Closing the embassy would mean abandoning Afghans in North America who need services and advocacy, Hassan Soroosh says
Afghanistan’s pre-Taliban envoy has kept his country’s Ottawa embassy running in the hopes that democracy will eventually return to his homeland, as he asks Canadians to fight “gender apartheid.”
“In terms of number and gravity, we are still having the largest humanitarian crisis globally in Afghanistan; 28 million people are in need of humanitarian help,” he said. Soroosh said Canada’s contributions to United Nations agencies working on the ground have helped, but Canadian groups can play a role in helping people recover from a dire humanitarian situation and one of the coldest winters on record.Soroosh stressed multiple times that humanitarian groups cannot let charity be diverted to the Taliban, but he had confidence Canadian groups know how to navigate this issue.
The Taliban has barred women from working with humanitarian groups, a devastating blow to a sector where women make up at least one-third of the workforce and can access spaces that men generally cannot. “According to many international experts, these repressive measures against women and girls in Afghanistan amount to a gender apartheid,” Soroosh said.
He said countries like Canada could make ongoing talks in Qatar with Taliban officials conditional on the regime ending certain practices, or even sanction elites so they can’t take vacations abroad. Instead, all three offices have cut their expenses and staff. The Ottawa embassy went from a cadre of 19 staff to just two diplomats, three assistants and one part-time employee.
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