NEWS AND VIEWS: My father deserves a fair trial (01/18/98)

NEWS AND VIEWS

My father deserves a fair trial

On December 16, 1997, the Canadian news media reported that the federal government was moving to deport two suspected Nazi war criminals for not telling immigration authorities about their past when they entered the country. One of them is Wasyl Odynsky of Toronto.

by Olya Odynsky

I did not have a Merry Christmas. I doubt this will be a Happy New Year. I blame Ottawa.

On August 24 I marched joyfully through Toronto's Bloor West Village, celebrating Ukrainian Independence Day. So did Mayor-elect Mel Lastman and thousands of others, my father, Wasyl, among them. A few days later our family's nightmare began.

Two investigators arrived at my parents' door. They wanted to know what my father had done during the war. He's a law-abiding man, a patriot. He has nothing to hide. So he spoke to them - without legal counsel present. I now know that he shouldn't have. His interrogators didn't bring an interpreter. His English is fine for daily life, but it is not good enough for a hostile interview. So I say Canada failed my father that day.

Why? Think about how this country's Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) treats refugee claimants. Compare that to what the Royal Canadian Montreal Police (RCMP) did to my father, a citizen and taxpayer of 50 years. When an individual suspected of being the kind of criminal whom the Canadian government might wish to exclude from our country comes before the IRB, a lawyer and interpreter are present, free of charge, and friends and family members can attend in support. However, in the case of my 73-year-old father, the RCMP arrived unexpectedly, confusing him, scaring my mother. The Mounties will say they were just doing their jobs, on "orders from above." Odd how they don't accept excuses like that from others.

On September 24, 1997, my father got a letter from Canadian Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Lucienne Robillard. She wants to denaturalize and deport him. Is it because he's a war criminal? No. The government of Canada does not have any evidence that would conclusively prove in a criminal court that my father is guilty of any wrongdoing during the second world war. Do you think a person is innocent until proven guilty? Ottawa doesn't.

Again, I object. Every week dozens of people from around the world claim refugee status here. Madame Robillard's appointees let many of them in, often after only the most perfunctory of hearings set up in their favor. The Lord only knows whom they have already let in. But, reportedly, there are real war criminals among these "refugees," from many of the Third World's festering conflicts. I'm sure some good people are getting in, too, a few of whom may really need our country's protection. I am all for Canada being a safe haven. But I wonder why the refugees of today get the benefit of the doubt in their hearings when my dad doesn't?

His story is simple. He was 19 when the Nazis arrested him and forcefully led him and others away from his village. Those who resisted were shot. He is not a murderer, nor was he ever a Nazi. He was, and remains, a victim of Nazi Germany's occupation of Ukraine. Most choose to forget what he knows from experience, namely that Ukraine lost more of its people than any other nation in occupied Europe.

My father lived in a refugee camp until he arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1949. No one questioned him about what he did in the war. The immigration officers, he recalls, were more interested in his health. Since he was a fit, young man, they let him in to work on a farm near Markham, Ontario, where he paid off the cost of his passage. My mother, Maria, came five months later. Without complaint, she also did a year's farm work. That's the kind of refugee immigrants this country got then - people who went where the country needed them, who reimbursed Canada for the costs involved.

Debts paid, my mother and my father moved to Toronto. He took a night job as a truck loader. She worked in a factory and kept our happy home. They had three children. I was their first. We went to high school in Scarborough, Ontario. My father was an active member of the Brotherhood of Ukrainian Catholics. Our family grew, just like yours. My parents became grandparents. They raised us to be proud of our Ukrainian heritage, and we are, but they also taught us to be even prouder of being Canadian.

I was. But now I wonder why Ottawa is trying to strip away the citizenship of a man who proved to be a good father and grandfather, whose boss knew him to be a hard worker, an honest citizen who contributed to Canada for longer then I have been alive? Canada has become my father's country. There is nothing for my parents in Ukraine. Yet the government wants to turn them out of their home, without giving him a fair trial. Does this mean that there are, in reality, two categories of Canadian citizens - those born here and those who come here - and that the latter's citizenship can never really be certain? Not exactly a prescription for nation-building, is it?

If Minister Robillard's bureaucrats have serious evidence to prove that my father is a war criminal, our family wants that documentation disclosed in a Canadian criminal court. My father says he stands ready to be punished if Ottawa can prove he committed an atrocity. He has the courage of an honest man wrongly accused of crimes he did not commit. But I don't think the government will have the fortitude to take up our family's challenge. I predict Ottawa will instead cater to those who orchestrated the hysteria about alleged Nazi war criminals in our midst, advocates of denaturalization and deportation who prefer rhetoric to evidence. I don't. I can't. My father's life is on the line. He is not going anywhere without a fight. And if he is not allowed a fair trial in Canada, then this is one fight that won't end with him. It will continue for generations. Ottawa can count on that.

Olya Odynsky is a resident of Etobicoke, Ontario, who says she has become a second-generation victim of the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

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