Refuge in Canada

Canada is a great place to seek refuge.  The country has so much to offer to prospective future residents and citizens.  Opportunities for furthering one's education, for achieving aspirations for the future, to live in a free, fair and just society.  Ideally, immigrants should be prepared to fully integrate into the acceptance, as a pluralist society, of the country's values and priorities.  Where equality is guaranteed under the law, and all citizens are expected to respect one another, at the very least.

Trouble is, how can we respect someone who, albeit under duress, has been partially responsible for the murder of countless people?  Sampson Jalloh, originally from Liberia and now seeking refugee status in Canada was 22 years of age when he was conscripted in 1992 into the rebel army of the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, led by the abhorrent Charles Taylor.

As a member of the Mandingo ethnic minority, he was a valuable addition to the rebels, for he had the trust of his tribal members.  And his job was to enter villages for the purpose of luring other Mandingoes out of their homes, so they could be caught, brutalized and killed by the fighters lingering behind Sampson Jalloh.  He claims never to have murdered anyone himself, personally, thus exonerating himself.

But his appeal for sanctuary in Canada, after having failed to persuade Holland to give him sanctuary on a previous try, has been turned down here, as well.  He has been ordered deported.  But Canada, always willing to be fair, offers to those who have been refused by the Immigration and Refugee Board, leave to appeal to the Federal Court of Canada.  And this, through his lawyer, is precisely what Mr. Jalloh has done.

The Immigration and Refugee Board chose not to believe Mr. Jalloh's version of what he claims he is not guilty of.  The government has some problem believing his story.  It has declared him guilty of crimes against humanity, and of being a member of an organization whose purpose is to instill terror and subversion.  And, in the process, slaughtering countless innocents in a bloody sweep of human misery.

Over 200,000 people were killed during the First Liberian Civil War, and a million people displaced, crowding refugee camps.  Mr. Jalloh claimed that some of the rebel raids he was involved with, were as part of a unit named the Small Boys Unit representing a band of child soldiers as young as eight, forcibly recruited through abduction and brutal indoctrination.

He informed immigration officers in Canada that he witnessed people being tortured and killed, but had no hand in any of that himself, other than to transport corpses.  He never, at any time, participated directly, he insists in any of the violence - other than to lure countless of his own tribal people to their certain deaths.  They have chosen not to believe him.

The story line he used in the Netherlands was somewhat different than the one he employs in Canada.  And it did him little good in the Netherlands.  His different story is doing him little good in Canada.  How can one be believed when he alters background stories to exculpate himself from responsibility for vile and bloody acts of slaughter?

Mr. Jalloh lives in Toronto.  He was arrested close by in 2009 for a scheme to convince a businessman to hand over a large sum of money to fund the conversion to legitimate tender of a huge stack of money smuggled out of Africa.  Durham Regional Police arrested him and his partner in crime, and Mr. Jalloh pleaded guilty to fraud over $5,000 and conspiracy to commit fraud.

"Given his lengthy and extensive involvement in the raids, their violent nature, his lack of effort to distance himself from the group, and his failure to take steps to protect the victims of the NPFL ... The Board ... did not believe Mr. Jalloh's assertion that he was continuously held captive and had no chance to escape."