Make young Alan’s death matter; don’t make it political
It’s the most heartbreaking thing about the story of threeyear-old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian refugee child lying dead on a Turkish beach. It is also the most overlooked and least-understood part of the story of that photograph driving people around the world half-mad with rage.
The little angel never had a hope in hell.
It all seemed so hopeful, at least for a few weeks. Alan and his five-year-old brother Ghalib and their mother Rehenna and their father Abdullah were going to get out. They were going to make it. Uncle Mohammad and Auntie Ghuson and his four cousins would make it, too.
They were all going to join Auntie Tima by way of a G5 private-sponsorship application for refugee resettlement.
But in June, they found out it wasn’t going to work, when Uncle Mohammad’s G5 application was rejected. That’s why the Kurdi family embarked on the crossing from Bodrum to Kos.
The photograph of Alan first appeared in Turkish media, then was widely distributed by Peter Bouckaert, the director of emergencies for Human Rights Watch, and then it went “viral.”
Millions of Europeans were devoured by rage at the terrible spectacle of little Alan Kurdi dead on the beach. There were protests of outrage at the incoherence of Europe’s governments in the face of the gravest refugee crisis since the Second World War. When it was reported the Kurdis had been hoping to make their way to Canada, there was another wave of rage.
We all wanted a villain to blame, and Chris Alexander leaped into the role by having come off like a thoroughly insensitive jackass, that same day, on the very subject of the Syrian refugee crisis, on CBC’s Power and Politics.
But simple stories like these almost always prove complicated, and there is nothing quite so complicated, and at the same time straightforward, as the reasons why a fair assessment would find there was probably little if anything Alexander could have done for the Kurdi families.
The villainy, if that is what it is, is to be found mostly in Turkey’s exemption from certain provisions of the 1951 Refugee Convention.
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees does not register asylum seekers in Turkey. Turkey does not issue exit visas to refugees who do not possess referrals from the UNHCR. In Turkey, there are no “refugee camps.” There are Turkish “temporary protection shelters.”
The Kurdis had no papers, no UNHCR refugee designations, and no passports, and therefore did not qualify for exit visas. That is why their plans to obtain G5 approvals from Citizenship and Immigration Canada were doomed — and the family ended up boarding that boat.
Canada began attempts to resolve the incongruities two years ago, when there were 200,000 Syrian refugees in Turkey — there are now about two million.
But it was that one photograph that mattered.
The thousands of photographs of dead children, dismembered mothers, bombed schools, old men writhing in agonies from sarin and chlorine gas, and all the rest Syria’s democratic underground has been flooding social media with for the past two years do not seem to have made any difference at all.
Those photographs invite these questions: how can the world allow this barbarism to continue? Why aren’t we stopping the war? What sort of “western civilization” have we become, to allow such horror to be visited upon the innocent of Syria, and yet we do nothing?
The photograph of little Alan Kurdi can raise more easily answerable questions: why aren’t we doing something useful for these poor, bedraggled refugees? In Canada, the photograph of that little boy risks being put to more politically convenient use.
But what would be a fine thing, if those two boys and their mother are not to have died in vain, is to try to rise above ourselves for once and try to agree to do something decent, something maybe even slightly grand.
We should fold our arms around the Kurdi family here in Canada. We should fold our arms around Canada’s brokenhearted Syrian-Canadian community. We should try to sort out a more generous, sensible and effective refugee resettlement policy, and leave the politics out of it altogether.