Thank you, Mr. Chair.
This has been incredibly moving testimony, and I thank all the witnesses, but in particular the activists from the Yazidi community for sharing information about the situation. I salute your courage and your work on this.
When I think about the events you describe, I think of the experience of my own grandmother, who was a Jewish child in Germany 75 years ago confronting similar events: fleeing for her life, seeing the devastation, the killing of members of her family just based on their background.
Regularly in Parliament we commemorate and honour these past genocides and we say, “Never again”. Whether it's about events in Rwanda, events in Germany and other parts of Europe, events in present-day Turkey impacting the Armenian people, we remember these events, and yet our Parliament here in Canada has still failed to recognize the genocide facing the Yazidi people.
It should be a source of embarrassment to all of us that the American administration, the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, the British Parliament, have recognized that your people, the Yazidi people, are facing genocide right now. What good does it do us to remember those past genocides, if we cannot use the word in the present?
I have the definition of “genocide” with me. It's a different definition than was mentioned. There are differing definitions, but this is from the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, the genocide convention. It defines genocide as:
...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group...:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
One of these things with the intent to eradicate the group qualifies as genocide. What we have clearly happening against the Yazidi people by Daesh is all five of these things, clearly documented by various human rights groups. What we've heard from opponents of using this word is that it's a technical word, that it requires study, and that we can call these acts barbaric but shouldn't use the word “genocide”, because there's a technical legal context to it.
Well, I think the technical legal dynamics are clear—the research has been gathered, the work has been done—but this isn't just a technical word; it's a word that drives us to action. When we fail to use this important word, it has a reduced impetus towards action. I don't think we can look away and try to couch this in different wording.
I want to ask the activists from the Yazidi community on the panel to talk specifically about why it is important that Canada, that the Canadian Parliament, finally use the word “genocide”; what the implications are of our stepping up and calling this genocide what it is?