Canadian Youths Return Horrified By Bosnian Misery

By Faisal Kutty

At an age when most of their friends are preoccupied with fast cars and the opposite sex, two young Canadians had experiences they will never forget during a month spent working to alleviate the suffering of Bosnian refugees.

Bilal Ibrahim, from Scarborough, Ontario, and Abdulrahman Lawendy of Waterloo, Ontario, left Canada on Aug. 3, 1994 on a relief mission organized by Mercy International that took them to Zagreb, Varazdin, Zenitca and Sarajevo.

Michigan-based Mercy International sends relief supplies and funds orphanages, medical centers, and meat canning facilities in Bosnia and Croatia. The mission to help refugees was the organization's first.

Ibrahim, 17, and Lawendy, 19, told the Washington Report that of the 22 million people that made up the former Yugoslavia, more than four million have been displaced since the April 1992 outbreak of fighting. More than two and a half million of those uprooted are Bosnians.

Ibrahim and Lawendy spent the first week and a half distributing supplies for Mercy International and Human Relief Agency, an Egyptian organization, among some of the estimated 200,000 to 300,000 refugees in the Croatian capital of Zagreb, which has become the operational center for international relief groups.

Having grown up with the material comforts enjoyed by most North Americans, it was difficult for them to face the fact that many lining up for handouts were once well off—as evident from the torn designer clothes on their backs.

For Ibrahim, the saddest event in Zagreb was his visit to an orphanage where most of the children were the result of rape. Some 50,000 to 60,000 Muslim women allegedly have been raped by Serbian thugs. If these children survive the war, they can only look forward to a life devoid of a mother and father. "They will never experience the love and warmth of a real family," noted Ibrahim, who hails from a family of six.

Their journey took them next to Varazdin, about an hour north of Zagreb, where they visited abandoned army bases now being used to house refugees. "The people in these bases had to live through the biting cold winters without windows," remarked Ibrahim.

Two weeks into the trip, they traveled from Zagreb to Split, on the Adriatic Sea, and from there to Medcovich, which is about 15 minutes from the Bosnian border.

At Medcovich the Mercy group joined a Danish relief convoy for the five-hour drive across Serbian-occupied territory to Zenitca. This stretch of the trip revealed the extent of the Serbian destruction and brutality. They saw, in Ibrahim's words, "numerous abandoned villages where there was not a single house left untouched except for the odd Serbian houses which were left in perfect condition."

The trek also took them past Mostar, where Lawendy, a first-year university science student, said he was shocked by what he called the "architecture of misery and destruction, whereby rows upon rows and blocks upon blocks of houses were leveled and thousands made destitute."

Bread and Beans

In Zenitca itself, they visited a school which was converted into a refugee camp. The small classrooms were used as dormitories with as many as three families—women and children but almost no men—crammed into a room. The rooms were overcrowded with hundreds of "sick, extremely skinny children" suffering from a variety of diseases due to malnutrition. His voice breaking with emotion, Ibrahim explained that the children lived on one meal per day, consisting of a piece of bread and some beans. Astonishingly, even under such miserable conditions, the people found the courage and commitment to try to teach their children.

Their next destination was Sarajevo, which in peacetime was only a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Zenitca. Unable to take the direct route because of Serbian blockades, the two went back to Zagreb and flew into Sarajevo on what they described as "Maybe Airlines," whose motto according to Ibrahim is "If you are scared to fly then don't come." Their proximity to the front was driven home when the group, composed of Ibrahim, Lawendy, Hassam Sawal, the field officer for Mercy International in Sarajevo, and Aiman Elhamalawy, a Mercy executive, had to don bullet-proof vests and helmets. The hills looking down on the airport are still under Serb control.

They were escorted into the city in an armored personnel carrier by an Egyptian U.N. battalion. Peering out from the armored vehicle, they found Serb-held areas of the city looked normal, while the Bosnian side was heavily damaged.

Throughout a stay in Sarajevo, Ibrahim says, "you continuously hear sniper fire." They also realized the extent of the shortages in the city. When water comes, it only drips, and every available container must be filled before it stops. The people had converted a public park into a communal farm, where they were growing food. Some were using seeds provided by Mercy International-USA.

On the second day they met an imam in a Sarajevo mosque who took them to his village on a hill overlooking the city. The site of a tower controlling TV and radio communications, it had been wrested back from the Serbs. The mosque in this village, only a few minutes from the front lines, was among 1,500 mosques destroyed in the fighting or under Serb occupation.

The trip to Sarajevo ended with a visit to the largest hospital in the city. One of the most emotional moments for Ibrahim occurred at this hospital full of overcrowded patients and overworked doctors whose salaries consist of two bags of flour a month. In one of the rooms they found a seriously injured two-year-old boy. He was medically restrained in a position which made it difficult and painful to move. As the relief workers handed out bananas to the patients, they put one on the table near the baby's bed so that a nurse could feed him later. But, to their horror, the little boy stretched and struggled with all his might to reach for the banana, as if he had not seen food for a long time.

Lawendy told the Washington Report the trip forced him to "take a grip on reality." It also changed his understanding of war. "War is a word bought and sold in our media without any value, but when you see it on a closer level, you realize it is a lot more devastating and the repercussions a lot more profound," noted the University of Waterloo student.

Ibrahim, a high school senior, says he will remember the children, more than a million of whom, according to UNICEF experts, have been traumatized with long- term and permanent effects. He will never forget the pain, the devastation and the improvised graveyards in the villages and cities of Bosnia. He also will remember what a 17-year-old Muslim girl said upon learning they were not soldiers but youths doing relief work during a school vacation. "You are so lucky to have such opportunities and the chance to get an education," she said. "All I want is to get a chance to study and live."

Canadian Muslims Allege Violation of Religious Freedom

The hijab, or Islamic headscarf for women, has become a political issue in Quebec, just as it has been for some time in France. The story's Canadian chapter opened on Sept. 7 when a Quebec school principal expelled 13-year-old Emilie Ouimet for wearing a hijab. Normand Dore, principal of Louis-Riel Secondary School, justified his decision with the statement that "distinctive clothing like a hijab or neo-Nazi regalia could polarize aggression among young people."

Since then, a number of religious and human rights groups have denounced the move. The Canadian Muslim Forum is submitting a formal written protest on behalf of the more than 40,000 Muslim students attending Montreal schools to the incoming minister of education and to the Montreal Catholic School Commission (MCSC).

SOS Racisme has called the student's expulsion "deplorable" and is demanding a review of the MCSC's policy on dress codes. The MCSC says it allows each individual school to set its own rules about dress. "Respect for religious and cultural diversity is not a matter that should have lower priority than the desire of school administrators, however laudable, to avoid marginalizing students," counters Max Bernard of the Canadian Jewish Congress.

"When supposedly highly educated people hold such views we [Muslims] are headed for trouble."

The Canadian dispute, which arose only a few days before the French government declared it was banning headscarves from schools on grounds that they violated a tradition of secular education in France, came as a bombshell for members of the Muslim community of Quebec province, who are feeling increasingly isolated.

Less than a year earlier, on Nov. 29, 1993, Quebec Municipal Court Judge Richard Alary ejected a 36-year-old Muslim woman, Wafaa Mousiyne, from his courtroom because he felt her headscarf violated rules of courtroom decorum. Court transcripts reveal that Judge Alary told the woman's lawyer: "When in Rome, live like the Romans."

However, Judge Raymond Lavoie, president of the Quebec Municipal Judges Conference, said there is no rule precluding people from wearing religious headgear in courtrooms. Therefore, Canadian Muslims were surprised and disappointed with a ruling by the Quebec Judicial Council that Judge Alary had done nothing wrong.

"Coming from a lay person, such ignorance may be understandable," says Iqbal Rahman of Le Bulletin, a publication of the Muslim Community of Quebec, "but when supposedly highly educated people in positions of authority and influence hold such views we can be sure we [Muslims] are headed for a lot of trouble."

Nor have Muslim men escaped from this onslaught of intolerance. On Aug. 5, 1994 Michael Taylor filed a complaint with the Ontario Human Rights Commission against Justice Arthur C. Whealy of the Ontario Court General Division. The complaint alleges that Justice Whealy ordered Taylor and other Muslims observing a trial to leave his courtroom for wearing kufis (a headcovering worn by some Muslim men). Lawyer Peter Rosenthal, acting for Taylor, maintains that "discrimination in the use of court facilities is particularly repugnant to the values expressed in the preamble to the Human Rights Code."

Trial transcripts obtained by the Washington Report indicate that Justice Whealy entered the courtroom on Nov. 15, 1993 and said, "Anyone insisting upon wearing a hat may leave." Robert Kellermann, a lawyer acting for one of the parties on trial, tried to intervene: "If I could speak, Your Honor. It is a religious matter." Justice Whealy replied, "I do not care. I am not quarreling with his religion, he is just not going to be in the courtroom."

Rosenthal is seeking a public apology from Justice Whealy, and a directive from the chief justice of Ontario that no person is to be excluded from a courtroom because he or she is wearing a head covering for religious purposes. In addition, the attorney wants an inquiry to consider whether someone expressing such views "should be allowed to preside at criminal trials in this multicultural province."

Faisal Kutty is a free-lance writer based in Toronto.