I would like to defer and answer your question by acknowledging the fact that we are communities and we are providing information based on the facts that we know. What do we do as Eritrean Canadian communities? I represent the Eritrean Canadian community in Winnipeg. We have sponsored 2,500 refugees. This is the second generation of refugees. When we sponsor them, their political opinion is not the same as the political opinion of the people who are bringing them to Canada. We do it on the basis of humanitarian criteria. The relations between the two generations have a difference. The people who say that they are suffering are being helped by the people who have a totally different political opinion. We heal the wounds in our own way.
The reports that we have seen internationally do not reflect the reality in Eritrea. We need to improve human rights in Eritrea, definitely, but the reports do not reflect the reality. They have a cultural bias and a chronological bias. The chronological bias is directing the youth without recognizing the difference between north and south. We have thousands and millions of Africans crossing the Mediterranean. What portion of those are Eritreans? Are we addressing human rights based on the issues of torture and persecution or are we addressing them based on the brain-drain that's happening in Africa and on migration?
The second point is Eritrea's history. We are here today, and this is the first generation. We were persecuted because we said we were Eritreans. We survived and we are alive because, while we were identifying ourselves that way, nobody's bullet reached us. The people who stayed in Eritrea had to live under the rain of napalm of the Soviet Union. The whole world was silent.
We overcame the crisis and we became independent. We are still threatened. In 1961 our institutions were abolished. Eritrea was deinstitutionalized during the Ethiopian occupation and prior to that. We don't have the institutions to create and address issues of human rights the way they're being seen in the western world. So the criteria contain a chronological bias, because we are setting standards in Canada to judge people in Eritrea. All the reports that have been done have the chronological bias and the cultural bias.