Afghanistan evacuation operation | Minister Sajjan denies having favored the evacuation of Sikhs

(Ottawa) Former Minister of National Defense Harjit Sajjan denies having ordered the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) to prioritize evacuating Afghans of the Sikh faith during the fall of Kabul in August 2021.

The daily life The Globe and Mail reported Thursday that the minister personally intervened to remove a group of 225 Sikhs from the country to the detriment of Canadian citizens or Afghans with a link to Canada, such as interpreters, for example.

“I did not order the Canadian Armed Forces to give priority to Sikhs,” said Minister Sajjan in a statement first sent to the Toronto newspaper, which his office then sent to other media.

“This is bullshit (It’s utter BS),” the minister said orally at a press briefing in Vancouver.

The man, who was sent to Afghanistan three times while serving in the CAF, explained that he had passed on information to the chain of command about the Afghans of the Sikh faith who had taken refuge in a temple (gurdwara) in Kabul.

But “I have not ordered the CAF to undertake a rescue mission in a gurdwara or anywhere else,” Sajjan said. He went so far as to accuse the publication of drawing conclusions based on racial bias.

The Department of National Defense assured Thursday that all evacuation operations had been carried out “in accordance with the directives of the Government of Canada and the Minister of National Defense”, and that the orders “came from the chief of staff and of its operational level commanders.”

Questioned by The PressOn Thursday, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff, General Wayne Eyre, assured that all Canadian special forces sorties in Kabul during the evacuation were carried out under legal orders.

The military worked with a list of people pre-approved by the Immigration Department.

The group of Afghans of the Sikh faith was one of them. “This group was on the list, so we did what we could to rescue them, as did others, for example the Afghan women’s soccer team,” the general said.

He insisted on the extremely difficult context in which the soldiers were operating in Afghanistan at that time, while the surroundings of the airport were overwhelmed by a mass of tens of thousands of people seeking to flee the country.

Citing privacy reasons, the Immigration Department would not say whether any of the approximately 5,700 facilitation letters issued while the airlift was operational had been sent to the Sikh group.

Bloc calls for investigation

The Sikhs in question were ultimately unable to be extirpated from Afghanistan during the August 2021 operation. However, they managed to escape on board planes chartered by other governments, including that of India, months later.

This does not exonerate the minister, insists Bloc Québécois MP Christine Normandin. And to get to the bottom of it, his successor Bill Blair must order an investigation. “That’s the first thing to do,” she emphasizes.

Because in the immediate future, the counter-attack of Harjit Sajjan, who accuses the Globe and Mail having been blinded by racist prejudices, does not allow us to see things more clearly, believes the elected official: “It would have been a minimum to say: “I will provide documents, we will answer the questions” “

The Conservative Party provided a generic statement accusing the Liberals of having “let down” the Armed Forces and disrespecting their leadership “in matters of procurement, recruiting or operations.”

A persecuted religious minority

Sikhs are a very small religious minority in Afghanistan, a Muslim-majority country where they face discrimination. In March 2020, a targeted attack by Daesh (Islamic State armed group) on a gurdwara in Kabul left at least 25 people dead.

And after the attack, “about 200 members of the Sikh community left the country for India, indicating that they left due to lack of security and insufficient government protection,” according to a Department of Defense report. American State published the same year.

In Canada, the seriousness of the situation prompted elected Conservatives, New Democrats and Greens to write to the federal Minister of Immigration at the time, Marco Mendicino, to urge him to create a special program to relocate Sikhs and Hindus in Canada.