OTTAWA — Liberal MP Maryam Monsef, widely touted as Canada's first Afghan-born cabinet minister, has issued a statement saying she only recently learned from her mother that she was in fact born in Iran.
The minister of democratic institutions, who will turn 32 on Nov. 7, says she and her two sisters never held Iranian citizenship and were always considered Afghan citizens, but she was not born in Herat, Afghanistan, "as I was led to believe for my whole life."
"It's fair to say I have experienced a range of emotions over the past few days as I have tried to understand this with my family," says the statement.
Monsef said she's learned she was actually born 200 kilometres from the Afghanistan border in Mashhad, Iran.
Monsef, born in 1984, says her parents fled Afghanistan as the security situation deteriorated, and that after her father's death her mother never talked about what Monsef calls "the unspeakable pain" of those early years.
"She told us she did not think it mattered," Monsef said of her mother, Soriya Basir.
"We were Afghan citizens, as we were born to Afghan parents, and under Iranian law, we would not be considered Iranian citizens despite being born in that country."
Profiles of Monsef since her appointment to cabinet last Nov. 4 have consistently referenced her family travelling back and forth across the Afghanistan-Iran border as the security situation allowed.
The Monsefs came to Peterborough, Ont., as refugees in 1996 when Maryam was 11 years old.
U.S. President Barack Obama, in an address to Parliament earlier this year, made a point of noting Monsef's Afghan heritage as a sign of Canada's inclusiveness.
"And we see the refugees who feel that they have a special duty to give back, and seize the opportunity of a new life," Obama told a joint session of Parliament on June 29.
"Like the girl who fled Afghanistan by donkey and camel and jet plane. And who remembers being greeted in this country by helping hands and the sounds of robins singing. And today she serves in this chamber and in the cabinet because Canada is her home."
