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Tuesday, September 15, 2015

The facts without the spin on little Aylan Kurdi

"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."


Glavin: Let's talk about the Kurdi family we did turn away

In Stephen Harper’s tightly fought and closely choreographed re-election 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 make 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 Mohammad’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 Kobane the family escaped into Turkey. That was in September 2013. They had been living in destitution and despair in Istanbul ever since.

http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/columnists/glavin-lets-talk-about-the-kurdi-family-we-did-turn-away



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