Origins

A majority of the Afghans in Canada arrived during the last two decades as political refugees from Afghanistan, a mountainous country covering 652,000 square kilometres that borders Iran, Pakistan, and the central Asian states of the former Soviet Union. Afghanistan has been independent since 1747, longer than most countries in the region. The country’s 16.8 million inhabitants (1991) include a wide variety of peoples and cultures. Of these, there are over thirteen major ethnic groups.

In general, ethnic cleavages split the country into the northern area, where the Persian- and Turkic-speaking groups live, and the south and east, where the Pashtuns preponderate. The Pashtuns (also known as the Pathans) make up over half the population of Afghanistan and there are even more (about 11 million) living in neighbouring Pakistan. In Afghanistan, the Pashtuns have dominated the other groups for most of the country’s history. Afghanistan has two official languages: Pushto; and Dari, the Afghan dialect of Persian (Farsi). Both are within the Indo-European linguistic family and written in a modified version of the Arabic script. Other languages spoken in Afghanistan include standard Persian, Baluchi, and Hazaragi of the Indo-European family, and Uzbeki, Turkoman, and Kirghizi of the Turco-Altaic group. There are also Arabic-speakers in some areas. Most Afghans, including the so-called illiterate, are bilingual or even trilingual. Since Persian is the language most often used in the cities and among the educated class who have emigrated abroad, most Afghans in Canada are Persian-speakers. The majority of Afghans are Sunni Muslims, although about 20 percent are Shiites. There are also small communities of Sikhs, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Jews.

Afghanistan has been independent since 1747. Since that time it has periodically been subjected to Russian expansionism from the north and exposed to Great Britain’s attempt to control the entire subcontinent of India and adjacent areas. Even though the British determined Afghanistan’s foreign affairs from 1879 to 1920, the country was never part of the British Empire.

From its inception as an independent country in 1747, Afghanistan was ruled, except for a brief period in 1929, by a monarchy that descended from the Durrani tribe of the Pashtun ethnic group. In 1973 the last of the Durrani kings was overthrown and Afghanistan declared a republic. Five years later, the so-called Saur Revolution took place and the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) came to power. This group attempted to implement Marxist-style reforms but ultimately lost control of the country. In desperation, its leaders called on the Soviet Union, which in December 1979 invaded Afghanistan with 120,000 soldiers and also replaced the existing Afghan Marxist government with one of its own. The Soviet invasion had two results. It provoked a war of resistance that would last for fourteen years and cause widespread devastation throughout the country. The war also created over 5 million refugees. More than 3.6 million fled to neighbouring Pakistan and 2 million to Iran, while those who had the means went to Europe or North America. Another 1 million were killed during the war.

After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, the political situation in Afghanistan did not return to normal. Instead, the various resistance groups turned from fighting Soviet troops to battling each other. Animosities that had been put aside during the war of resistance returned, and the fighting changed to a bitter civil war pitting Afghanistan’s ethnic, linguistic, and sectarian groups against one another. The result is that the country continues to be in a state of warfare, making repatriation impossible for most refugees.