STEP UP TO HELP PERSECUTED YAZIDIS, MPS TOLD
Women abused and tortured, committee hears
OTTAWA • Rev. Majed El Shafie is asking for the Canadian government’s help to resettle about 1,600 Yazidi people from camps in Iraqi Kurdistan — including 400 “tortured victims of severe abuse” — girls and women who, his organization says, managed to escape sex slavery in ISIL-held areas.
The founder of One Free World International, based in Toronto, testified at the House of Commons immigration committee Wednesday. For the proposal, which includes methodologies for steps such as security screening and application processing, he is partnering with the Office for Refugees, Archdiocese of Toronto.
El Shafie said he secured the support of former Conservative immigration minister Chris Alexander last summer. But the election campaign meant plans never came to fruition.
He proposes to go through Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada’s “Joint Assisted Sponsorship” program. It assists refugees who have “special needs” arising from, among other things, trauma and the effects of systemic discrimination.
Still, noting the government’s initial refusal to label ISIL’s persecution of Yazidis as a “genocide,” El Shafie expressed little hope that the Liberal Immigration Minister, John McCallum, would approve his idea.
Foreign Minister Stéphane Dion did concede in mid-June, after the release of a United Nations report condemning ISIL for crimes against humanity, that the extremist group’s targeting of the Yazidi religious minority constitutes a genocide.
But Dion had skirted around using the term for months, and just two days earlier, the Liberal government had voted down a Conservative motion in the House of Commons to recognize it as such.
Nafiya Naso, a Yazidi woman who lives in Winnipeg, also testified at the committee Wednesday. She said as many as 5,000 Yazidi girls have been forced to become sex slaves. Many others, including older women, are simply murdered. Men and boys? They’re either converted or executed, Naso said. “How is this not a genocide?”
El Shafie accused government MPs of missing the point Wednesday, saying they were “partisan” and used their time to launch “personal attacks” against him.
Liberal Randeep Sarai, for one, questioned why El Shafie was criticizing the new government for inaction when there was “no criticism of the past government whatsoever.”
His caucus colleague Ali Ehsassi expressed concerns about how to make sure vulnerable people are safe while in transit. He also questioned “the means that are used” to get people to Canada, bringing up a 2011 interview in which El Shafie admitted he had engaged in bribery.
“We are not dealing within a system that respects the law,” rebutted El Shafie, who himself came to Canada as a refugee from Egypt more than a decade ago. “If this was your daughter, or your sister or wife, you would do anything.”
Conservative and NDP members on the committee indicated they support accelerating and prioritizing asylum applications from the most vulnerable, including people from religious minorities such as the Yazidis.
But Canada has no formal mechanisms to help people who are displaced inside their home countries, because these people don’t fall under formal UNHCR refugee definitions.
That makes Yazidis in Iraq different from the 25,000 Syrian refugees welcomed at the start of the Liberal government’s mandate, who were mainly drawn from camps in Jordan and Turkey.
El Shafie said he hopes evidence gathered during a factfinding mission he is leading this summer will “move the Canadian public” and convince the government to take special measures to help the girls and women and their families.