ENDORSED BY: Global Balkans Network; Freedom Fight / Pokret za Slobodu; No One is Illegal - Montreal; No One is Illegal - Toronto; No One is Illegal - Vancouver; Solidarity Across Borders (SAB)

Please take a moment to sign the following petition:  http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/xxx and join the Facebook group to let the H. family stay in Canada.

Please also consider sending an email to Jason Kenney, Minister of Immigration asking that the family be granted status on humanitarian and compassionate grounds. 

The petition was started by six year old AH's kindergarden classmates to prevent the deportation of the H. family back to Kosovo. The family's other child, three year old Canadian-born daughter J. is in need of expert medical care to treat a sensitive heart condition. In the meantime, the father has been detained by Canadian immigration authorities since March 11th on the pretext that he constitutes a 'flight risk' if a deportation ruling is ordered. This leaves IH on her own to care for both her children with the looming threat of deportation.

S was an activist with Ibrahim Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK), which led one of the Balkans' longest, mass-based and non-violent civil resistance campaigns for greater autonomy, self-determination and fundamental human-rights for Albanians living in Kosovo. The family fled in 2004, when their home was shot up. S. and other LDK activists have been prosecuted by the US armed and trained Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) since NATO forces occupied Kosovo in June 1999.

It is not safe for the H. family to return to Kosovo under the present circumstances.

As activists working to develop links and support concrete struggles in the former Yugoslav region, we at Global Balkans are writing to you as someone who has shown themselves to be aware of and concerned with the devastating impacts of the postwar, neoliberal transition in the region. We are sending you an appeal to consider supporting (in whatever capacity you can) our fundraising for an urgent action fund that we are currently establishing.

Global Balkans is an emerging activist research, media and organizing network that works both locally and in solidarity with Balkan social movements to investigate, publicize and impact political, social and economic struggles in the former Yugoslav and wider Balkan region. We are working to build a transnational, anti-nationalist, anti-capitalist, and anti-authoritarian network operating through local, geographically determined collectives with a pan-Balkan and internationalist outlook (currently based in New York, Toronto, Montreal, and Milan). The urgent action fund we are in the process of establishing is one of several projects we are working on towards those ends.

Some of you may have followed the struggle of the workers of Jugoremedija in Zrenjanin, Serbia, who after a 9 month factory occupation and a 2 and a half year strike are set to become the first factory amongst the "transition" countries in Eastern Europe undergoing neoliberal privatization to be recovered and regain majority control by its workers. If you would like to learn more about their courageous fight to overturn the illegitimate privatization of their factory, you can read more about it here: http://www.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2006-07/16grubacic.cfm and here: http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11728 .