Mr. Speaker, I am honoured to rise to support the motion by the member for Sturgeon River—Parkland.
It is tragically incredible that in 2016 any minister in any country that considers itself a democracy, committed to the rule of law and recognizing the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide refuses to speak the word that specifically and powerfully defines what has been happening in full sight, and has been horrifically documented in Syria and Iraq for years now. It is the brutal persecution of any and all who refuse to convert to the Islamic state's perverse interpretation of Islam, kidnapping, sexual enslavement, rape, torture, mass murder, in other words, genocide.
Today we have heard, and I suspect will hear many more times, convoluted attempts from the government side to excuse Liberal ministers from uttering that word. More than seven decades after the word was created from Greek and Latin roots, the Greek word genos for race or tribe and the Latin word cide for killing, lexicologists, diplomats, politicians and ordinary people have quibbled and quarrelled over a precise meaning and when it should be applied.
The House passed a motion unanimously just last year, put by the former Conservative member of Parliament Brad Butt, that reaffirmed recognition of four genocides of the 20th century: the Holocaust, the Armenian genocide, the Ukrainian Holodomor and the Rwandan genocide. However, many of us felt that motion fell short of recognizing all of the 20th century genocides, such as the Great Chinese Famine, Cambodia's Khmer Rouge killing fields, Srebrenica, and Darfur, to reference several yet unrecognized genocides. Now we have Syria and Iraq and the so-called self-proclaimed Islamic state.
The evidence is overwhelming. The most clearly defined instance is the massive atrocities committed on the minority communities of Nineveh province in northern Iraq. Before June 2014, Nineveh was Iraq's most diverse province. The ethnic and religious minorities included the Yazidis, the Assyrian Chaldean Christians, the Sabaean-Mandaeans, the Shia Shabak, Turkmen, and the Kaka'i. More than 800,000 men, women and children were forced from their homes and communities. Shrines, temples and churches were systematically destroyed. Many thousands were killed in barely three months, and the slaughter has continued since.
In September last year, during the Canadian election campaign, the Simon-Skjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide conducted a bearing witness expedition to Iraq. The group documented the brutal forcible displacement, forced religious conversion, rape, torture, kidnapping and murder. Just to explain for the House what the Simon-Skjodt Center is, it conducts work on genocide and related crimes against humanity for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The Simon-Skjodt Center is dedicated to stimulating timely global action to prevent genocide where possible and to, as it states, “catalyze an international response when it occurs.”
In August 2014, the report found that more than 200,000 Yazidis were surrounded on Mount Sinjar without food and water. Another 50,000 were isolated and captured by Islamic state terrorists. Only have U.S. humanitarian food drops and bombing raids created a safe corridor for escape was the siege of Mount Sinjar ended.
Detailed testimony, recorded by the genocide expedition, was given by refugees in Iraq's internally displaced persons camps and those at large in the area.
One man's quoted testimony in the expedition's report characterizes, I believe, the Islamic State's campaign of forced exile and actual extinction. “We have no future“, he said, “Our generation has gone”.
The Simon-Skjodt genocide report, and it is a report I would suggest all members of this House read for its well-documented detail of what has happened under Islamic State's brutality, concludes with the statement:
...our belief is that [Islamic State] perpetrated genocide against the Yezidi people.
The next sentence is one that will be debated, I know, throughout the day today, but the next sentence is the sentence the Liberal government has been hiding behind. The sentence says:
Any formal determination of whether genocide was perpetrated needs to be made by a court based on careful consideration of the evidence.
That is exactly what has not happened. It has not happened as Islamic State has continued to perpetrate genocide and crimes against humanity ever since, and still today.
The International Criminal Court will not, on its own, initiate proceedings to consider and declare Islamic State guilty of genocide. The ICC must first be directed by the United Nations Security Council to act. Because of veto dysfunction on the Security Council, and the blockage of such genocide and crimes against humanity resolutions by Russia and China, repeatedly, none of the democracies on the Security Council have bothered to put such a motion regarding Islamic State.
As a bit of an aside, this is just another powerful reason to shake up, to renovate, to recreate the United Nations to be the international institution it was originally created to be and is so often not today.
However, and this is a point we will argue through the day today, the inability of the United Nations to direct the International Court to act should not be used by sovereign democracies like Canada to not meet our individual responsibility to speak the g-word out loud and to take the necessary action with like-minded countries.
We know well, and we heard from the Leader of the Opposition, the list of those who have spoken out. Our mother Parliament, the British House of Commons, voted unanimously to define Islamic State action as genocide. So too the European Parliament, the Council of Europe, the Vatican, the U.S. House of Representatives, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, the U.S. Secretary of State, the council of bishops in Europe, and others, and there are more, almost by the month, have dared to speak the word the Liberal government refuses to say.
In conclusion, I would urge all colleagues, across parties, to stand today and support the motion put by the member for Sturgeon River—Parkland to declare that this House strongly condemns the atrocities and declares these crimes to be genocide.
