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Muslim cadet says RCMP harassed him
What started as a simple request to wear a pendant containing passages from the Qur'an spiralled into a daily dose of harassment for a Muslim cadet at the RCMP training academy, the Canadian Human Rights Commission heard yesterday. It was the first day of a tribunal examining Ali Tahmourpour's complaint that he was ridiculed for his Muslim beliefs and subjected to unwarranted criticism while at the academy in Regina from July to October 1999. He was terminated 14 weeks into the 22-week program. Tahmourpour, born in Iran, initially filed a complaint with the commission in March 2001. At that time, the government argued he was let go because of poor performance and the commission dismissed his complaint. Soon after, the Federal Court of Canada asked that it be reconsidered. The request was based on the commission's failure to consider RCMP statistics, which show a 7 per cent attrition rate among cadets as a whole, but a rate of almost 16 per cent among visible minorities. The rate, calculated from 1996 to 2001, includes both dismissals and resignations from the force. Federal Court Justice John Evans ruled the figures should have been considered in that case, as they were "sufficiently suggestive of the discriminatory practices alleged." Tahmourpour, 35, began his second hearing in front of the commission yesterday by painting a bleak picture of an RCMP unwilling to accept diversity within its academy. He described his first fitness class, where cadets were ordered to remove all jewellery. Tahmourpour asked a sergeant if he could keep wearing his religious pendant. The sergeant agreed but then mocked him in class for wanting to wear it. "It ostracized me. It singled me out," he said. "It was the first destructive moment in my training." He said he was pulled out of class daily by the academy's staff and criticized for taking too many notes, sitting in a too-formal position and for being too soft-spoken. "I saw no validity to the things I was being criticized for. I saw it as harassment." The other minorities, he said, would "poke fun at their own ethnicity, their own ancestry just to gain acceptance." He also described being ridiculed and yelled at for an hour and told his English was unintelligible, and another incident where an officer mocked his Arabic signature. The tribunal continues today. Posted by: ryuge 2007-08-14 |
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