We’ve all got blood on our hands. DiManno,
Canada: Child killer.
For much of Thursday, that’s how this country was viewed around the world — a cruel and bureaucratically rigid place that turns its back on toddlers whose tiny drowned bodies wash ashore.
We have always professed to be better than everyone else, a finer and kinder society, if more often a scold on the world stage, wagging fingers at the U.S. and Europe from our morally superior perch.
A benevolent society with one of the planet’s highest standards of living, generous hearted and accommodating to newcomers, because we’re a nation that has benefitted from the dreams and sweat of immigrants, like my own parents, like the Portuguese and Korean and Ukrainian masses that followed, like the Vietnamese boat people who found sanctuary here in the 1980s.
But one desperate Syrian family fleeing the war-ravaged town of Kobani wasn’t so lucky. And so they clambered along with others into an unseaworthy boat for a doomed voyage across a five-kilometre strait of Aegean Sea between the Turkish coast and the Greek island of Kos.
The vessel capsized, as have so many others, throwing its asylum seekers into the water. Again and again these miserable souls have perished.
It doesn’t matter that just about every nation on Earth has blood on its hands for largely ignoring the catastrophe unfolding in Syria. When the U.S. president draws a line in the sand over the use of chemical weapons against civilians by the genocidal Bashar al-Assad regime — and then does nothing when hundreds die writhing from gas attacks — foreign capitals get the message: It just doesn’t matter enough.
Upwards of 2,500 Syrian nationals have died this year alone, according to the United Nations High Commission on Refugees, in the civilian exodus. Doesn’t matter. Maybe because they didn’t have names and they didn’t have faces.
But this 3-year-old boy, lying facedown in the surf on the Turkish coast, his red T-shirt riding up to reveal his pale babyish midriff, cut through the hardened heart of an appalled world. Who are we, this species, and what have we become to allow this?
One child representing countless more. One picture that might finally spark global outrage from a collective stricken conscience.
Canada was the villain because this, as originally and widely reported, was one death we could definitely have prevented. And if that is an intrinsically unfair condemnation of my country — it could have been any youngster whose parents had applied for refuge to any nation, Canada the “victim” of optics, this haunting photo — well then, too bad. We had the ignominy coming.
Then Prime Minister Stephen Harper told a rally in Surrey, B.C., that Canada was not the culprit. The reports were untrue, or at least wrong in the details. The child’s family had never been rejected for asylum. It was an uncle of the toddler who’d been deemed unworthy, turned down after his sister, a Vancouver hairdresser resident in Can- ada for two decades, had made a refugee application for her brother, Mohammed Kurdi.
Mohammed Kurdi is alive. His brother Abdullah, father to 3-yearold Alan, is alive. But his two young sons drowned this week and so did their mother. That’s a mere fig leaf of cover for the government.
This rich, spacious and privileged commonwealth has accepted only 2,300 asylum seekers from Syria to date — with, in the midst of a federal election campaign, the ruling Conservatives last month pledging to bring an additional 10,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq if re-elected. Vote baiting brings out the compassionate in Harper and his acolytes.
New Democrat Fin Donnelly, running for re-election in Port Moody—Coquitlam, told the Star Thursday that he had personally hand-delivered a letter on behalf of the aunt and her husband to Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Christopher Alexander.
That application was for Mohammed and his family. When the request was declined, Abdullah Kurdi abandoned his interest in Canada as a refugee.
This scenario was put forth in a statement from Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokesman Jean-Bruno Villeneuve, claiming “an application for Mr. Mohammad Kurdi and his family was received by the department but was returned as it was incomplete as it did not meet regularly (sic) requirements for proof of refugee status recognition. There was no record of an application received for Mr. Abdullah Kurdi and his family.”
An official in Donnelly’s office told the Star Kurdi specified in an attachment to the letter that she and her family were sponsoring only Mohammed and his family, though the attachment does go over the family histories of both Mohammed and Abdullah.
Yet Abdullah Kurdi, after identifying the bodies of his sons, Alan and Ghalib, told reporters Thursday that Canadian officials had offered him citizenship after the photos flashed around the globe, but he’d turned them down. Not so, Villeneuve countered. “Canada did not offer citizenship to Mr. Abdullah Kurdi.”
This does not greatly move the compassion needle for Canada.
We dodged a bullet — can’t blame us for Alan and his equally dead kin — but we can sure as hell share the blame for all the many other Alans.
Canada has done disgracefully little to alleviate what’s been described as the worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.
Specifically, if Mohammed Kurdi’s sponsors hadn’t been sent packing, the dominoes might have fallen a different way. And what of all the other equally despairing civilians who risk everything to flee harm?
We’re left to surmise that Canada’s standards are preposterously high and its mercy ruinously low.
It isn’t just Canada, of course, that has turned a blind eye and deaf ear to the crisis.
In Budapest this week, police blocked refugees from boarding trains heading to Germany.
Thursday the Hungarian prime minister had a stern message for migrants: “Please don’t come.” Not here, not there, so where? In his coffin, Alan Kurdi won’t take up much space. Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.