National Post (National Edition)
Chance at refugee status comes too late for Alan
The call Tima Kurdi had been waiting for came last Tuesday, Oct. 13. It came too late for her nephew, little Alan Kurdi, the drowned refugee boy lying on a Turkish beach in the Sept. 2 photo that shook the conscience of the world and knocked Canada’s federal election campaign off its rails.
It came too late as well for Alan’s brother Ghalib and their mother, Rehanna, who also drowned that day when the inflatable boat they were travelling in with a dozen other refugees capsized only minutes after putting out from an isolated cove near Bodrum for the 30-minute crossing to the Greek island of Kos.
And it came too late for Alan’s broken-hearted father, Abdullah, who survived, and for Tima’s other brother Mohammad, and his wife and children who had also given up hope, in June, when Tima, a hairdresser in Co- quitlam, B.C., learned she had failed to convince Citizenship and Immigration Minister Chris Alexander to intervene on behalf of the two families.
Last week, Elisha Kapell-Seguin, assistant-director, western region, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, called Tima directly to invite her to resubmit her application to sponsor Mohammad and his wife and children, which had been stymied by the same impossible-to-meet document requirements that had sealed the fate of Abdullah and his family.
The catch-22 predicament facing both families had been set out in a file that had gone in and out of Alexander’s office and back and forth between him and his senior officials and Coquitlam-Port Moody NDP MP Fin Donnelly between March and June this year.
After nearly three weeks of uproars about the welltravelled path to his office and the little dead refugee boy in that photograph lying on that beach, Alexander announced on Sept. 19 that he was eliminating the catch-22 document requirement that had doomed both families’ hopes of resettling in Canada.
After she got the call from Kapell-Seguin, “I was crying,” Tima told me. “I was so emotional, because I was really happy, but the feelings of the pain were still hurting me. And even last night I was crying for two hours before I went to sleep.”
Last Thursday, Tima sent Citizenship and Immigration a rewritten application to sponsor her brother Mohammad, his wife Ghouson and their five children — the latest is an infant, born after the initial application was filed in March. But Tima says she is also hoping that prime minister-designate Justin Trudeau will intervene directly on behalf of little Alan Kurdi’s father, Abdullah. After burying his wife and two young sons in the Syrian Kurdish city of Kobane, Abdullah is now in Irbil, a free Kurdish city in Iraq.
After everything Abdullah has been through, it should not be asking too much for Trudeau’s direct intervention to grant Abdullah temporary resident status or some other assurance that will allow him to be brought to Canada and apply here for refugee status, and eventually citizenship, Tima said.
“People have no idea what it is like when you have to flee your country to somewhere else and you are not welcome,” she said.
Tima also said that while she voted for Fin Donnelly, the NDP MP who tried to help her with her case, she bears no ill will toward Alexander or the Conservatives, and she is content that Trudeau will be Canada’s prime minister. “The way Trudeau talks ... I think he is trying to help,” she said.
Apart from losing his wife and children, Abdullah suffered the further indignity of becoming the subject of nasty allegations during the federal election campaign that he was a human smuggler, a fraud, a hustler who’d never been a refugee at all, a guy who’d killed his own family and should be in jail. Tima also found herself accused of having orchestrated the whole thing in a conspiracy with the New Democratic Party and the news media.
“But I know that when people saw that photograph of Alan on the beach, it also opened the hearts of a lot of Canadians, and that is why I am going to write a letter to Justin Trudeau to ask if he can help Abdullah.
I know he is really busy but this has become a special case.”