Afghan MP appeals to Canada to do more to help refugees: ‘Commitment is not done’ – National
Members of AfghanistanParliament, forced to flee her hometown after the Taliban takeover last year, is begging Canada to do more to help bring Afghan refugees safely.
Canada promised to resettle at least 40,000 Afghan refugees last summer, and Immigration Minister Sean Fraser said more than 14,000 had arrived in late May.
Trudeau defends Canada’s resettlement in Afghanistan, stating that “there is still more to do.”
However Naheed FaridThousands of desperate people have been sitting in Afghanistan’s parliament for 11 years, and three Canadian senators are already processing the remaining 26,000 applications on Thursday, yet waiting for a chance to escape safely. Said he was still there.
They will not stop at 40,000 in the federal government, make it easier for Afghanistan to obtain visas, and establish a special high-level committee led by Fraser to dismantle the bureaucracy that makes the whole process more difficult. I am asking. That should be it.
“Even though the threshold for accepting 40,000 refugees is already full, responsibility, determination and commitment have not yet taken place,” Farid said at a press conference in Ottawa via videolink. I did.
Farid said Canada has already provided a lot of support, but the dire human rights and humanitarian conditions faced by millions of people demanding even greater response remain.
Senators said their offices were flooded with requests for help and initially successful efforts to work with embassy staff, diplomats and immigration officers. But Ontario Senator Ratna Omidbar said the protocol and process that Canada implemented to support it instead became an “impregnable fortress” of bureaucratic bureaucratic formalism that even Senators couldn’t break through. Said that.
Manitoba Senator Marilow McFedran said he couldn’t even get an answer from the government as to who made the decision as to which Afghan applicants would be invited to resettle in Canada.
“So what happened in my experience, and also what I’m personally talking about, seems to be basically unable to answer most of the important questions about some of these cases. There are dedicated staff in the area, “she said.
Afghan interpreters call on the federal government to fulfill its promise to help endangered families
Individual Afghans must first show that they meet the criteria and then cannot apply for entry into Canada without being invited by the Canadian Immigration Bureau. McFedran was told by Fraser’s office that he couldn’t intervene to make decisions about who would apply, and the officials she spoke to said they didn’t know who would make those decisions, but they weren’t. ..
“So there’s a witch behind the curtain here, and that’s when I don’t know who to point to now,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons we decided to speak.”
McFedran said the decision was also quite arbitrary. She talked about two women who worked for a Canadian aid agency in Afghanistan. After the fall of Kabul last August, the women sat in the same room and at the same time submitted an application through the Canadian Government portal.
A woman received an immediate response and is now preparing to board a plane to Canada. Another woman McFedran called “Zed” to protect her identity, she didn’t get anything back, so she applied again and received her auto-reply. After that, she made a third application and she got nothing again. She was able to go to Pakistan now, McFedran said, but she remains at risk.
“This is a woman who served Canada, and her colleague is about to arrive in Canada, even after confirming that all of her salary has been paid by Canada (a non-governmental organization) alongside her colleague. I don’t even have an invitation to sign up for Zed, “McFedran said.
Canadian Press has contacted Fraser’s office for comment, but has not yet responded.
Ontario Senator Salma Ataurajan said he couldn’t even put into words the horror story he heard about what was happening in Afghanistan, and Canada has a moral obligation to provide as much support as possible.
“Afghanistan is currently the worst place on the planet and can’t get any better,” said Ataurajan.
© 2022 The Canadian Press
