Remembring the wars of their childhood

Posted on Friday, November 21, 2008
Written by Rodney Barnes

The sun rises hot over the crowded, dusty streets of Ramallah, Palestine, in the summer of 1992.

Ghadeer Siyam is shopping with her mother and older sister when the sound of shots ricochet off the walls of storefronts, and tear gas fills the air. Her mother grabs five-year-old Siyam and her sister and runs into the nearest shop, a glass-toy store, and ducks under a wooden table.

She pulls an onion from her bag, cuts it in half, and gives it to her children to ward off the effects of the tear gas. She covers their ears with her hands, and, crying, begins singing them a lullaby:

My mother brought me a balloon, a red balloon, and when I blow it up it grows, and when I squeeze it it shrinks. The balloon is in the sky, and the sky is blue...

The shots come in violent pulses, and the silence between them is dead quiet. In the store around them are a dozen people, also families, mostly women and children. The men — their husbands, fathers — are the last to come in, having cleared the streets of innocents before ensuring their own safety.

The gunshots stop half an hour after they begin. The shopkeeper brings Siyam's mother a glass of water, and a telephone. Her mother, still shaking, calls a friend to come pick them up. “My mother was about to collapse,” recalls Siyam.

Now 21 years old, Siyam is still motivated by the childhood visit to her homeland. Her encounter with the violence of war helps her appreciate the significance of Remembrance day, giving her a compassion that any Canadian vet would be proud of.

Though the Ryerson student immigrated from Jordan three years ago to study industrial engineering, the traditionally western day of commemoration has grown to be meaningful for her.

Living among a generation of native-born Canadians who have thin relations left to the country's war experiences, Siyam's respect for Remembrance Day has become a white poppy among the red. With the average age of World War Two vets ranging in the late eighties, and only a single veteran still alive from the First World War, many students today can't connect with Canada's war history.

As a result, the future of Remembrance Day in Canada may hinge on its appreciation by a younger generation born outside the country — a generation reared in the war-torn areas of the world.

Black July is a Remembrance Day for the Tamil. Taking place every July 24, it commemorates the largest act of genocide against their people. In Canada and other countries who granted asylum to refugee Tamil, it is a day where they give thanks to those who provided them a safe haven from the massacre. More importantly, it is a day where they recall their history and recount the stories from the event.

Kajananth Thiru, a Sri Lankan-born Tamil, was 15 years old when his father told him about his close brush with death. He had been running goods through the Sri Lankan jungle, with all main roads blockaded by the army of the government, when a helicopter had flown by, dropping bombs on the small group of Tamils. He had dashed into the cover of denser trees, coming out later to find two civilians dead and their tractor destroyed.

“He told me he was a few steps away from death,” said Thiru.

It's been stories like this one that have driven the third-year business management student to learn more about the plight of his people in Sri Lanka, though he says that he doesn't remember much of his childhood in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.

“When I heard that even my dad was close to death you want to do something to save the other people who are being targeted by the Sri Lankan government," he said.

The 20 year old moved to Canada in 1995 with his family. Having little experience of the struggles of his people, the student involved himself in the Tamil community. He participated in events like Black July and joined the Ryerson Tamil Student Association so he could learn more about his history.

Sri Lanka had been under British colonial rule for more than a century when it declared independence in 1948. The Tamils wouldn't see much of this freedom under the new regime of the Sinhala, who were the ethnic majority on the island. In the following years, Tamils would see the use of their language limited, their numbers in Sri Lankan universities dwindle, and their political influence disappear as a result of discriminatory acts passed by a Sinhalese-controlled government bent on oppressing the minority group. The three decades following independence are splashed with the blood of riots, many of them outright pogroms against the Tamil people, culminating in the Black July of 1983.

It began when small group of Tamil Tigers ambushed a military convoy, killing 15. For the next few days, the Sinhalese killed, raped and assaulted hundreds of Tamil people, looting and destroying their property in the name of retribution. The police and military, at first doing nothing about the violence, eventually began taking action against the mobs, quelling the riots a few days after they began. By the end of the month the Tamil death count would reach between one- and three-thousand, with over 18,000 properties destroyed.

Tamils worldwide come together on July 24 to remember the atrocities endured that day 25 years ago, educating the younger Tamil population on their struggles.

“It helps me connect with my parents, my siblings, my aunts, uncles and grandparents - what they have gone through in their lifetime,” said Thiru. “And it helps me connect to our fight for self-determination, our fight for human rights. It's something that we need to remember.”

Though there are some fundamental differences between the Tamil's Black July and Remembrance Day, he said. One is that the July 24 event recounts the stories of innocent civilians, whereas November 11 commemorates fallen soldiers. More pressing, he pointed out, is what happens after those days.

“In Black July we bring out everyone's story, one by one,” he said. “But in Remembrance Day, when I was in elementary school we laid the flowers, said a couple of words, and we forgot about it the next day.”

Muhammad Ali Jabbar was just heading into the first year of his mechanical engineering degree at Ryerson when he joined the Canadian Forces Reserve, with the Lorne Scots stationed in Oakville. The Lahore, Pakistan-born student would spend the next three years recieving basic combat and weapons training, learning how to wage urban, winter, and wilderness warfare using a 9mm or C7 rifle. Through three years of military parades and excercises, however, Jabbar doesn't feel that his time in the Canadian Forces furthered his appreciation for the fallen soldiers of the World Wars.

“In the army you don't really talk about it. That's a different aspect of it,” he said. “The purpose of the army, the training, is so you can listen to commands, so you can obey... You don't think; you do, and then if you have any moral questions you can ask them after.”

Jabbar, in fact, had no concept of Remembrance Day until he was 11, when he moved to Canada. By then, however, he'd had enough experience during his childhood, and hearing about the conflict in Pakistan, to realize that soldiers aren't the only casualties of war.

“For me Remembrance Day became remembering the collateral damage, remembering the people who had been killed – not just the soldiers, but also the civilians,” he said. “When you see images of war, especially when you would hear of the brutality that was going on at Kashmir at the time, in the 90s...I think it made me appreciate what I have and what responsibility I have to try and make the world better and hopefully try to make a change in the world.”

Jabbar had joined the army because of Canada's reputation as global peacekeepers, but found that most of the other soldiers in his unit had more pragmatic reasons.

“I can say 40 per cent of the guys, when I was there, they didn't have anything else to do,” he said. “It wasn't because they had some moral grounds...it was just an opportunity for them to make their lives better, to get paid, as well as to get an education.”

He had his own education in mind when he quit the armed forces in 2003, though disagreement over the morality of Canadian involvement in Afghanistan helped his decision.

“We know the war in Afghanistan right now that thousands of civilian Afghanis have been killed, and they're being killed by our soldiers,” he said. “We are not the peacekeepers any more; we are the occupiers.”

After several years of fighting the elusive Taliban in the mountainous countryside of Afghanistan, and now with a distant 2011 extension on military operations in the country, Jabbar says that the Conservative government, desperate for more personnel, has gone too far in their recruiting tactics. Using the feelings of pride and patriotism provoked by Remembrance Day in order to recruit more people has “taken away the human aspect of Remembrance Day,” he said. “The reason you have a remembrance day is so you stop the war, so you stop killing. It's not so you can recruit more people so they can kill more people.”

It will be the compassion and enthusiasm of this younger generation, born outside Canadian borders, that could see the return of life and meaning in Remembrance Day. These are people — students, most of them — who can appreciate this day in a more profound way. “I think every day should be remembrance day,” said Siyam. “Because if we remembered, we would be better, we would improve.

“I think we are living the dream of an older generation. Unfortunately a lot of our generation do not understand this, that what we are in right now was a dream of people who paid their blood for it.”

Under that wooden table in the toy store in Palestine, Ghadeer Siyam remembers being most worried about the absence of her father, who was at work during the shooting. She used to sleep outside her parents' bedroom door so that she would always be close to him.

“I didn't want to wake him up, and at the same time I was so scared anything would happen, and I would lose him,” she said. “Because I've seen a lot of kids in my class losing their fathers.”

It was her mother's embrace that kept her calm.

“I felt so safe because my mother was holding us so tight that I couldn't feel the time,” she said. “But my mother was crying, that's all I remember, she was crying, crying...

“Her tears made us warm.”