Senator Mobina Jaffer talks about the realities of refugee camps

B.C. Senator Mobina Jaffer has just returned from refugee camps in Turkey, where she witnessed first hand the horrifying results of the war in Syria.

Jaffer herself was once a refugee from Uganda and is now calling on the rest of the world to not only welcome refugees, but to help solve the crisis in Syria so people there can live in their own homes, with peace and security.

Jaffer sat down with On The Coast host Stephen Quinn to talk about her experiences.

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How are you feeling after having time to digest what you've seen on your travels?

For the last five years I have been going. But this has been, really, the worst. This year I've come back thinking people have lost hope. Until now there was always hope that people could go home, but with the increased bombing, it's become worse.

When the Liberal Party was in power, I was the envoy for women around the world on issues of conflict. I truly believe it is the women who are going to be bringing peace to the region. It's women who are going to have to find a way. We believe that peace is going to have to come with us women making our communities accountable, and it's us women who are going to have to interpret the Qur'an.

Tell me about some of the things you saw in those camps.

Turkey is actually providing Cadillac camps. I've never seen such well-run camps. And I've travelled to many refugee camps. Turkey spends $30 million a month on these camps, and they've got over 2 million people in those camps. But it's also breaking. It was supposed to be a short-term crisis, but it's become a long-term crisis. It's now just bursting with problems.

The last day before I left, I met with many young orphan children. On the day I left the camp, I got a pottery hand from a child. It's red, which represents blood. A little 10-year-old girl gave me this. She said, 'You're a senator from Canada. Go tell Canadians there is blood on our hands. We are dying. We are not asking to come to your country. What we are asking is help stop the bombing.'

How can Canadians play a role in getting Syria back to normal so people can return and rebuild their lives?

That is something that has to happen that we're very good at: peacekeeping. We are absolute experts at peacekeeping.

But there's no peace to keep there. It's mayhem.

One of the amazing things this time, the women that I worked with, are reaching out. They are using the Qur'an, and they are reaching out to these people. For me, ISIS is just terrible, but they're saying 'We need to find a way to bring peace to our region.' 

It doesn't matter how much you fight or bomb a place, in the end, the communities have to come together. I've been in many conflicts: Sri Lanka, Sudan, no matter how much they have fought, in the end, people have come to the peace table, and I don't give up on that. We might not get all the parties at once, but we have to start, and Canada's good at that.

The attacks in Paris and Beirut happened while you were in Turkey. What were the people you were with there feel about what they saw happening?

[The Beirut attack] is a very serious attack. It's in Hezbollah territory, and Beirut is still reeling. And then the attacks in Paris happened that we were all devastated by. The women, they looked me in the face and said, 'You in the west don't understand our realities.' 144 people are killed every day. That's the reality of the Syrians.

You had a hand in bringing some of the women you were working with together to talk about how to keep young men and boys from turning to ISIS.

Three or four years ago, I worked in Peshawar with women colleagues who worked with mothers of terrorists. What we do is get work for mothers of terrorists so we empower them with some economic power, so that when they see their sons have too much money or guns, they phone the organization we have set up with Norway and Germany, they sort of descend on the household and take this child away and start to debrief them.

We believe we have to go to the source. When you see that someone is turning with too much money or guns, something's not right. There has to be help right away to stop the terrorism.

This interview has been condensed and edited. To hear the full interview, click on the audio labelled: B.C. senator returns from tour of refugee camps in Turkey