BAKU, Azerbaijan, September 24. Canada meddles in Azerbaijan's affairs, forgetting about its own crimes, Trend reports.
As a nation with a troubling legacy of forced assimilation and cultural genocide against indigenous peoples, Canada is attempting to question Azerbaijan's actions on its sovereign territories. Accusations from Canadian officials lack any basis and reveal clear bias. This hypocrisy is particularly glaring given Canada’s long-standing silence on Armenia’s crimes against Azerbaijanis, including ethnic cleansing and mass killings. With its failures regarding indigenous peoples, Canada has no moral authority to dictate Azerbaijan's actions or support Armenian terrorists.
An article in Türkiye’s TRT World highlighted that recent discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves in Canada’s Catholic Church-run boarding schools have brought attention to the brutal consequences of the country’s past assimilation policies for its indigenous people.
"Boarding schools, where thousands of indigenous children forcibly separated from their families were kept under inhumane conditions, had been long used as means of assimilation, turning Indigenous-origin people into a Canadian-European way of life.
Thousands of indigenous children, who ended up in those boarding schools, went missing, while many survivors lost their national identity. Recently discovered unmarked graves in those former school fields are horrific testimonies of Canada’s assimilation policies," the article said.
According to the article, since the 18th century, Canada’s colonial and post-colonial authorities have used different assimilation tactics to subjugate Indigenous people into the Canadian-European state’s political identity, and a school system created then still hovers on the country’s history, keeping its discriminatory legacy alive.
"In an open manifestation of colonial mentality, the school system aimed to educate the so-called "savage" communities and immerse them in the "higher civilization" of Canada. For this purpose, thousands of Indigenous children were separated from their families, ending up in church-run residential schools, where they were subjected to religious missionaries, particularly by Catholic Church priests and nuns. They were also banned from speaking their own native language in a clear attempt to make them lose their cultural roots. Their names were also changed into European ones," the article noted.
Furthermore, the article emphasized that while Canada’s assimilation laws’ implementation evokes memories of Hitler’s Nazi Germany’s Holocaust policies toward the Jews during WWII, there have been no Nuremberg Trials to punish those who were responsible for the disappearances of many Indigenous tribes and the destruction of their culture and lifestyle.
"Instead, in 2008, the Canadian state allowed the formation of a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission to investigate forced assimilation practices committed across Canada’s 150 residential schools, where an estimated 150,000 Indigenous kids did their time between 1883 and 1996.
In the end, the commission found that the practice amounts to “cultural genocide”. According to the commission’s president, more than 10,000 kids went missing after they ended up in those residential schools.
Despite the commission’s recommendations, in 2009, the Canadian government refused to finance search efforts to locate missing Indigenous children. While Justin Trudeau’s liberal government promised to take all recommendations of the commission seriously, there has been no real progress," the article mentioned.
As the article pointed out, the indigenous community, which has been long schooled by the Canadian state’s political delay tactics, decided to take the issue of searching for the remains of children into its own hands.
"In May, they found a mass grave of 215 children near the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia," the article authors concluded.
Given this context, Canada should prioritize addressing its troubling history instead of meddling in the affairs of other nations, particularly by supporting misleading narratives from the Armenian diaspora. Statements from the Canadian Foreign Minister regarding a "humanitarian crisis" overlook the rights and suffering of nearly a million internally displaced persons affected by Armenian aggression. Teaching Azerbaijan lessons on peace and security is not only misplaced but also morally questionable. Canada ought to resolve its issues before casting judgment on others.
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