Front Burner - A Canadian mission to rescue Afghanistan’s last female politicians

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

The war in Afghanistan is the longest in both Canadian and American history. The U.S.' withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, signaled not only the end of a 20-year war, but it also marked the re-introduction of a familiar era in the country's history: the return of the Taliban, and the widespread subjugation of women. Three years into Taliban rule, CBC News chief correspondent Adrienne Arsenault brings us inside a secret mission, led by a group of Canadian MPs, to rescue Afghanistan's last female politicians, and bring them to safety in Canada.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcriptsTranscripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. It's been about three years since the Taliban regained full control of Afghanistan, and life for women under their rule has been a disaster. Three years after the return of the Taliban, new laws now prohibit Afghan women from showing their faces or even speaking outside their

homes. Girls older than 12 have been banned from school, women have been restricted from numerous jobs, and beauty salons have been forced to close. Today, we're going to bring you inside a secret mission led by a group of Canadian MPs to usher some of the women caught in the crossfire of the Taliban to safety here in Canada. Namely, some of the 69 former female MPs and their families. Here's one of these women who goes by the pseudonym Niloufer.

When the Taliban regained control of country, I thought I shouldn't leave Afghanistan. I should stay with my people and serve the women of Afghanistan. I taught the Taliban at Change that they weren't the same Taliban as before 2001. But they hadn't changed. The election of Afghanistan's female MPs was subject to global praise. Many believed it was a step toward the future for a country that had long struggled with women's rights.

But with the return of the old guard, many of these women went from women praised to women hunted. Here's Liberal MP Marcus Polofsky. The women's rights movement in Afghanistan was encouraged by Western countries, and Canada was certainly a big part of that. So I think as a result of that, we owe a particular obligation to the women who kind of stepped forward. They're now in a position of threat to try to do what we can in order to help them. And Conservative MP Alex Ruff. Forget about the partisan baloney. This is about what's doing the right thing to help these former Afghan MPs. This is all part of a new exclusive report from the CBC's Adrienne Arsenault, who worked quietly alongside those involved for many months. And she joins me now to talk about it.

Adrienne, hi. Thanks so much for coming on. Hey there, Jamie. My pleasure. So let's go back to the beginning here. After 20 years of war in Afghanistan, the Americans pulled out in August of 2021. There were fears really immediately about what this would mean for the country, for women in the country. Then the Taliban returned to power and pretty quickly, a Canadian woman named Corrie Levine determined that something needed to be done. And can you tell me about Corrie, who is really the person at the center of this effort? Yeah, she sure is. So she's a human rights researcher. She's from Victoria, B.C. She's been in and out of Afghanistan for maybe 20 years. She has written a ton about women's rights. lots of opinion pieces that you can find online.

She's a member of the Green Party. So, you know, to say that she is like active and brave and determined is completely underselling her commitment. And after the Taliban returned to power, Cori started receiving these messages, right, from her Afghan friends on the ground in Afghanistan. And just tell me what kind of things they were saying to her. Oh, yeah, this was crazy. So she'd been in Afghanistan about six weeks before the Taliban took over back in 2021. At this point, she was back in Victoria, she was writing a report about the female parliamentarians she'd been working with. And at about 1 a.m. one night, her phone just starts going off.

I was getting all these texts from Afghan friends saying, you know, the Taliban have come. I've got my gun. I'm going to shoot myself. It was, you know, really nice to know you. One said, you know, it took me six hours to get home from work. There were dead bodies in the street. You know, it felt like a shock. It was like somebody had put a stun gun to me. It just felt completely surreal.

So if you can imagine, you know, sitting in your comfortable home, reading these frantic messages from all these people you know well, she was completely panicked. And so as she was following along, people were telling her, we're trying to get to the airport. We're hiding in a gully with babies. There were bombings and shootings. And I'm sure you recall that incredible rush of humanity at the Kabul airfield. Desperate to flee Taliban rule, Afghans are resorting to this, grasping at U.S. military aircraft and risking their lives.

Some hung on to the wheels and fell to their death. Those left behind could only watch in horror. And then her phone gets crazier, right? People saying, wow, Corey, what's happening in Afghanistan? How can we help you? There were 29 women, female politicians, that Greece had offered to take in temporarily. And so then, okay, let's get a plane. There's a plane to Mazar.

Let's go to Mazar. Then the plane doesn't take off. And I'm throwing you like all these details at you because I want to give you a feel for the pace and the panic of the chaos she was confronted with. And a bit of time goes on. Some women get out, not all of them. Some get trapped.

Incredibly, some decide we're not leaving. We can't abandon our people. Maybe we stay and stand up, which in at least one case was a fatal decision. But over the course of a year, Corrie did everything she could on her own to help out, but she was really limited. And I think everyone who was trying to help out from afar understands those limitations. So tell me more then about, you know, what she eventually decides to do. Well, incredibly, she decides she has to go back to Afghanistan. So in 2022, and when she was there, that sort of sealed it for her in terms of understanding just how acute the dangers were these women faced. And so in the fall of that year, she was back in Canada. She went to a

conference in Ottawa on Afghan women. And there were a few Canadian parliamentarians there. Elizabeth May, who Corrie knows because Elizabeth May was her MP at one point, was there along with Leah Taylor Roy, a liberal MP. She was telling them the story of the women and the panicked calls. And Leah said, you know, I have a colleague in the liberal caucus, Marcus Polowski. He's done a lot of work on Afghanistan. Someone else said, and you know what? We should connect you with Heather McPherson of the NDP. And also Alexei Brunel-Dusep from the bloc would be interested in this. And it starts to build. And then there's a flurry of conversations where it's clear that, you know what, who else should be in this conversation but Alex Ruff, who's a conservative, who'd served two tours in

Afghanistan with the Canadian military. He would really be interested in talking about, is there anything we can do? And suddenly there you had it. You know, you had this collage of public officials who said, yep, we're in. And just what specifically was their role in this process? What did Corey want and need them to do? You know, it's interesting. I watched a Zoom call that Corey had recorded with the politicians and at least one woman from Afghanistan. And it was very clear from the beginning that they were there for clout, that they were going to be the ones who were going to push the ministers, because really it took so long. We're talking about two

ministers over the span of this time, Sean Fraser and then Mark Miller. They were going to sign letters. They were going to navigate the system. She would meet with them when there were roadblocks. They would try to decode where those roadblocks were and then fan out and try to smooth the way, basically bang the desks, keep the conversation on the front burner, as it were, and not let it be normalized that there are Afghan female MPs, the sort of people Canada helped prop up and support that were stuck in Afghanistan under threat of dying, and that Canada was going to let it happen. So really, that's what they were there to do. They banged a lot of desks in Ottawa.

So you mentioned some of these former female politicians in Afghanistan were able to migrate to countries like Greece, where they set up an Afghan government in exile. Others crossed into Pakistan, right, which grew frustrated over time, was really concerned about resources. We're talking of millions of Afghans who fled there. There are reports of families being rounded up and deported back to Afghanistan. Pakistan has begun to detain undocumented migrants, nearly all of whom are refugees from Afghanistan. The government has set a November 1st deadline for them to leave or be expelled. The crackdown affects an estimated 1.7 million Afghans in the country, drawing criticism from rights groups and the Taliban government, who are overwhelmed by the influx of people with nowhere to go and few opportunities for work.

Can you elaborate for me on just how hard it is for women trying to leave the country? It's brutal. It's brutal. So there's the act of physically trying to get out. You know, how do you get a visa? How do you get through the checkpoints? Where are you going? What are you doing? Who are you?

Do you have permission to cross into Pakistan? There were tons of false starts with fraudulent visa brokers who would rip these women off. It was hard enough to sort of get the right visas and then get someone willing to drive them. So then you finally, you know, in the middle of the night, you cross out, never mind the emotional work and horror of leaving other family members in your country behind. You get into Pakistan and you think, whew, we're here briefly. This is just a brief stop. Canada's going to get the paperwork. We'll be okay. But then the more time you're in Pakistan, they're realizing we have a problem

because by the summer of 2023, I mean, they're realizing we have a problem because by the summer of 2023, I mean, you talked about it with the millions of Afghans who fled there, Pakistan established something called an illegal foreigners repatriation plan. What happened is nearly 650,000 Afghan refugees were rounded up and sent back. If you're a woman who's fled the Taliban, then you get deported back to Afghanistan, you're in big trouble, right? You're not surviving. So a lot of the people who were in Pakistan went into hiding. They felt hunted, they felt pursued, harassed. And because the effort to get people out has been so slow, it's been this incredibly rough limbo. You know, the people we've spoken to who

are in Pakistan are saying, look, we can't go out, we can't go to a gym, we can't work, we can't go to school, we're hiding. The women who are in Afghanistan, not only can they not do any of those things, they are struggling with the reality that, you know, they can't even speak in public in Afghanistan. We spoke to one very bright woman who would like to get out, speaks multiple languages. And she says, Hey, you know what? I'm at home learning how to tailor because that is all that is left for me. Afghan society for me as a woman has collapsed. Jamie, it was this week that the Taliban reversed a ruling that had allowed tens of thousands of child brides, which is a terrible phrase, to get divorces. And so now these tens of thousands of women and girls who'd escaped that hell are being ordered back to their husbands. So

it's impossible to be there. Getting out is brutal. And then once you're out, you have to wait and the paperwork takes forever to get to Canada. This is a really tough thing that's happening. long time, right? To get many of these women out, the process took years. And so how is it actually that even a group of NPs representing each of the federal parties were unable to quickly grant these women access into the country? Like, how is it that they were kind of stuck in this bureaucratic purgatory? Well, like, how sobering a reality is that? When I met with him back in April, I asked him many times, like, what the heck is happening if all of you who have more connections than anyone else in this country can't make this happen faster? What hope is there for a small NGO or a family or an individual person trying to help people run for their lives? They're very frustrated too. Our collective frustration is immense. We cannot answer the question, why is it taking so long? But I don't think that the tools that the Minister of Immigration has at his or her disposal at any given time are fit for purpose. A colleague of ours in Ottawa put this question this week to Mark Miller, who said, look, it's not just one issue.

There's lots of complexities. But Canada owes it to Canadians to ensure that all the I's are dotted, all the T's are crossed in terms of safety in particular. What that means is that this is a place where it's tough to get paperwork in Afghanistan. And you have to prove that people are who they say they are and to get safety checks on those people. I mean, imagine the uproar if a process was rushed, a relative of one of these women comes to Canada, it turns out they have Taliban or other problematic connections. What would be the questions then? That's sort of the argument for why things take so long.

Miller says he know things take too long. They acknowledge it. And I sort of found it a little bit fascinating and I guess maybe heartening that while all these MPs were talking with us about their frustrations, they were still very civil and very understanding with each other about what this has taken to make happen. And I think in this era of like these horrific divisions politically, I'm still thinking about this experience. I'm still struck by how they work together going towards one goal. Imperfect, for sure, but they were all together. Do you think in the end they were able to make a difference? Were they able to make their process go smoother or faster? a difference? Were they able to make their process go smoother or faster?

In a way, that's a bit unanswerable, but probably, yes. I mean, there are different types of clout, right? We saw with the two Michaels, Michael Kovrig, Michael Spavor, who were held in detention in China, that while people were pushing for their release from behind the scenes, it was really only when their families came forward publicly that the pressure was amped. This is different. These politicians and Corey never said a word publicly, not at all. They were flat out terrified that to do that would seal the fate of these women. But, you know, remember, like Corey had been trying for almost a year to get them out already and she was stuck. So bringing the MPs in was a force multiplier with people, again, who just are so good at banging the desks. So I think, you know, really, it absolutely made a difference. You alluded to this earlier, but one woman

in particular that Corey was in communication with, Marcel Navazada, was shot and killed in Kabul while this extended immigration process was underway and had this process move quicker, is it likely that she would be alive today? I think that's a 3 a.m. terrible question that everyone asks themselves. We'll never be able to know that. Just in terms of timelines, they were only three months into trying to help these women get out when she was killed. I mean, the timing of it still gives me chills because there was a Zoom call with the MPs, Canadian MPs and Corey, and one of the women that was on January 10th, 2023, where they were all vowing to work hard and were talking about how they needed to work secretly in the name of protecting them. And it was in that call that Alex Ruff, the conservative MP, said very forcefully,

look, what happens if while we're trying to help, one of these women is killed? What are we going to do? And it was five days later that Mursal was murdered in her home and her bodyguard also killed and the family wasn't safe. We obtained footage of armed Taliban, you know, lurking outside their Kabul home. So they are and have been terrified for a very long time. And, you know, what, everyone is aware that Mursal should be here right now. They all know that. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization.

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At this point, who has Canada been able to get out? Who did they end up getting out and where are they now? Yeah, this is a good news part of the conversation. I mean, it's the only reason why we're having this conversation publicly. There are a handful, maybe six female MPs who are here with their family members. And that means sometimes just a few family members, sometimes as many as maybe 10. And we were at the airport a few days ago, late one night. I am a big fan of arrivals terminals at airports. I love to see those reunions. I am that person crying all the time.

So this was a fascinating scene because it was all of the Canadian MPs, except for the NDP, Heather McPherson, who just couldn't be there, and Corey, because they were waiting for Marcel Nabizadeh's mom and three little brothers. And it was amazing to see them arrive and to see that welcome. You know, we've got four people, very little luggage because they ran for their lives. Really bittersweet moment because it was too late for Rassal, but they're so eager to live. And, you know, like all government-sponsored refugees, you don't get to choose where you live. So some

of them are in BC. Rassal's family is headed to a small town in Ontario. All the Afghan women and families are scattered for now and they're safe. I'm not entirely safe enough for us to always be able to give you their names and locations because there's still some family members left behind in Afghanistan. The threats are real, but the ones we're in touch with are working. And Corey told me something fascinating at the airport that for Afghans who came to Canada a while ago, some of them still think of these women as their MPs. And so when they have questions or concerns, it's these women they're reaching out

to. So that connection lives. And we've seen women set up parliament in exile in Greece. Maybe we'll see that here. Are there still women that are trying to get here? Still women trying to get to Canada. I think the MPs themselves are out of Afghanistan, but again, stuck in that awful limbo in Pakistan. One in particular is still waiting for the paperwork, and I don't know for sure, but delays like this, in her case, it's 10 months in Pakistan, tend to be about security clearances for a family member, although I really, I don't know, and it's just sort of an educated guess. Adrienne, you know, the war in Afghanistan

is bound up in the mess that was the war on terror. But if we go back to the early days of that war, the condition of Afghan women was really a large part of the political capital leveraged to justify the West's campaign in Afghanistan. It was a big reason for going in, right? This promise essentially that we were there in part to make the country more livable for women. And it just, you know, strikes me talking to you today, that justification seemed to kind of disappear in the aftermath of the American withdrawal. And truly, that is so devastating to watch. Totally devastating. Promises made are not promises kept.

Because in a way, how could they be? The Taliban is in control. And even those who, you know, hopefully or I guess naively thought, maybe this time the Taliban will be different. They were clearly predictably wrong. I don't know if you recall those promises in the very early days of the Taliban takeover that girls would be allowed to finish school or go to a higher level of school, forget it. They cannot. This is the biggest women's rights crisis on the planet right now. And, you know, forget playing sports, forget walking in a park, beauty salons have closed, there's no

working, there's no speaking in public, no speaking, you know, this isn't a matter of getting a fine. They risk beatings, arbitrary detention, sexual violence, death. It is flat out hell. When you talk to the women MPs who are here now, do they have any sense of whether there remains much hope for the future? What are they saying to you about the future of their country? Yeah, that's hard. You know, they cannot exist without hope.

They're very clear about that. That if they don't have hope, there's not a lot of purpose. Uniformly, I think the women who are out, who are in Greece and Canada, for example, and all over the world, including, let's say, the women from the Afghan Women's Orchestra who are scattered around the globe. They are singularly focused on making life better for those who are left behind. I don't know how they're going to do that. But I do know that they saw very clearly that outsiders couldn't do it for them. And they feel like they're the ones who will have to, who are devoted to it.

And this is their purpose that they will not let go of regardless of where they live. But the act of living itself is important to them. It's everything to making a difference for their country. Okay. Adrienne, thank you so much for this. Really appreciate it. Absolutely. All right, that was all for this week. Front Burner was produced this week by Joytha Sengupta, Matt Mews, Matthew Alma, Aja Sauter, and Allie Janes. Sound design was by Mackenzie Cameron and Sam McNulty.

Music is by Joseph Chabison. Our senior producer is Elaine Chao. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Locos. And I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you next week. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.