Group offers assistance to federal government in resettling Yazidi

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This article was published 15/11/2017 (2346 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Winnipeg volunteers are asking the federal government to let them help reach the Liberals’ goal of bringing hundreds of Yazidi refugees to Canada by the end of the year.

“We are offering ourselves to help, to partner with them,” Hadji Hesso, director of the Yazidi Association of Manitoba, said. “We could have reached that target by the end of August.”

Yazidis follow a minority religion and primarily live in Iraq. In August 2014, the so-called Islamic State group started slaughtering Yazidis and selling others as sex slaves.

In the past year, Hesso’s group has helped welcome 100 refugees to Winnipeg, all through “government-assisted” resettlement. (The United Nations selects the most vulnerable people inside its refugee camps and Ottawa financially supports them for a year.)

Another Winnipeg group, Operation Ezra, has separately brought 55 Yazidi refugees to the Manitoba capital since July 2016, all through the private-sponsorship program, in which small groups of Canadians pay for a family’s living expenses for a year.

Both groups testified Nov. 9 at the House of Commons immigration committee, which is looking at how Yazidi refugees are faring.

A year ago, the House unanimously supported a motion by Conservative immigration critic Michelle Rempel, to recognize that “(the Islamic Sate group) is committing genocide against the Yazidi people” and “to provide asylum to Yazidi women and girls.”

By February, the Liberals announced they had already brought almost 400 refugees and set a target to bring 1,200 people from camps that include Yazidi people by 2018. The UN refuses to identify refugees or internally displaced people by religion, though it has kept Yazidis in separate camps.

As of Oct. 29, 807 refugees had arrived in Canada out of the 1,383 people Ottawa has selected for resettlement — with roughly 80 per cent being Yazidi and most arriving through the government-assisted stream.

The federal Liberals say they can bring the remaining refugees by year’s end. But Hesso expects it will take until March, unless officials prioritize the program the same way they did during the late-2015 resettlement of Syrians.

Hesso said federal officials have a target of increasing the current 100 Yazidi refugees in Winnipeg to 280. The city holds the largest Yazidi community in Canada, but it will soon be matched by London, Ont.

Government officials told the committee ethnic tensions are slowing down the program. The Yazidi mostly live in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region of Iraq, which voted in September to break away from the country, whose government then shut down airports and border crossings.

But Hesso is exasperated Yazidi people are languishing in camps after already passing medical checks and multiple interviews with UN and Canadian officials.

He claimed volunteers in Canada asked to help with the process through the summer to no avail. Hesso said refugees now have to go through Baghdad, requiring a passport from people who lack any official ID. He said Yazidi volunteers would have flagged for officials and could still help navigate that issue.

Operation Ezra volunteer Lorne Weiss said private-sponsored refugees are processed faster, because most are living in camps in Turkey.

The committee also examined whether Yazidi refugees are getting adequate counselling once they reach Canada. Earlier this month, an official told the committee “less than five” of the 807 refugees in Canada had accessed individualized counselling under a federal program that gives all refugees 12 months of medical aid.

That number left Rempel stunned. She later called the limited federal support for Yazidis “another injustice that humanity has placed upon their lives.” But officials said research suggests refugees take months to process trauma before seeking help.

Both Winnipeg groups said refugees face long waits for local mental-health treatment. Hesso says the trauma of rape and violence is hindering some women from adjusting. “It’s hard to erase that vision from their mind and heart,” he said.

Yet both groups say they’ve made strides in working with community groups and health authorities to do Kurmanji-language interpretation and help connect refugees with programming.

A regular Thursday night mixer brings about 75 Yazidi refugees from both groups to help them form friendships, while English classes alongside immigrants from other countries help them adapt to Canadian life.

“We try to make them busy so they can be integrated into the Canadian society and, hopefully, that will help them to go through this time. But it won’t be any time soon,” said Hesso.

Weiss said Canada should consider a tailor-made program to get Yazidi people to Canada, through both the government or private-sponsored schemes, because suffering through a genocide is worse than war.

“These people have been exposed to having family members enslaved or murdered in front of their eyes; children forcibly taken from them and being trained to be child soldiers,” he said, echoing testimony he gave Ottawa 16 months ago.

Weiss said Operation Ezra has been piggybacking on organizations and church groups that have a federal permit to sponsor refugees, and finding groups willing to share their quota has been even more difficult than fundraising to support the families.

Rempel added she’s heard the camps can be unsafe, because the Yazidi minority faces suspicion and stigma from wider Iraqi society.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca