The Kurdis we did turn away

In Stephen Harper’s tightly fought and closely choreographed reelection campaign, it was a script-shredding nightmare. A drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach, in a photograph that transfixed the world and riveted public attention to the Syrian refugee crisis, had been hoping to make it to Canada.

The quickly crafted response was this: A terrible, heartbreaking tragedy, yes, but it has nothing to do with the Canadian government. And that is what one might reasonably infer from a matter-of-fact statement released by Citizenship and Immigration Canada bureaucrats only hours after the story of the Canadian connection broke.

The department’s files contained “no record” of an application for little Alan Kurdi and his family, but rather for Alan’s four cousins and their parents, Mohammad and Ghouson Kurdi, and the application had failed for lack of proper documents.

But the scramble to distance the government from that dead child on the beach has deeply divided Conservative campaign advisers, some of whom are smart enough to know that the appearance of a dodge can only be making things look worse.

It’s quite true that the initial (and immediately rectified) rushes of the story inadvertently conflated an application on behalf of Mohammad Kurdi’s family with a complex set of correspondence to Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander on behalf of both families. But what has since emerged from Alexander’s own files is a closer proximity between the dead boy on the beach and the handling by Alexander’s office of the Kurdi families’ predicament than it appeared even at first.

Yes, Alan and his brother Ghalib and their mother Rehanna drowned when their life raft swamped shortly after setting out from Bodrum, Turkey, for the Greek island of Kos, a mere 12 sea miles away, leaving Abdullah Kurdi the only survivor. But it is more than a stretch to assert that the tragedy had nothing to do with us, as the paper trail in the case clearly shows.

We’ll come back to Abdullah’s family in a moment, but fine, let’s talk about Mohammad and his family then. Let’s even agree for argument’s sake that there is a distinction with an actual difference between the application for Moham- mad’s family having been “rejected” and the government’s insistence on the term “returned.”

Everybody agrees that Alexander’s intervention was necessary for Mohammad Kurdi’s G5 application to succeed. The agreed-upon facts are also that Alexander did not intervene. But here is what happened to Mohammad Kurdi’s family, and what Alexander’s office knew, and what the minister did, or did not do, about it.

Alexander did not intervene even though he had been informed in writing by March 24 that Mohammad, his wife and four children had spent six months on the run in Syria, and that Mohammad had been attacked and injured by armed militiamen, and that after the water and electricity supply was cut off to the Kurdish enclave of Kobani the family escaped into Turkey. That was in September, 2013. They had been living in destitution and despair in Istanbul ever since.

No later than March 24, Alexander had also been made aware that Tima Kurdi, the sister of Mohammad and Abdullah who had initiated the submissions on behalf of both brothers and filed the G5 application for Mohammad and his family (the G5 process enables five Canadians to group together to privately sponsor refugees), was at her wit’s end. She’d rummaged together $20,000 to keep her brothers alive in Turkey. Mohammad’s wife Ghouson, pregnant with her fifth child, was gravely ill. The four children were not able to attend school. Mohammed was suffering the indignity of offers to purchase his 15-year-old daughter.

On April 9, Alexander was made aware that the condition of Mohammad’s family had worsened and grown more urgent. Two of the children were working in a factory but were only occasionally being paid. “The family is now starving,” Alexander was informed in writing, “as they do not have enough to buy food ... we beg you to intervene and assist in saving this family.”

No response came directly from Alexander, but on April 23 there was a brief flicker of hope when Inta Klotins, Alexander’s special assistant for case management, requested the full names and birth dates of all the members of both families. The information was sent. Nothing came of it.

A week later, Klotins suggested that a Sponsorship Agreement Holder application (SAH) might be a better route than a G5 — but the Kurdis had already tried that, and Mohammad and his family didn’t have the necessary documents for that process either.

On it goes like this, finally petering out in June. The application to resettle Mohammad’s family went nowhere, and that’s why there is still an envelope on Tima Kurdi’s desk containing an un-submitted “G5” refugee resettlement application for little Alan Kurdi and his family.

The envelope contains all the necessary G5 forms, along with two photographs each of Abdullah and Rehanna and Alan and Ghalib, along with photocopies of Abdullah’s expired Syrian passport, and the Turkish ID cards for each family member. Abdullah Kurdi’s signature, dated April 14, 2015, appears on the application forms, in triplicate.

Alexander and his officials knew, all along, that the application for Abdullah’s family hinged on the approval of the application for Mohammad’s family. They were also aware that neither family had a chance without ministerial intervention to exempt them from a Catch-22 document requirement that it was impossible for the families to fulfil in Turkey. Finally, they knew that Tima Kurdi and her G5 co-sponsors intended to apply for Mohammad Kurdi’s family first, and then Abdullah Kurdi and his family — even if it took years to raise the funds to resettle them here in Canada.

Alexander and his officials also knew that apart from the specifics of the Kurdis’ case, G5 applications for Syrians were largely useless without ministerial exemptions, especially for Syrian refugees in Turkey. Senior CIC officials were in talks with the Canadian Council for Refugees to sort out ways to fix the mess in a timeline that matches almost exactly the duration of the paper trail in the inextricably-linked cases of Abdullah Kurdi’s family and Mohammad Kurdi’s family. Both timelines begin in late March, and come to the same abrupt bureaucratic dead end in June.

Anyone who breathes a sigh of relief that Canada turned out not to be so directly implicated in the death of little Alan and his brother and his mother, they’re deluded. Anyone who imagines that Canada is off the hook for the shame, the agony and the hopelessness that Mohammad and his family continue to endure, then there is something dangerously wrong with them.

(Minister) Alexander did not intervene