‘I am blaming the whole world for not helping the refugees enough’
The boy on the beach had a name: Alan. Not Alayn, with a Y, the way Turkish authorities spelled it, the way media reported it after his rag-doll body washed up on a Turkish beach. He was named Alan, after his Canadian cousin. A name given like a promise. This child would have a better life. But this child will have no life. “I am not blaming the Canadian government,” Tima Kurdi said through tears. “I am blaming the whole world for not helping the refugees enough.”
“The boy was our nephew,” said Rocco Logozzo, who is married to Tima, a Coquitlam hairdresser. She’s the mother of big Alan and auntie to little Alan. “Yesterday was going to start as a normal day. Then, this.”
Little Alan’s life was marked by turmoil. His father Abdullah, mother Rehenna and brother Ghalib moved from town to town as Syria was torn apart by civil war, eventually landing in the border town of Kobane as Islamic State militants pressed to capture it. Finally the family fled to Turkey where two sisters and another brother, Mohammad, had already sought refuge. Last year Tima travelled to Turkey. She was shocked by how much her family and other refugees were suffering. So she went from house to house using hand gestures to communicate and begged for help, for mattresses and blankets, for food and supplies until she filled a whole truck. “It changed my life,” she said.
She went to the flea markets and bought clothing for Alan and his brother Ghalib, who died alongside him in the waters of the Aegean Sea two nights ago.
“I bought them so many clothes from the flea market in Turkey,” she said.
The clothes Alan was wearing when his body washed ashore, the red shirt and blue shorts, are now a flag for every child without a country.
“The only thing I regret,” Tima said, “is that I did not buy them any toys because there was something else more important: food.”
Tima sits on a chair outside her Coquitlam home, a mike clipped to her shirt. Her face is a map shattered with grief, but she is determined to speak for her brother, Abdullah, who survived the tragic attempt to cross from Turkey to Greece, and for her sister-in-law and the children who no longer have a voice.
“They didn’t deserve to die. They were going for a better life. It shouldn’t happen.”
When her brother called her, they cried together.
“When the boat flipped upside down and the waves kept pushing him down,” she said, “those two boys were in his arms. He said he tried with all his power to push them up above the water to breathe and they screamed, ‘Daddy, please don’t die.’ ”
“He looked in his left arm — the older boy, Ghalib, was already dead,” Tima said. “And so he let him go. He tried to save the second one, Alan. He looked at him and there was blood coming from his eyes. So he closed his eyes and he let him go. He looked around for his wife. She was floating in the water like a balloon. He said you should see what she looked like. He said I tried with all my power to save them. I couldn’t.”
Tima, too, tried with all her power to save them. She tried through official channels that were doomed to fail. The family had a plan. Tima would sponsor them, starting with her eldest brother Mohammad’s family, through Canada’s legal refugee process. But the plan, and the process, failed her.
Mohammad’s application was denied on a technicality and in spite of a personal intervention by Fin Donnelly, the NDP MP for New Westminster-Coquitlam. He asked Canada’s minister of citizenship and immigration to grant Mohammad’s family of five refugee status, which would have cleared the way for Tima to apply on behalf of Abdullah, Rehenna, Ghalib and Alan.
Instead, Mohammad fled to Germany, but it wasn’t long before he called Tima to let her know the deepening crisis had effectively marooned his wife and four children in Turkey. “He told me there is no way he can bring his family to Germany.”
As the situation in Turkey grew more dire, and with Canada’s doors effectively closed to the family, Abdullah made the decision to try to cross to Greece. They would pay the smugglers with money that Tima had been sending the family to live on.
“They were desperate, and they decided to take a risk,” Logozzo said.
When Tima spoke to her sisterin-law a few nights ago, she said Rehenna told her, “I’m so scared of the water. I don’t know how to swim if something happens.”
Tima tried to comfort her. “I said, ‘Don’t go if you don’t want to go.’ But I guess they decided they were going to do it all together.”
Two weeks ago, she recalled, Ghalib said to her on the phone, “Auntie, can you buy me a bicycle?” Tima broke down, tears fell, then she drew another deep breath. “He wanted a bicycle like all the other kids. I said to my brother one day I will send you extra money so you can buy him a bicycle.”
As he prepared to travel from Turkey to Syria with the bodies of his children and his wife, Abdullah said to Tima, “This has to be a wake-up call for the whole world. My message for the whole world is please help the people crossing the water. Don’t let them take that journey any more. Don’t let them die.”
Abdullah doesn’t want to go to Germany, or come to Canada anymore. Without his family, his life, with its small slice of promise, is effectively over. “All I want is to be there beside them, feed them, give them some water,” he told her.
Tima said when her brother worked in construction in Syria, little Ghalib would call him every day to bring home his favourite food: a banana. He could only afford one banana, so he would bring one and split it in half for the boys to share. “He said, I’m going to buy a banana every day and put it on their grave.”