With the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan being imminent, the situation promises to get much worse for minorities. A member of the Hazara minority community said it best when he said: “To be a member of minority in Afghanistan is hell; but to be a Sikh means to be in the innermost circle of hell”.
In July 2020, 429 Sikhs and Hindus fled Afghanistan for India on a special visa valid for six months. Those who fled may not face an immediate threat to their lives, but they're still suffering. There are no real permanent settlement prospects for these refugees in India, despite the claims of the Indian government. India's Hindu nationalist BJP government is playing politics as it tries to project itself as a saviour of minorities fleeing Muslim countries but, in actuality, provides no assistance to them or any options for settlement.
Families that fled last July continue to be supported by Sikh organizations and private donors. There is no access to basic services such as health care and education or even vaccination for COVID. Very few of them have found employment. Eight Afghan Sikh families recently returned to Afghanistan out of desperation, a move that was celebrated by the Afghanistan government. Most of them have now returned once again back to India. One family reported that they couldn't find a hospital to care for their daughter in New Delhi, and after receiving treatment in Kabul, they returned because they felt unsafe remaining there.
Since 2015, we've repeatedly called on the Canadian government to create a special program for Afghan Sikhs and Hindus so that they can come to safety in Canada. In July 2020, 25 Canadian MPs from the CPC, NDP and Greens wrote to the Minister of Immigration for this special program, but I'm not aware of a reply to this letter, let alone any progress in this regard.
After the March attack, there was a weekly call set up with a representative of CIC, which was then reduced to biweekly and then cancelled altogether, with no reply to our emails since August 2020.
The question isn't whether there will be another attack. The question is when the next attack will be. These are extremely vulnerable individuals who do not have a future in Afghanistan or in India. They're looking desperately to Canada to save their lives.
It's been frustrating to advocate without real results on their behalf for this long. The Sikh community is willing and able to pay for all the resettlement costs, and has done so for the small number of Sikh refugee families who have arrived from the Helmand group. We just need the government to give us the permission to bring them here.
Those are my comments for now.
Sukhwinder Singh
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Sukhwinder Singh
2021-06-22 18:46
Hello, respected members of the committee. Thank you for allowing United Sikhs to speak for Afghan minorities.
We are a United Nations-affiliated international non-profit NGO to empower those in need, especially disadvantaged and minority communities around the world, with humanitarian aid, advocacy and education programs. We have 10 chapters in Asia, Europe and North America. We also have an office in Peshawar, Afghanistan.
Ghazni, Jalalabad and Kabul are the three major cities in Afghanistan where minority families are concentrated in large numbers. United Sikhs has been providing legal assistance and humanitarian aid in these cities for the past many years. Our first case in Afghanistan started in 2010 with Harender Kaur and her daughter, to whom we provided help in taking asylum in Canada with the help of the Canadian government, because her husband was kidnapped and then beheaded.
After that, so many times minorities were attacked brutally. They were forced to pay jeziah. They had verbal and written threats, including ultimatums to leave the country, and social boycotts, not even drinking the water from the fountains in front of their shops and in front of their houses. They were called Kafirs. Kids couldn't go to school. Women and young girls couldn't go out because of kidnapping threats. This was the life they were living in Afghanistan.
Then there was the gurdwara attack in 2020. That was the day when all the NGOs and Afghan Sikhs and Hindus decided to move temporarily to India so that we could bring them to safe places like Canada and the U.S.A. As Balpreet said, a total of 95 families have reached New Delhi, India, from different parts of Afghanistan. United Sikhs and other NGOs are the only help for them. They have no help from the Indian government, and not even their IDs.
Last year United Sikhs started a helpdesk in New Delhi for these families. They getting medical treatment, including special tests as needed; the urgent assistance needed by pregnant mothers in government hospitals; assistance with the life-sustaining needs of newborn babies, including immunization; emergency medical procedures; the facilitation of UNHCR-related issues, such as the issuing of refugee cards and the renewal of cards for previously Afghan nationals in New Delhi; ration distribution to needy Afghan families; COVID-19 rapid tests; and assistance with temporary settlement of Afghan families in India.
What are the challenges they have now? They do not have any identification. If they make any identification, then they cannot get their refugee cards and refugee status. They are just in between. The UNHCR says they came to India on a visa, which is not suitable to get refugee status. These are their challenges. Their kids cannot get education. They have no jobs. They're not getting proper medical treatment.
Their only hope is us—the Canadian government—so I will make this request of the Canadian government: Please stop a cultural genocide.
I will ask Gurvinder Singh to add a few more points, please, and then wrap it up.
Thank you.
Ali Mirzad
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Ali Mirzad
2021-06-22 18:59
Should I continue? Okay.
The Hazara people have suffered more than a century of constant persecution because of their religious beliefs, their ethnicity and their physical and facial characteristics.
At the end of the 19th century, thousands, if not millions, of Hazara were massacred, forcibly uprooted and sold into slavery by the Emir of Afghanistan, Abdur Rahman Khan.
Through royal decrees, he openly labelled Hazaras as “heretic foreigners”. This paved the way for persecution that continues to this day.
In 1998, the Taliban issued a similar decree continuing that campaign by killing thousands of Hazaras in the cities of Mazar-e-Sharif and Bamiyan alone.
In post-9/11 Afghanistan, Hazaras continue to be the subject of daily attacks, be it within the sanctuary of religious places, in gymnasiums, in the streets or on public buses. Attacks such as the May 2020 assault on the Médecins sans frontières maternity ward in Kabul's Dasht-e-Barchi, where infants still in incubators were targeted, or the May 2021 attack on the Sayed Al-Shuhada, all-girls school where as many as 94 young girls died, have proven that Hazaras are a target regardless of age or gender.
To put it simply, the life of a Hazara in Afghanistan is that of a death row inmate living on borrowed time, awaiting an impending execution.
For years around the globe and indeed across this nation, coast to coast to coast, Hazaras have cried for help. We humbly request to this committee, and through it, the Canadian Parliament, to, first, formally recognize the 1891-93 ethnic cleansing perpetrated against the Hazara as a genocide; second, designate September 25 as a Hazara genocide memorial day; and, third, support Bill C-287 to ensure that all development assistance sent from Canada to Afghanistan is contributing to the peace and security of the region for all peoples.
At this point, Mr. Chair, I would like to thank the committee once more for giving me the opportunity to testify before you today.
My thanks also go to the three highly distinguished individuals representing our association. We have with us Dr. Melissa Kerr Chiovenda, assistant professor of anthropology, Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and Dr. William Maley, emeritus professor of diplomacy at the Australian National University.
We also have Dr. Niamatullah Ibrahimi, lecturer in international relations at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.
View Heather McPherson Profile
NDP (AB)
Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
I want to thank all of our witnesses today. This is incredibly compelling testimony and very important information for us to be gathering from you. The question that I really want to understand and maybe get quite a bit of clarity on if I could, is the current context we're in.
Of course, we know right now that we are in the middle of a COVID-19 pandemic. Different places around the world are responding differently and are at different points in recovery from that, but we also know that the United States is pulling out and that Canada's pulling out after spending a significant investment in Afghanistan, after spending significant time talking about the importance of ensuring that rights for women and girls are protected, for example.
I'm just wondering. Has this violence against both the Hazara and the Sikh populations...? What does it look like? Has it gone up significantly? Has the increase been significant? How much of that is related to COVID? The challenges around COVID, is that providing cover for what's being done by the Taliban? How much of that is because of the withdrawal? I would like to get an understanding of the context in terms of the withdrawal and COVID-19, the global pandemic.
Mr. Maley, if I could start with you that would be wonderful.
William Maley
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William Maley
2021-06-22 19:34
Thank you very much.
There has been a very significant escalation in violence against minorities in the period since the signing on the 29th of February 2020 of the bilateral agreement between the United States and the Taliban. That's not to suggest that there wasn't significant violence before that, indeed there was, but there's been an escalation.
The reason I think is that the agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban provided for, as it were, a moratorium on Taliban attacks on the forces of the United States and its allies, but the effect in practice has been to channel attacks by the Taliban against targets within the Afghan community. It inadvertently incentivized those kinds of attacks. If the aim of enemies of the Afghan state is to put on display, symbolically, the incapacity of the state to provide protection to the general public and, in a sense, discharge a key state function, then killing minorities is a very effective way of sending the signal that the government is impotent because in this kind of situation, as Hobbes once said, the “Reputation of power is power”.
The Americans with their agreement boosted the reputation of the Taliban and undermined the reputation of the Afghan government. Attacks on minorities since then have aggravated that particular problem. In a sense it's likely that in any situation of similar dimensions minorities will find themselves significantly under attack and for that reason I don't see any likelihood that we're going to witness a diminution of such attacks in the near future.
Jasjeet S. Ajimal
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Jasjeet S. Ajimal
2021-06-22 19:36
To add to that, before the troops were leaving the Sikh and Hindu communities in Afghanistan had to pay a jeziah tax, a special tax to the Taliban, in order to survive. When ISIS came in different parts of Afghanistan, they had to pay ISIS. The tax is utilized by these terrorist organizations to not only persecute these minorities, but under their law determine a way to kill them, as in they will raise the tax to a point where these people cannot pay and then in their eyes it's okay to go and target these people for killing. It's also a way to fund their crime and continue to fund their terrorism.
As the troops are departing the situation is going to escalate. These folks, just like the professor mentioned, will continue to get a larger amount of tax. They will continue to be persecuted not only for symbolic reasons that they're maintaining control but also to finance the terrorism.
View Scott Reid Profile
CPC (ON)
I have only 30 seconds, and I have one last question for Mr. Pappier.
There's a higher level of violence against indigenous human rights defenders than other defenders. I'm wondering what the reason is for that. Is it because they're less visible? Is it because they're in rural areas, where it's harder to keep track of abuses? Is it because the public tolerates it more? What's the reason for that group of people being particularly subject—
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