Mr. Speaker, I begin by once again thanking the member for Calgary Nose Hill for her tireless advocacy on behalf of Nadia Murad, on behalf of the hundreds of Nadia Murads who have escaped Daesh's sexual slavery, and for giving voice to the thousands of women who continue to be enslaved by this genocidal death cult.
I would also like to thank the member and her colleagues for bringing this debate into our House.
All of our days are filled with busyness. However, as busy as we are in our institutions of caretaking and good governance here on the Hill, as much as we attempt to manage and control processes in this place, there will be events that intrude upon us, events that are beyond our control, events that require an immediacy of action by us, and that require hard decisions from us.
These will be decisions which will define us, decisions that carry a moral burden, decisions such as those of military engagement, of war and peace.
However, the most morally demanding of action occurs when confronting the darkest of evils, genocide. Genocide is defined as the destruction of a nation or an ethnic group. The simplicity of its definition is a stark contrast to the horror of its meaning.
It was a term coined and defined by Raphael Lemkin in 1944, a Polish Jew born in Vawkavysk, within the bloodlands of eastern Europe, the epicentre of mass killings in Europe's decades of death during the 20th century, where the Holodomor occurred during the 1930s, and where the unimaginable horror of the Holocaust took place in the 1940s.
Lemkin later served with a team of Americans working to prepare the Nuremberg trials, where he was able to introduce the word genocide into the indictment against the Nazi leadership when the word genocide was not yet a legal, criminal term.
These last two years, the world has once again faced the horror of genocide. During these last two years, Daesh publicly declared genocide against the peaceful Yazidi people of Syria and Iraq on the Internet, and then the mass murders began.
Genocidal massacres do not pause and wait for international legal processes to make criminal, legal determinations of genocide. I was a member of the Canadian delegation at the United Nations World Summit in 2005 when former Prime Minister Paul Martin stated before the General Assembly:
Too often, we have debated the finer points of language while innocent people continue to die. Darfur is only the latest example.
In 2005, Prime Minister Paul Martin made clear we could not allow another Darfur to occur. Yet, the Yazidi genocide took place during the last two years as we in the House debated the finer points of language while innocent people continued to die. In the next few days, we will be facing decisions requiring an immediacy of action on behalf of the Yazidi survivors of genocide.
This summer, the citizenship and immigration committee heard testimony from Nadia Murad. Nadia's mother and brothers were murdered by Daesh when they occupied her town, separated, and then slaughtered the men and older women. The younger women and children were horrifically abused and sold into Daesh's sexual slave markets.
This September, during the United Nations World Summit, a decade after former Prime Minister Paul Martin spoke at the World Summit, and the premise of the Responsibility to Protect, R2P, was introduced by Canada, Nadia told the horror of her story before the UN Security Council, the horror of the story of the Yazidi genocide at the hands of Daesh. As the UN Security Council chair noted at the conclusion of Nadia's testimony, it was the first time in its history that the Security Council had given a speaker an ovation.
Nadia's strength is inspirational and needs to be applauded. However, the clapping of hands is not a substitute for concrete action.
Yazidi genocide survivors and many of the women who escaped Daesh's sexual slavery are currently languishing in IDP camps, internally displaced persons camps, and refugee camps, where they often continue to suffer discrimination and abuse as members of a religious minority. However, they also face an even harsher reality, as Nadia stated during our committee hearings in early July three months ago, Yazidi women have no home to return to.
How can women whose villages have been razed, whose families have been massacred, whose neighbours stood aside, or worse, as they were chained and taken to Daesh's sex-slave markets, return to villages that no longer physically exist, to face neighbours complicit in their horror?
Every year on the Hill, we memorialize the Armenian Genocide, the Holodomor, the Holocaust, and solemnly pledge and declare, “Never again”. Yet, Rwanda happened, Srebrenica happened, Darfur happened, and in the last two years, the Yazidi genocide happened.
We cannot predict what will happen in three years time when our elected mandate comes to an end. However, we can all agree that each and every one in this House will have changed during our time in this place. In those moments of quiet reflection three years hence, will each of us individually be able to say, “I passed the test”, or will some of us look back and say, “What happened to me”?
To my colleagues of all parties in this House, this is the institution where the great debates of the day can take place, which can lead us collectively to find unity in motions that arrive at decisions of great moral imperative and immediacy.
Surely, for the sake of the Yazidi genocide survivors, we can rise above partisanship and the splitting of hairs on the finer points of language and details.
One evening, after last summer's hearings into the Yazidi genocide, I brought Nadia into this chamber, with only the security personnel present. In fact, I invited her to sit in your chair, Mr. Speaker. As she looked out into the magnificence of this chamber, she seemed unsure. Perhaps she was thinking of where she had been a year prior, and where she found herself that summer evening.
As she looked out, I said to her, “Nadia, I'm sure that one day the child or grandchild of a Yazidi genocide survivor will stand in this place as an elected member of Canada's House of Commons and reaffirm humanity's pledge of “Never again”. I believe I saw a tear in her eye.
Let us reach out with a Canadian helping hand, as has Germany, and bring a group of these genocide survivors to the sanctuary of Canada. Let us begin the process of restoring their shattered lives.