Air India hearings conclude with racism claims

Ottawa: The federal government is challenging a study, commissioned by families of the Air India bombing victims that suggests systemic racism may have played a role in the way officials dealt with the tragedy.
The report, written by sociologist Sherene Razack, was tabled Thursday just as 15 months of hearings before a public inquiry were about to conclude.
Razack pointed no fingers at individual police officers, intelligence operatives or federal bureaucrats and didn't accuse anyone of intentional and overt racism.
But she maintained there is a "powerful impression'' that racial stereotyping -- even if it was unconscious -- was a factor in both the pre-bombing assessment of terrorist threats and the post-bombing investigation of the attack that took 329 lives.
Barney Brucker, the chief lawyer for the government at the inquiry, raised questions about the reliability of the study as soon as it was presented.
"We have been operating under very relaxed rules of evidence (but) I do have some concerns with respect to this report,'' he told commissioner John Major.
"It is argumentative in the extreme. There's a complete lack of evidence for some of these assertions.''
Many of the victims' families have contended for years that the former Conservative government of Brian Mulroney viewed the 1985 downing of Air India Flight 182 as a feud among South Asians that didn't affect the rest of Canadian society.
Major, a former Supreme Court judge, has alluded to that perception several times during his hearings and raised the point again in an interim report issued this week.
"The question that lingers among the families and other Canadians,'' he wrote, "is if Air India Flight 182 had been an Air Canada flight with all fair-skinned Canadians, would the government response have been different?
"There is no way to answer that. As a country we would hope not.''
Raj Anand, the lawyer who tabled the study Thursday on behalf of the victims' families, said outside the hearing room it's a question that deserves further exploration.
Part of Major's mandate, he noted, is to investigate any deficiencies among Canadian officials in their response to the bombing.
That should include a look at whether "Canadian institutions were operating under blinders as a result of systemic discrimination,'' said Anand, a former head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.
13/12/07 The Canadian Press/CTV.ca, Canada

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Categories: Air India - International Dec 2007, Foreign Dec 2007, NACIL Dec 2007, Safety Dec 2007