Joyce Yedid

Madam Joyce Yedid of the Bar Association of Quebec and Member of Amnesty International#

Hon’ble Speaker, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like first of all to thank you for giving me this opportunity of possibly sharing certain experiences that we have had in Canada. And, secondly, to emphasise, possibly, the importance of this kind of conference, at the international level.

Canada is very far away country and the only knowledge that we had of Sri Lanka was a paradise in the Indian Ocean, a land of abundance and beauty. No one knew about the problems, economic, cultural and ethnic, of that land.

The first inkling that occurred were quire misleading. Into Canada trickled rumours from West Germany that there were hundreds and hundreds of refugees in Germany, in France and in various other countries from Sri Lanka. The Canadian Government considers these people as economic refugees. And economic refugees are not refugees as recognized under international Law since according to Canadian Law which repeats the words of the Geneva Convention in 1951, ‘A refugee is a person who escapes persecution only for the following five reasons namely race, religion, nationality, membership in a special group and political opinion’. An economic refugee is not a refugee in Law. So we were warned and advised that there were a large number of alleged refugees in European countries who were on their way to Canada. That was the first information to change the idea of Sri Lanka, a Paradise which existed in the minds of most of the population; and even so, I would not say most of the population, but people involved with the refugees.

I was not personally involved with any of the early arrivals from Germany, because these were the first refugees that came. And I think that kind of experience, I merely repeated to you so as to emphasis the importance of hosting this kind of conference; the importance of publicising to the world what the situation is. I certainly have no intention of addressing myself to the sources of the problem. They may be cultural, they may be historical, they may be a combination or racial. I am quite sure that there are many people here much better suited and eligible than I am to discuss these matters. But one thing is sure in countries like Canada, very little is known about the source of the problems and this I think accounts for a great deal; ignorance accounts a great deal for the lack of understanding and possibly lack of sympathy.

So what I would like to urge is the necessity of undertaking on an International scale the kind of Publicity and information campaign that would permit the world to see and understand the source as well as the manifestation of the problem. On the legal foundations I don not think I want to address myself either, not with standing the fact that I am an attorney because I am quite sure that there are many more distinguished delegates here who are Members of the Bar or Members of the Judicature who can address question far better than I can. Certainly I have no intention of repeating or expanding any Prevention of Terrorism Act or emergency legislation, or violation from the legal point of view.

I think that what I would like to share with you is possibly the experience of most of the workers involved in refugee work in Canada. There are possibly two or three thousand people who are claiming refugee status in Canada and I have seen and spoken to a large number of them personally. And in fact what I would like to share with you is the emotional cost and the physical cost of the violation of human rights.

In Canada, we have instituted a system that provides for so called group refugees but the Tamils of Sri Lankan do not appear at the present time to fall within any such category such as the boat people or Groups of people who seem to quality as refugees. They undergo the individual process of refugee which is a very long and very painful process. Mr. David Selbourne mentioned the necessity of having a court of Law, some sort of International Tribunal where it would be possible to record evidence. But that is what we do everyday in Canada. People are placed under oath and have to explain and justify why they are refugees. And I can tell you that I have heard hundreds of stories.

The majority of refugees that have come to Canada fall within a certain frame work. The earliest arrivals are possibly the most involved members of the TULF and other political groups and organisations. They primarily appear to be young men who were politically active for possibly reasons that originally were not necessarily violation of human rights in a physical sense namely; there was obviously clear discrimination of a legislative nature which led to frustration, which led to political involvement; and which led to the repression by the police and army. Those young men fled wherever they could. Originally, I believe, to Germany, France and other European countries.

Unfortunately, the German system either unwittingly or by policy did not accept them. In fear of returning to their country they started to flock to Canada known as a country that welcomes and treats the refugees fairly. These were the first refugees that we saw in Canada. The refugees who came in the summer of 1983 came primarily of directly from Sri Lanka. They are essentially but not exclusively refugees from Colombo. They are not heavily politicised. They are not young men and women who were fighting for their lost rights. They were people whose homes were burnt, whose families were injured, whose businesses were destroyed, and who in very actual and immediate fear for their lives took the first plane out of Colombo. Canada just happened to be a place they came to. That’s the second group of refugees and it included as well many members of the Tamil community living in Singalese areas. The experiences that they recount are not in abstract terms anything that I want to discuss.

But what I want to talk about are the consequences of the violation of human rights and the consequences of importance that we can see are obviously the disruption and the destruction of family units. And I think this is the primary element that we noticed. In Canada this may not seem as devastating as it appears to the Tamil Community. Canada is not a country where family are very closely knit. So if a young man and a young woman or three young men leave the family and go to foreign lands it is not necessarily a tragedy. But I think one has to understand that within the compacts of Tamil life it is a tragedy. It is a tragedy to the family but, who, may be, find some relief in the knowledge and hope that at least their children are safe. Because, needless to say, that every family wants their children to be safe; whether they are Tamil, Canadian, British, or anything else. So, there is a certain comfort I supposed, in the knowledge that one’s children are hopefully free and certainly safe. But nonetheless, I think the process of family destruction and disruption is a very serious one.

The other consequences that we witnessed are divergent according to where the refugees come from and how well they are able to integrate into Canadian life.

The young men and women who are in Canada and they are primarily young men, and most of them came from Colombo but some of them came from the North; these young men ad women face very difficult life in Canada. The climate is different, the geography is different, the economic conditions are different. They find themselves without family, without the support of family, without a frame work, a net work that gives support to the Tamil culture which we do not have in Canada. That very real thing is one of the first obstacles and one of the first difficulties.

The second type of difficulty we noticed is that they exhibit all the tragedy of refugees as opposed to immigrants. Immigrants choose to leave their homelands. Immigrants decide that life is too difficult in one’s own lands: I will pack up and take my family and leave. Refugees live in a perpetual state of wishing to return to their homelands. And I think that is characteristic of most of the Tamil young men and women that we have in Canada. They have a yearning to return to their homelands and everything is considered temporary. In Canada, they live with the hope and expectation that one day they are going to their home. And I do not know if you understand really the consequences of living under these conditions, but they are grave and very difficult in terms of home cost.

We have in Canada many young men who are coming out of prisons in Jaffna, Batticaloa, Elephant Camp and other Sri Lankan jails and who fled their country. This has led to another type of problem that we have noticed. A lot of these young men have suffered in a very physical way. They carry the marks of their torture: letter brands on their body with hot Irons, Cigarette burns all over their body; scars. These we know from testimony, from medical reports. Some of these scars are apparent and some of these have continuing effects. It is very common among Tamil young me to be vomiting blood after 3 years: they are still doing it at home in Canada. A lot of Tamil young me have serious stomach problems. A lot of them have permanent injuries to their limbs, bodies and to their hearing. They carry the marks of their detention in very many respects and some of these will be permanent.

They also carry other marks which cannot be seen but which are much more real in the sense: fear, hatred. Some of these young men and women have admitted to me that they repeatedly wake up in terror, screaming. And that is true, especially of the young men from the North who are more tougher because they have been in prison more often, they have been tortured more often, and more extensively. So I suppose they are tougher but how much tougher can you get?

The people Colombo, a year after, are still, in my opinion, in a state of shock. All of them repeatedly told me that they suffered nightmares of their burning homes or of the mobs and thugs coming towards them with iron bars and other implements of attack. And I think, as many speakers have mentioned before that ultimately the government will have to accept responsibility for that. It was either unwilling, or unable to control the mobs and it will have to accept responsibility for the situation. I have spoken to some of the Tamil women who have been raped and the consequences are devastating. The young men and young women in Canada are continuously living and reliving those experiences. And every time that there is trouble anywhere in Sri Lanka there is a rush for the telephones to find out whether their families are safe or unsafe. These may be undocumented things. But nonetheless we can see and feel the anxiety and the terror with which these young men and women are living.

I want to conclude with one remark. Their hopes and dreams are to come back home. With all this, Sri Lanka is still their home. But what I think is very tragic, is this. It appears to me as an outsider that the youth, the Tamil Youth of Sri Lanka is outside the country. It is the people who have been bereft of its youth and a nation deprived of its youth is in fact deprived of the future. This is one thing which I think we should all think about.