Activists, social justice groups, students and families came out last Wednesday to the forum “Communities under Attack” in Sidney Smith to hear more about the how the recent ‘War on Terror’ has affected civil rights in Canada. The forum was a coming together of different groups who feel they have been targeted under the guise of national security. The idea was initiated by Project Threadbare, a group created last year to advocate for 24 South Asian Muslim men who had been arrested on suspicion of terrorist links and have not received trials. Some of the men had been deported to Pakistan, where they could face abuse and torture. The forum was sponsored in part by SAC and was aimed at creating awareness about the plight of these individuals.
The panel of speakers included Mona Elfouli and Ahmad Jaballah from The Campaign to Stop Secret Trials, Sanjeev Kumar from the Human Rights Action Committee, Jaggi Singh from No One is Illegal and Farrah Burraidah from Project Threadbare. Elfouli, the mother of two young boys, is the wife of Mohammad Mahjoub, one of five men to be detained using Canada’s Security Certificate, which allows Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) to arrest people without charges for an indefinite period of time, hold them without trial, and block access to the evidence against them. Elfouli told the crowd that her husband has been imprisoned since June of 2000 without bail or trial.
“All we’re asking is to give them a fair trial in public, to allow them to see evidence and their lawyers to see evidence,” she said. She urged people to write and speak out against the Security Certificate: “we need the Security Certificate demolished. We need our husbands back; we need the fathers of our children back.”
Her emotional speech was followed by another from Ahmed Jaballah, 18, whose father has also been imprisoned under a Security Certificate since 1999. After articulating the loopholes in Canadian law which he said allowed individuals to be imprisoned unfairly, he told the crowd: “We don’t need your sympathy, but we certainly need your actions. Do whatever you can to make a difference in this country, and do it now before it’s too late.”
Kumar, Burraidah and Singh discussed the formation of groups that have come together to take action against larger issues of racism within immigration policy. Using examples of families and individuals who have been deported, they all agreed that more work needs to be done to ensure that “our communities would no longer be targeted.” Burraidah emphasized that “we need to be more vigilant in fighting the racist backlash being felt by South Asians, Arabs and Muslims in Canada.”
When asked what she wanted students to get out of a forum such as this one, Elfouli said, “I want students to know that there is no democracy in Canada anymore. If there was one, it is demolished now by the Security Certificate.”
