How Canada’s sponsorship model helped one Rohingya writer escape genocide and purgatory
BY: JN JONIAD / 23 FEBRUARY, 2022
On September 30, 2021, I landed in Toronto, Canada. For the first time in my life, I felt freedom and experienced the goodness of the world when a group of kind Canadians welcomed me at the airport. They wrapped a Canadian flag around me and gave me a hat with a maple leaf on it and said “welcome home.” I later learned that day happened to be Canada’s first National Day of Truth and Reconciliation. I also happen to be a survivor of genocide, but in Myanmar, and a survivor of the inhumane treatment I faced as a refugee in Indonesia.
In Myanmar, as a member of the Rohingya minority, I was considered an illegal immigrant and was denied my right to citizenship; I could not travel even within my own country. Most of my basic rights were denied. In 2013, when the Myanmar government incited a massacre of the Rohingya, I was doing my second year in physics at Sittwe University in the capital city of Rakhine state, where nearly a thousand Rohingya were killed by both Rakhine vigilantes and the military. I was forced to leave my country and sought refuge in Australia as it was a signatory of the 1951 UN refugee convention promising to protect the displaced.
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