Monday, November 29, 2021

The Syrian Refugees That Time – and Canada – Forgot

 

This Syrian boy is afraid to turn 18, because that’s when the murderous Assad regime will come to claim him for its blood-stained military. His refusal to be forcibly conscripted into an atrocities-tainted army will mark him for jail, torture or death. With most of his family in Canada –including a father who is awaiting adjudication of his own refugee claim – he needs an urgent Temporary Resident Permit to escape a regime condemned by Canada for its “brutal and shocking attacks on its own people.” 


By Matthew Behrens

            The lethal crisis of closed borders and xenophobic immigration policies made an increasingly rare media appearance last week with the drowning deaths of 27 desperate refugees attempting to cross the English Channel. Since 2014, at least 166 asylum seekers have lost their lives making that perilous journey; almost 23,000 have been killed or reported missing crossing the Mediterranean during the same time period.

            The inhumane lengths to which many nations will go to prevent migration was documented this week in The New Yorker, which reported that the European Union “has created a shadow immigration system that captures [migrants] before they reach its shores, and sends them to brutal Libyan detention centers run by militias…. It has equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a quasi-military organization linked to militias in the country, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian rescue operations and capturing migrants. The migrants are then detained indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by the militias. In September of this year, around six thousand migrants were being held.. International aid agencies have documented an array of abuses: detainees tortured with electric shocks, children raped by guards, families extorted for ransom, men and women sold into forced labor.”

            Meanwhile, the world’s single largest refugee population has gone from being a headline story to yesterday’s news, a magical transformation that has disappeared almost 14 million forcibly displaced Syrians. The United Nations reports that this population is almost evenly divided between those who sought asylum abroad and the millions of internally displaced people who continue to face mass hunger, homelessness, and continued political repression.

            Conditions for the millions who were able to get out of Syria – the majority of them in Turkey – remain poor. In Lebanon, 90% of Syrian refugees live in extreme poverty, and with no official refugee camps, most are scattered throughout the country, crammed into small, over-crowded lodgings that leave them vulnerable to Covid.

The situation inside Syria remains dire. Human Rights Watch reports a widespread “inability to procure food, essential drugs, and other basic necessities. As a result, more than 9.3 million Syrians have become food insecure and over 80 percent of Syrians live below the poverty line.” The group added that on top of these deteriorating conditions, “human rights abuses in government-held territory continued unabated. Authorities brutally suppressed every sign of re-emerging dissent, including through arbitrary arrests and torture.”

 

Mass Disappearances

According to the Syrian Network for Human Rights (SNHR), at least 100,000 Syrians remain forcibly disappeared. The network also estimates that nearly 15,000 have died due to torture since March 2011, the majority at the hands of Syrian government forces.

            It’s a human rights catastrophe that has been mislabeled a “refugee crisis,” as if those escaping persecution and desperate conditions are the root problem. In fact, the crisis results from interconnected decisions of wealthy nations like Canada. On the one hand, governmental and corporate policies give rise to a “Canada Brand” of overseas violence, repression, and displacement. On the other, Canadian policies of interdiction abroad (stationing officers in scores of countries to prevent refugees from escaping and getting here) and deadly agreements like Safe Third Country (which allows for forced return of asylum seekers from the Canadian border to the US on the outrageous claim that it is a safe country for refugees) make it impossible for far too many to find safety.

            It is the anti-refugee sentiment within Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) that leads directly to findings by CBC that Canada is nowhere near hitting its refugee intake goals for 2021. One cannot blame covid here; it is a result of systems that have been created and sustained for decades in which Canada favours business class immigrants over torture survivors and long-separated loved ones.  Indeed, IRCC’s own online processing times calculator reveals an average 6-month waiting period for economic immigration applicants, whereas a privately sponsored refugee desperate to get out of Uganda faces an average delay of 34 months.

            While refugees were briefly mentioned during the 2021 pandemic election, it was largely in response to the capture of Kabul by the Taliban and Canada’s long-term, decade-long failure to provide safety for interpreters, fixers, drivers, and others who assisted the Canadian military during its occupation of Afghanistan. It was a far-cry from 2015, when the “sunny ways” Liberals took advantage of a mean-spirited Harper regime and a photo that went around the globe.

 

6 Years After Operation Syrian Refugees

            Indeed, it’s been six years since the world was transfixed by the heart-rending image of lifeless, 3-year-old Syrian refugee Alan Kurdi washed up on a beach. In many ways, it became a touchstone issue for the 2015 federal election, with the Trudeau Liberals promising to welcome tens of thousands of Syrian refugees. Operation Syrian Refugees helped resettle 25,000 asylum seekers in the space of 100 days, and while the bulk of this work was undertaken by hard-working community members and civil society organizations, it did represent a perfect example of how humanitarian action can be enacted when the political will is there to see it through.

            Last December, Justin Trudeau looked back on that initiative by recalling how “we opened our arms and our hearts to people and families fleeing conflict, insecurity, and persecution.” Trudeau called on Canada and its international partners to “find ways to continue to protect refugees fleeing war or violence.”

            While Trudeau’s sentiment is a welcome one, it needs to find life in creative solutions to overcoming the barriers faced by those fleeing such war and violence.

One such person who desperately needs to join his family in Canada is 17-year old Yazan Al-Ali. This Syrian boy is afraid to turn 18, because that’s when the murderous Assad regime will come to claim him for its blood-stained military. His refusal to be forcibly conscripted into an atrocities-tainted army will mark him for jail, torture or death. With most of his family in Canada –including a father who is awaiting adjudication of his own refugee claim – he needs an urgent Temporary Resident Permit to escape a regime condemned by Canada for its “brutal and shocking attacks on its own people.” 

Yazan is all alone right now, hiding in Syria, as his step-mother passed away in October, 2021. His older brothers all escaped and sought asylum because they too refused to be part of the brutal Assad military. Syrian military intelligence are searching for Yazan’s father, both because he helped his other sons escape the military and because he has claimed refugee status in Canada, an act viewed by the Syrian regime as treasonous.

As a result, Yazan’s family name is red-flagged by the regime, and there is great risk of 17-year-old Yazan being targeted as a means of punishing those who have left. As a young man on his own, Yazan is also at much greater risk of sexual violence by Syrian government forces. (In March 2018, the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic (the Syria COI) published a report with detailed evidence on sexual violence against men and boys in Syria.)

 

Lives Like Death

Yazan’s step-siblings and extended family live a very successful life in Canada. They have the resources to welcome, support and resettle Yazan when he receives the required permission to enter Canada. But Minister for Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) Minister Sean Fraser must act quickly, as Yazan turns 18 in less than six weeks.

Despite the recent window-dressing elections of Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad, conditions have not improved whatsoever for the majority of the population. In October 2021 Human Rights Watch published a stomach-turning report, Our Lives are Like Death, which detailed the horrific mistreatment of refugees who voluntarily returned to Syria from Lebanon and Jordan.  The report notes that conditions in host countries have become so severe that growing numbers are willing to try a return to Syria, despite their fears of what awaits them. Human Rights Watch found “that returnees face many of the same violations that caused their flight from Syria. These include persecution and abuses, such as arbitrary arrests, unlawful detention, torture, extra-judicial killings, kidnappings, and widespread bribery and extortion, at the hands of the Syrian security agencies and government-affiliated militias.”

On December 10 (which is also International Human Rights Day), Trudeau will no doubt issue a self-congratulatory message marking the 6th anniversary of Operation Syrian Refugees. His government can actually provide some meaning to those fine words by committing to opening the door to far more refugees from Syria and other countries as well. A good start on the path would be granting Yazan Al-Ali a temporary resident permit to allow him to come to Canada for his own protection. 

 

(The story appears on rabble.ca the week of November 29, 2021)

 

Monday, October 25, 2021

How Canadian Taxpayers Helped Murder an Afghan Family


 Long-forgotten amid the chaotic airlifts out of the Kabul airport in late August of this year is an incident in which Canadian taxpayers contributed to the murder of 10 members of an Afghan family, seven of them children.

 Zemari Ahmadi, who worked for the US Aid organization Nutrition and Education International and had applied for refugee resettlement in the US, was the target of the lethal August 29 MQ-9 Reaper “hunter-killer” drone attack. The surveillance and targeting drone cameras that had been used to follow his every move that deadly day are made by L-3 Wescam, a Canadian-subsidized war manufacturer about to expand from its long-time Burlington, Ontario facility to a 330,000 square foot location in nearby Waterdown.

            Initially described by Joint Chief Chairman General Mark Milley as a “righteous strike,” the Pentagon claimed its Hellfire missile attack on a residential street was justified because of an alleged “imminent threat” to evacuation operations, even though the airport was 3 km away. Those killed were Mr. Ahmadi and three of his children (Zamir, 20, Faisal, 16, and Farzad, 10); Mr. Ahmadi’s cousin Naser, 30; three of Romal’s children (Arwin, 7, Benyamin, 6, and Hayat, 2); and two 3-year-old girls, Malika and Somaya.

            Most of those killed were completely “shredded,” leaving behind only “fragments of human remains.” We only know this because, unlike most drone strikes – which tend to take place in rural areas where fact checking Pentagon claims about the victims’ identities can prove difficult – this one occurred in a densely populated Kabul neighbourhood.

            While the U.S. military continued to spin its baseless justification for the attack based on so-called evidence of terrorist threats, a New York Times investigation countered Pentagon claims that the driving and behaviour of Mr. Ahmadi were suspicious, noting “the evidence suggests that his travels that day actually involved transporting colleagues to and from work. And an analysis of video feeds showed that what the military may have seen was Mr. Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water into his trunk to bring home to his family.”

 

The Hunter-Killer Drone

The MQ-9 Reaper (using the Canadian-produced Wescam MX-20 Electro-optical/Infrared (EO/IR) tracking and targeting system) allowed the hunter-killer drone operators maneuvering joysticks from remote bases in the U.S. to track Mr. Ahmadi’s vehicle as it drove around Kabul. The Americans claimed that he had stopped at an ISIS safe house, but their own footage revealed that in fact, it was where he worked, the long-established office of  Nutrition and Education International. The Pentagon says it decided to strike because of the “reasonable certainty” that no women, children or noncombatants would be killed as Ahmadi returned home. Yet relatives of Mr. Ahmadi said as soon as they saw him pulling into his driveway, family members came out to welcome him home. They would have been seen clearly by the drone operators via the Wescam system, but the order to fire went ahead regardless. Because of a deadly airport attack the previous week, Joe Biden reverted to the old stand-by of flexing muscles, no matter the civilian cost, and the apparent “America won’t be pushed around” counter-action was to fire first and respond to questions later.

Half a world away in the Golden Horseshoe area that Wescam has long called home, it is unlikely that company executives gave a second thought to the fact that their products had once again proven their efficacy in bloodshed.  For 20 years, protesters have gathered at the entrance to Wescam, setting up graveyards with the names of hundreds of drone strike victims, illustrating in vivid detail their parent company’s connections to torture, and ending up being hauled off in handcuffs for trying to conduct citizens’ weapons inspections of the facility.

For two decades, drone strikes have been the  face of long-distance, “over the horizon” warfare waged by soldiers who go to work at video terminals, push buttons to fire Hellfire missiles as effortlessly as making a move on Playstation, and return home in time for dinner and taking the kids to soccer practice.

 

Awash in Federal Funds

Wescam prides itself on being a world leader in drone technology, and Ottawa is only too pleased to keep them awash in federal tax dollars. In 2015, Wescam received a $75 million “repayable contribution” (they call it a contribution because it’s almost never repaid) to continue supplying technology used not only in overseas war zones, but also by domestic police forces and border agents. Indeed, there is no clearer Canadian example of a company that profits from the intersectionality of state violence than Wescam.  Indeed, their systems are used by border agents to prevent migrants from gaining asylum, by police to terrorize the racialized communities they occupy, by militaries as a low-cost kill-chain alternative, and by Hollywood movies that celebrate this violence. As then federal Industry minister James Moore said in distributing the cash, “WESCAM surveillance and targeting technology has been used to help police forces conduct manhunts and track marijuana grow ops here in Canada. Abroad, Canadian armed forces have used similar aerial systems during Canada’s 10-year mission in Afghanistan to capture high-value targets.”

            Among numerous other contracts, in July 2020, the blood-stained Crown entity Canadian Commercial Corporation announced a $380-million contract to supply an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” of the MX-Series of Wescam’s surveillance and targeting products for the U.S. army.

Wescam is also a proud supporter of the brutal Saudi regime, announcing a deal in 2019 where “we can significantly broaden our support for Saudi government and military forces.” Part of that arranged entailed the opening of a maintenance centre by L-3 Wescam in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The CEO of Taqnia Defense and Security Technology Co., enthused: “We look forward to maintaining L3 WESCAM’s portfolio of products while providing exceptional service to its regional customers.” Wescam  technology has been used as part of the unending war crimes campaign led by the Saudis against the people of Yemen, as documented by the likes of researcher Antony Fenton.

            Canada is now considering a new, $5 billion purchase of armed drones. There is little doubt that this will be a slam dunk for Wescam to receive the contract. That inside knowledge is perhaps why they have busy preparing a 330,000 square foot factory just north of Hamilton. But even if they failed to win the Ottawa tender, they should have no trouble keeping a positive balance sheet, with their products being exported to over 80 countries.

 

Wescam’s Overseas War Crimes

            Among the recipients of Wescam’s hunter-killer technology is Turkey, which in September 2020 was the focus of a Project Ploughshares report that found that the Turkish military supplied by the Burlington company “has committed serious breaches of international humanitarian law and other violations, particularly when conducting airstrikes.” Turkey has also exported its purchased Wescam technology to armed groups in Libya, “a blatant breach of the nearly decade-old UN arms embargo.” These exports also violate the Canadian government’s own Arms Trade Treaty obligations.

Ploughshares’ research also revealed that Wescam maintains an authorized service centre for the Turkish weapons company Baykar. Turkey is the third-biggest recipient of Canadian weapons exports (valued at over $152 million). After having  temporarily suspended weapons sales to Turkey in October 2019 after that country’s latest invasion of Syria, Canada announced an extension of the embargo in spring 2020.

Turkish strongman Recep Erdogan was furious, and confronted Trudeau about it. Erdogan was especially peeved, since at that time Trudeau had lifted a pause on weapons exports to war crimes being produced by the Saudi regime in Yemen. According to one Turkish official, Trudeau “said they would take some steps to alleviate Turkish concerns regarding the exports; that they would review everything case by case.”

Middle East Eye reported, “Turkey was giving utmost importance to the import of the optics and surveillance systems from the Canadian firm Wescam for its military drones.” It did not take long for Global Affairs Canada to grant an exemption for Wescam to continue those weapons exports a month later.

Turkey was apparently worried that its capacity to wage drone warfare would be limited, given battlefield losses in Syria and Libya. That resumption of weapons sales came just as the group Genocide Watch openly questioned why Turkey was not before the International Criminal Court for war crimes committed during its multiple incursions into Syria. They noted that:

 

In areas under Turkey’s control, civilians have been subjected to horrific crimes against humanity committed by Turkish forces and Turkish supported militias. Kurdish towns have been bombed and destroyed, some with white phosphorus, a war crime. Hundreds of civilians have been summarily executed. Kurdish and Yazidi women have been kidnapped and subjected to sexual slavery. Secret prisons hold hundreds of Kurds who are routinely tortured.

 

During those incursions, schools and hospitals were bombed, as were civilian convoys fleeing the violence, and nearly 180,000 Kurds were forcibly displaced in an act that even U.S. officials named as an act of “ethnic cleansing.”

Similar genocidal attacks against Kurds have been launched by Turkey in northern Iraq, with Ploughshares pointing out, “In 2018, Turkey began the practice of targeted killings in Iraq, becoming only the second country in the region, after Israel, to undertake extraterritorial targeted killings.”

When one senior Kurdish leader was assassinated by a Turkish drone in Iraq, footage of the attack was proudly shared on Wescam’s own website, though it was erased after the Canadian window dressing embargo in spring 2020. Wescam’s MX-GCS EO/IR imaging system has also reportedly been integrated into the Belgian-made Cockerill turret of the Turkish FNSS Kaplan armoured fighting vehicle.

Meanwhile in Libya, where battling forces have all committed war crimes, Turkey is exporting its own drone technology with Wescam targeting systems, in violation of a decade-old UN arms embargo. Ploughshares shared pictures of downed drones that had been built with Wescam targeting cameras.

 

Constantly Overhead the Kurds

Turkey also employs Wescam drone technology in ongoing domestic repression and murder by drone against Kurdish people, including reports in December 2019 that Turkish drones “participated in airstrikes against Kurdish organizations in at least 11 provinces in southeast Turkey.”

The Intercept noted last year as well that Turkish drones (which, notably, rely on Wescam technology) are a “near constant presence in the skies in the country’s southeast. Nearly every day, a Turkish drone, usually a TB2, either fires on a target or provides the location of a target that is subsequently bombed by an F-16 or attack helicopter.” Hundreds of people have been killed in these strikes.

In 2019, Amnesty International reported that Turkish operations demonstrate “an utterly callous disregard for civilian lives, launching unlawful deadly attacks in residential areas that have killed and injured civilians.” Ploughshares concludes that “there is a clear and demonstrable substantial risk that the further export of Wescam sensors to Turkey could cause harm to civilians and facilitate breaches of IHL [International Humanitarian Law].”

While export permits to Turkey were cancelled in April, 2021, a week later, Global Affairs produced a stunning report that essentially opened the door to the renewal of the same weapons exports at a time when media and Parliament would not be alert to such a reversal, with one memo advising the Minister: “The approval of the specific permits mentioned in this memorandum is not expected to garner media attention, as the process is not public. (...) Parliamentary scrutiny is expected to be limited given the current COVID-19 crisis.”

In a move that would make Orwell squirm, Global Affairs acknowledged that “credible evidence that certain Canadian military goods and technology exported to Turkey, namely sensors equipped on Turkish UAVs, have been used in the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Libya and Syria.” Remarkably, Global then declared that “there is no substantial risk that Canadian military goods and technology exported to Turkey would be used to undermine peace and security, or to commit or facilitate” human rights violations and that “there is no reason to take any action in relation to the remaining permits” for exports to Turkey. Further on, they claim that “there is no substantial risk that Canadian exports of military goods and technology to Turkey would undermine peace and security, either nationally or regionally.”

 

Canada: A Pawn for Autocrats

            Lawyers Anaïs Kadian and Emilie Béatrice Kokmanian produced a piercing critique of the Global Affairs report, Canada: Human Rights Champion or Pawn to Autocratic Regimes in the Global Arms Trade. Their response highlights the inconsistencies and outright falsehoods peddled by a Global Affairs department which plays a much stronger role justifying weapons sales than it does in promoting peaceful diplomacy.  Indeed, the authors point out that Global Affairs perfidy extends to a “troubling lack of transparency in the process itself: permit approvals are not public, thus escaping scrutiny from the media and Canadians.” They conclude that Canada failed to abide even by its own fairly limited criteria in approving weapons exports.

            As Wescam executives relish the booming business of warfare, drone resisters have blown the whistle on this insidious process of killing. “The truth is that we could not differentiate between armed fighters and farmers, women, or children, ” Lisa Ling, a former drone technician with the US military, told Emran Feroz, an independent journalist, and the founder of Drone Memorial, a virtual memorial for civilian drone strike victims. “This kind of warfare is wrong on so many levels.”

Former intelligence analyst Daniel Hale was condemned last July to 45 months in the penitentiary for leaking documents that illustrated the global network of drone warfare links and high rate of civilian casualties. He informed the court at his sentencing, ““I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take — precious human life. I couldn’t keep living in a world in which people pretend that things weren’t happening that were. Please, your honor, forgive me for taking papers instead of human lives.”

            While thousands have been killed by drone warfare, their lives have been easily dismissed because, as Hale told the court, the U.S. military labels everyone killed in drone attacks – among them, some 2,200 children – as “enemies killed in action” unless proven otherwise, just as Mr. Ahmadi’s family in Kabul were listed until reporters uncovered the truth. “With drone warfare, sometimes nine out of 10 people killed are innocent,” Hale said. “You have to kill part of your conscience to do your job.”

            Rarely addressed in such discussions is the fact that, even if the target is allegedly guilty of some offence or another, killing them in the absence of a fair, open, transparent trial is the gravest violation of due process. Drone warfare has conveniently removed the judicial process, through which embarrassing details about our own criminality could be brought to light.

            This returns the spotlight to the provider of these hunter-killer weapons systems – Wescam – and its government promoter, Global Affairs Canada. These are not inaccessible organizations hiding away on remote islands producing illicit goods. They are located in very visible buildings and seen by thousands of travelers every day who drive by, perhaps never thinking about what goes on behind their doors. Their work is made possible by our tax dollars. Their work can be easily interfered with and shut down when we act on our conscience.

When Daniel Hale released his trove of documents illustrating the extent of drone warfare criminality, New York magazine asked, “Why did no one seem to care?” In light of the relative silence of the Canadian government and people following the murder of an Afghan family in Kabul in which we are all complicit, we should be asking ourselves the same question. 

This piece by Matthew Behrens appears on rabble.ca the week of October 25, 2021

 

 

Thursday, August 26, 2021

The Secrets They Keep: Why Canada Fears Afghan Interpreters

 


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