The dream of eliminating racial discrimination is alive in the world, but it is impossible to eliminate the dreams and memories in Lucky Powar's head.
There are days he wishes he could kill the images burned into his brain, collected from the darkest pits of human depravity in modern history. He tries to stand on them to see a brighter future up ahead, and he also stands on the dignity of those he remembers overcoming those dazzling infernos of spectacular crime. He is speaking tonight as the featured guest at the "Racism-Stop It!" rally on the steps of the Prince George Courthouse.
Powar, as part of the United Nations security force on missions in Sierra Leone and the former Yugoslavia, saw the worst effects of what humans do to one another. His concern is rooted in how functional both those places used to be until racial discrimination took root in both those places. One was tribal genocide in West Africa, the other was sub-national genocide in Eastern Europe. Hot and black-dominant in one instance, seasonal and white-dominant in the other. The settings could scarcely be more different, but there was one underlying vein of bad blood in all these conflicts.
"They were all ethnic, 100 per cent," he told The Citizen.
Powar is an ethnic roadmap himself. He was born in India but moved as a child with his family first to Lake Cowichan, then Williams Lake, and for the most part in Prince George where he still lives. He began his journey to these UN hotspots by first working for the federal corrections service at prisons in the Lower Mainland.
He was hired in 2001 to help administrate the fledgling war crimes penitentiary in Sierra Leone at the early stages of the intervention into the atrocities there among ethni-political factions.
He was there for 18 months before being transferred to be deputy director of Dubrava Prison in Kosovo.
Both facilities were populated by star criminals; some of the ugliest souls to ever be wrapped up in blood and bone.
"In Sierra Leone, one of the leaders of one tribe there was six-foot-nine, more than 300 pounds, and he had these red eyes, really bloodshot. I don't know what the devil looks like, but... And the worst part was, the way he would smile at you. He was a total psychopath. He used to eat the hearts of his victims, that was his trademark, his little terrorist thing. I wasn't afraid of much but when I dealt with him, it gave me goosebumps."
The coin flipped in Kosovo, where Powar was personally assigned to the escort detail of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, accused of war crimes against different ethnic factions within the disintegrated Yugoslavian federation.
History is clear that horrifying atrocities occurred there, but it is not so clear what Milosevic's own role was. Powar said there was no doubt he was a political egomaniac who lost his jam when the international community intervened.
"He was just a freakin' coward," he remembered. "He had no remorse when he had a force behind him, but once he was facing his accusers he turned into a baby. He defecated in his pants in the vehicle as we transported him."
Dubrava also had the prime minister of Kosovo as an incarcerated guest during Powar's time there, accused of murderous violence against some Serbian enclaves in the area, as an act of revenge against what Milosevic supporters had done.
"We weren't happy when he was freed without a proper trial. Killing is killing, it is always wrong," Powar said, stressing that evil was done on all sides of that bitter conflict.
Yet flowers grow out of concrete. In Sierra Leone, Powar would travel outside the UN protection protocols because he had very dark skin and could move about the traumatized population more easily than white UN officials. He always hired the same youth to be his guide and translator.
"He was from a family that was completely slaughtered," he said. "When the rebels came to his house, he managed to hide but he could see them. He watched as they made his older brother rape his sister, while his parents were forced to watch it all, then they murdered them all and moved on to the next house."
You could never help everyone, he said, it was an overwhelming level of social destruction and permanent mental scarring, to say nothing of the tens of thousands there who had limbs and facial features hacked off by machetes. Yet they had a will to live and thrive, despite the marks of horror. So you picked a few and helped then as much as you could, he said.
And in Kosovo his heart found an even deeper level of empathy. He is now married to a woman he met there. She is back in her home country now caring for an ailing family member, and Powar will join her in a few weeks.
He can't wait to see the changes there now since he left Kosovo in 2006, and his greatest wish is to return to Sierra Leone for the same purpose.
"When I got back to Canada I couldn't help think that we must have all done something wonderful in a past life to deserve living here," he said. "We are very blessed. And we complain about the stupidest things."
Yet even here there is ethnic tension bubbling away. He reminded everyone that Yugoslavia was a model European society, and Sierra Leone was a five-star resort destination in the very recent past. Discrimination, if left unchecked, could rush like an infection through a social system.
He experienced a few incidents of racism against himself or observed among his Sikh friends in the 1970s and '80s in Prince George, but is impressed with how accepted Western culture is by the Sikhs here, and vice versa, albeit still imperfect.
Powar sat on Sunday morning at the Guru Gobind Singh Temple having tea with Daniel Gallant, the organizer of today's rally (4:30 p.m. at the Prince George Courthouse) having tea and traditional food of India. Gallant was once an activist in the B.C. and Alberta skinhead white supremacy movement. Both remembered living in the Lower Mainland at about the same time when a Sikh man was killed in a skinhead attack.
"That was a big part of why I wanted to have the Sikh community involved in this event, and somehow it was meant to be because Lucky was the perfect person to do that," Gallant said.
Powar was working at one of the prisons involved in the sentencing of the attackers and he remembered "we all went out of our way to be professional, at the time, but to make sure they were handled by absolutely as many people of colour as we could."
Since then, he said, some of the attackers turned remorseful for their actions, and one even converted to Sikhism. That, said Powar and Gallant together, took a lot of work and a lot of love from all sides. That is what will diminish discrimination.
