When the first planeload of former
Afghan interpreters disembarked at Toronto’s airport the evening of August 4,
they were greeted by a number of Trudeau cabinet ministers. Conspicuously
absent from the welcome party was War Minister Harjit Sajjan.
Sajjan’s absence was telling for
a government so focused on photo-ops celebrating its alleged benefaction. During
the following weeks, as thousands more have desperately sought refugee flights
to Canada, there are quiet whispers that could point to why Sajjan was, and
remains, far away from the cameras with each new arrival. Those whispers could
be crystallized in two words. “Everybody knew.”
What does everyone know? Afghan
refugees in Canada are not likely to go on record at this time, but a number
have shared with me what is common knowledge both in their diasporic communities
and back home. In essence, among the individuals Canada is bringing here
– those who worked so closely with Canadian Forces during the occupation
of that country – there will be interpreters, fixers, drivers, liaisons, and
others who were “in the room” or knew what was going on there when Canadians
were knowingly transferring farmers, shopkeepers, teachers, and countless other
Afghan civilians into the hands of torturers.
Of course, Canada does have a
responsibility to evacuate as many of its former Afghan contractors and their
families as possible. These are individuals who were placed in an impossible
situation: to feed their families, they took on relatively well-paying,
high-risk gigs facilitating the work of
a brutal NATO occupation force which killed, tortured, and injured hundreds of
thousands of people. While many Canadian veterans have led a valiant struggle for well over a decade to help get these
individuals and their families out, that campaign does not appear to have received
one iota of support from the generals, other military brass and politicians who
have a vested interest in keeping out potential witnesses to Canadian war crimes
in Afghanistan.
It has been heartbreaking watching
the crush at the Kabul airport. But few seem to recall that this last-minute
dash – as the Taliban attempt to take control of Afghanistan – could have been
prevented if there had been a serious commitment to the lives of those in
Afghanistan who enabled the Canadian military occupation.
Canada Never Cared
In 2009, then Immigration Minister Jason Kennney announced with much fanfare a program to
accept interpreters on a fast-track, yet two years later, the Canadian
Press reported that over two thirds of Afghans
who worked with the Canadan military in Kandahar had been turned away. “Working as an interpreter for
NATO forces in southern Afghanistan was akin to having a Taliban bull’s-eye on
your back,” the report noted. “Stories of night letters, threatening phone
calls, abductions and even hangings were part of the job. As interpreters also
travelled with soldiers and diplomats, at least six were among those killed
during the IED strikes that claimed 161 Canadian lives.”
Then
as now, the rules of the immigration program were hopelessly labyrinthine. For
example, one could only qualify to come here if they served a consecutive 12
months, but if that period started before the arbitrary marker of 2007, they
were deemed ineligible, even though they would have been among the first to
step up and assist Canadian soldiers.
The racist contempt the federal
government has shown to its former Afghan contractors (who notably were forced
to use segregated
washrooms in a scene out of 1940s Alabama)
is similar to the disrespect Ottawa regularly shows the veterans who have been
lobbying so long on their behalf. These soldiers know first-hand the dangers
faced by those left behind. It’s not a new risk at all, but rather one that has
always existed, because the Taliban and other forces opposed to the occupation
never went away. To call out Ottawa’s failure to act much sooner as criminal
negligence is an understatement.
Canadians with tender ears don’t want to hear this at a
time when we want applause as the rescuers of those who were complicit in our
dirty work. But it is part of a lengthy record that is limited in disclosure by
those with the most to lose.
When the issue of Canadian
transfer of detainees to torture was major headline news 15 years ago, former
translator Ahmadshah Malgarai, a cultural and language advisor with secret
clearance and commendations to his name, bravely told the Special Committee on the Canadian
Mission in Afghanistan in April, 2010: “There was no one in the Canadian military
with a uniform who was involved in any way, at any level, with the detainee
transfers who did not know what was going
on and what the NDS [Afghanistan’s tortured-tainted National Directorate of
Security] does to their detainees.”
By extension, that would have to include the
other translators, fixers, and liaisons. Critically, it would also include
Minister Sajjan, his predecessors, and the military decision makers in Ottawa. In
fact, it was this group of military brass and political operatives who intended
that certain Afghans be tortured in order to gather “intelligence,” as
University of Ottawa professor and lawyer Amir Attaran (who played a front-line
role in exposing such crimes in the 2000s) pointed out in 2010. In the battle
to secure unredacted documents related to the transfer of detainees to torture,
Attaran told CBC, “If these
documents were released [in full], what they will show is that Canada partnered
deliberately with the torturers in Afghanistan for the interrogation of
detainees. There would be a question of rendition and a question of war crimes
on the part of certain Canadian officials. That's what's in these documents,
and that's why the government is covering up as hard as it can."
Canada In Factual Cleansing Mode
As Canada closes its embassy in Kabul, there
is no doubt a great deal of paper shredding going on. At home, the government is in full factual
cleansing mode, using the dramatic evacuations as a starting point for
completely rewriting the deadly and illegal Canadian occupation as a feel-good,
well-intentioned, noble narrative about feminism and peaceful development that
attempts to paper over the geopolitical violence that undergirded the original
decision to invade.
Indeed, the mission
itself was part of a larger, brutal purpose, in which the lives of the Afghan
people were mere "collateral damage" in big power games, and the
lives of the on-the-ground soldiers were equally expendable in
the eyes of the generals and political leaders. It is those on-the-ground
soldiers, and not the generals, who have had the dignity and honour to be paying out of pocket in
an effort to speed the evacuations of their former contractors. Notably, such
veterans, who have spent years advocating for the contractors’ transfer out of
Afghanistan, have complained of being locked out of the process, despite
having gathered folders filled with critical information needed to help
identify and protect those most at risk.
Meanwhile as each
planeload lands in Canada, Sajjan, among others, is no doubt up nights
wondering who among them might be called as a witness in a war crimes inquiry. At
the end of 2017, law professor and former MP Craig Scott submitted a war crimes
brief to
the International Criminal Court (ICC), in which there is ample documentation
that Canadian political and military officials “may have aided, abetted or
otherwise assisted the commission of war crimes or crimes against humanity.”
Scott argued that an
ICC inquiry would open up space for whistleblowers in the Canadian government,
noting, “I am quite confident there are multiple persons across various
departments in the Canadian federal civil service who know much but who are
wary of coming forward until there is a credible investigative process that
stands a chance of not being stymied in the way of every other process in
Canada regarding detainees to date – and thus would be more likely to come
forward to investigators within an ICC process they perceive as serious.”
Scott’s meticulous
brief documents “off the books” detainee transfers as well as a perfidious
pattern of deceit at the highest levels of the Canadian military. Notably,
Scott, among the most well-versed on this subject, points out that “a lack of concern for the well-being of
transferees need not have been – and likely usually was not – shared by the
ground-level soldiers and military police who carried out the actual handovers.
There is good reason to believe that many of those under orders from superiors
to transfer did worry for the fate of transferees given rumours they had heard
about treatment of prisoners in custody … even as they did not generally have
access to the firm evidence that would prove such rumours (as would key command-level
officials) and even as they may well have assumed that Canada had set up
effective monitoring so that at least Canadian transferees were less likely to
be abused.”
Scott confirms the comments of Amir Attaran from 2010, pointing
out that “there are reasonable grounds to suspect that certain Canadian
officials ran a system of sending people to the real risk of torture despite
knowing (or having the legally requisite basis to know) of the real risk of
torture.”
Someone was in the Room
In 2007, the Globe and Mail
famously reported on
the fate of many detainees, such as a
33-year-old farmer whose teeth were knocked out by Afghan interrogators. In a
legal brief prepared by Amnesty International and the BC Civil Liberties
Association, they noted that this farmer “claimed that Canadians visited him
between beatings, heard his screams, and urged him to provide his Afghan
captors with intelligence.” Given that a rural Afghan farmer was unlikely to be
fluent in English or French, a Canadian-contracted interpreter must have been
on-site to translate for the now bloodied detainee. The translator(s) –
wherever they might be – could now be called as witnesses at a war crimes
inquiry.
Meanwhile, in a move that may
have had many quaking in their boots, in March 2020, the ICC unanimously
authorized “the Prosecutor to commence an investigation
into alleged crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court in relation to the
situation in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.” While there has yet to be
further news on this front, the fact that the door remains open provides hope
for some measure of the accountability so many Canadian officials hope to
avoid.
Among those with the most to lose here would be Sajjan,
whose 2015
appointment as war minister was at the time widely celebrated. Foreign Policy gushed, “Canada’s New Defense Minister Made His Own Gas Mask to
Work With His Beard,” while the National
Observer enthused: “You don't know how badass Trudeau’s
Defence Minister really is.”
Sajjan was hailed as “some
kind of next-level Spy vs Spy war hero” who had done three tours in Afghanistan
and was praised by his superiors as “the best single Canadian intelligence
asset in [the Afghan war] theater.”
Despite all the celebratory news
pieces, Sajjan’s appointment by Trudeau may have unintentionally opened a
Pandora’s box that former PM Stephen Harper thought was sealed shut when he
prorogued Parliament in 2009 to avoid stinging questions about Canadian
complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees. Indeed, Sajjan’s overseas tours
as a key Canadian asset and liaison with torture-tainted Afghan authorities
dovetailed with an era when significant human rights concerns had been quietly
raised by Canada’s foreign affairs representatives. This included a 2005
Canadian report that noted
Afghanistan’s “military, intelligence and police forces have been involved in
arbitrary arrests, kidnapping, extortion, torture and extrajudicial killing of
criminal suspects.”
In 2006, as Harper’s Conservatives took over
direction of a war begun by the Liberals, Graeme Smith’s remarkable Globe and Mail investigative reporting –
along with the courageous statements of Canadian whistleblower Richard Colvin,
a diplomat in Afghanistan – brought to light a side of the Afghanistan
occupation that most Canadians could not square with their traditional
perceptions of the military. Terms like “war crimes” were openly used to
describe Canadian transfers of detainees to the torture-stained Afghan National
Directorate of Security (NDS), and the Harper government faced potential
contempt of Parliament proceedings over its refusal to release thousands of
documents related to the scandal.
Torture Was Standard Operating Procedure
Colvin, who had served 17 months on
the ground in Afghanistan, had testified in 2008 that Afghans
transferred from Canadian Forces to the NDS commonly faced “beating, whipping with power cables, and the use of electricity. Also
common was sleep deprivation, use of temperature extremes, use of knives and
open flames, and sexual abuse—that is, rape. Torture might be limited to the
first days or it could go on for months. According to our information, the
likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For
interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure.”
Colvin pointed out that
many detainees had nothing to do with the Taliban: “many were
just local people: farmers, truck drivers, tailors, peasants, random human
beings in the wrong place at the wrong time, young men in their fields and
villages who were completely innocent but were nevertheless rounded up. In
other words, we detained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent
people.”
While ongoing inquiries into the
detainee scandal and the role of key Canadian decision makers were effectively
shut down with the 2011 election of a Harper majority, the issue was raised
again in the fall of 2015 a week before the Trudeau team officially took charge
in Ottawa. But amidst what seemed the national lifting of a grim mood following
a nasty election (in which Harper’s team had questioned the loyalty of
niqab-wearing Muslims and proposed a Barbaric Cultural Practices Hotline),
little attention was paid to the Military Police Complaints Commission
announcement that it would investigate a new case in which Canadian soldiers
allegedly abused and “terrorized” Afghan detainees at their Kandahar base. That
same week, researcher Omar Sabry and the Rideau Institute think tank released a
new report calling for a “transparent
and impartial judicial Commission of Inquiry into the actions of Canadian
officials, including Ministers of the Crown, relating to Afghan detainees.”
But who would decide whether to
proceed with such an inquiry? It seemed that Sajjan, Canada’s hip new War Minister,
might have to recuse himself from any role in considering the issue, given he
could be compelled to answer some very difficult questions. As a
high-level intelligence officer who appears to have taken an active role in
combat operations, it seemed implausible that Sajjan was not familiar with the
torture rampant throughout the Afghan detention system. Indeed, in 2006, Sajjan became the
Canadian “intelligence liaison” to Kandahar governor Asadullah Khalid.
According to Colvin’s Parliamentary testimony, Khalid “was known to us very early on, in May and June 2006, as an unusually bad
actor on human rights issues. He was known to have had a dungeon in Ghazni, his
previous province, where he used to detain people for money, and some of them
disappeared. He was known to be running a narcotics operation. He had a
criminal gang. He had people killed who got in his way. And then in Kandahar we
found out that he had indeed set up a similar dungeon under his guest house. He
acknowledged this. When asked, he had sort of justifications for it, but he was
known to personally torture people in that dungeon.” (Khalid went on to become
Afghanistan’s national intelligence chief).
Torturing
a 90-Year-Old Man
Sajjan is also credited with the intelligence gathered for
operations that led to the “kill or capture” of some 1,500 alleged Taliban
members, a military claim that must be measured against the commonplace
reference to any detainees as potential Taliban, as opposed to the broader
categories of detainees translator Malgarai referenced in his testimony: “They went from 10 years old to 90 years
old. With all due respect, I would ask retired General Hillier to tell me and
explain to me how a 90-year-old man.... He was a 90-year-old man. He couldn't
even walk without help. His hands were tied. His foot was shackled. He was
blindfolded. Sometimes, when he couldn't walk fast enough, they pushed him. He
fell many times, and he had injuries on his body. Could he please explain to me
how this 90-year-old man, who couldn't even walk, who needed help when you
tried to pick him up, could be a fighter?”
As Ottawa celebrated the new
Trudeau government, serious questions were raised but unanswered. Would Sajjan
discuss whether he undertook precautionary
measures to ensure that he was not passing on to his superiors information
gleaned from torture (especially given his liaison role with Governor Khalid
and the widespread and well-known use of torture by the NDS in Afghanistan by
the time of Major Sajjan's first tour of duty in 2006)? Alternatively, was such
information caveated to the effect that its source may have been the fruits of
torture?
Equally compelling, in the small,
circular world of intelligence operations, was information gleaned from NDS
torture of detainees used in the Canadian round-up of individuals who, upon
detention, were transferred to the hands of NDS torturers? Ultimately, given
his likely awareness of torture in Afghanistan, did Sajjan refuse to take part
in any operational activity that may have led to the transfer of detainees to
torture?
When the Harper government closed
the case in 2011, Liberal MP Stéphane Dion
told the CBC “the likelihood is very high” that
Afghan detainees were abused while in the custody, adding, “I don't think
Canadians will accept that it's over.”
But Dion
was silent when, in June 2016, Sajjan rejected public calls for an inquiry
which, by this time, had received the support of everyone from former Conservative
Prime Minister Joe Clark and leading Canadian law faculty to former NDP leader
Ed Broadbent and Amnesty International.
Ever since
the 2015 election, Sajjan has seemed to run away from any association with
Afghanistan. In 2017, he was accused of falsely downplaying his role
in the war, as Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson sought to determine why he would
not consent to an inquiry. In a response to Simon, Sajjan beggared belief by
claiming, according to Dawson’s notes, that “[a]t
no time was he involved in the transfer of Afghan detainees, nor did he have
any knowledge relating to the matter.” He may have been the only one in
Afghanistan not to know.
It was a remarkable walk back from the public
record, in which his commanding office, Brigadier General David Fraser,
described him as someone who “singlehandedly changed the face of intelligence
gathering and analysis in Afghanistan.”
Ultimately, Dawson meekly concluded, based
only on interviewing Sajjan and speaking with no one else, that there were no
grounds for an investigation. On such a weak foundation Sajjan was then able to
reject an inquiry.
Sajjan’s dismissive dispatch of the issue shocked many in the
legal community who held out hope that campaign commitments to transparency and
accountability would survive beyond election day. Four years and two elections
later, Sajjan is on the campaign trail once again, trying to burnish his image
as the wise saviour of a people in whose torture he may well be complicit. As
we welcome Afghan refugees and work to save as many as possible from the likely
retaliation they face if left in Afghanistan, the failure of Ottawa to take
care of its former contractors for well over a decade may well warrant an
inquiry in itself.
Meanwhile, the manner in which Canadian
complicity in Afghan torture has corroded basic democratic principles and put
thousands of lives at risk continues to reverberate here and around the globe.
As those most responsible for these crimes continue to run away from them, they
rely on exercising the levers of governmental secrecy to protect their paycheques,
pensions, book deals, and the other perks that come with the sick celebration
of militarism that was a mainstay of the Afghan occupation. by Matthew Behrens. An edited version of this story appears in rabble.ca
