|
Afghanistan torture scandal nails Tory cover-up
The
scandal arising from Ottawa’s attempt to cover up
alleged war crimes by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan is another nail in the
coffin of the imperialist occupation. It may even deprive the Tories of
a majority government at the next election.
According
to an Angus Reid opinion poll, conducted Nov.
24-25, 49 per cent of Canadians believe the testimony of Ottawa’s former number-two
diplomat in Afghanistan, Richard Colvin. He
told a parliamentary committee that he had repeatedly warned the
Conservative government that Canadian Forces had turned over captured
Afghan combatants to systematic torture at the hands of Afghan
authorities. While 41 per cent of those polled said they were not sure
who to believe, only 10 per cent said they
believed government ministers.
Under
international law, soldiers cannot hand over enemy combatants knowing
they are likely to be tortured. It is a war crime to do
so. Rather than bite the bullet, the Stephen Harper Conservatives
proceeded to deny that they knew anything untoward was happening to
Afghan detainees. Heightening concern is the fact that, apart from
captured national resistance fighters, some prisoners are non-combatant
farmers and townspeople caught up in the fighting in Kandahar province. Ottawa has 2800 soldiers operating
mostly in that area as part of the U.S.-led occupation of Afghanistan under the banner of NATO.
Tory
federal Defence Minister Peter MacKay
attacked the credibility of Richard Colvin, who is presently a top
intelligence officer at the Canadian embassy in Washington, D.C. The government trotted out
as star witnesses three generals, plus Canada’s ambassador to China, David Mulroney. Mulroney
was Colvin’s former boss in Afghanistan. The four denied Colvin’s
claim that he had warned about detainee torture back in 2006-7, and
disputed that there is any factual basis to the accusations of
systematic torture by the Kabul regime.
But
the government has a big problem—actually several. First, the memos
sent by Colvin to Ottawa and the Canadian Forces high command, memos
the government refuses to show to Parliament’s Standing Committee on
National Defence, have been leaked to the
media.
Second,
not only do they show a steady stream of warnings to officials, they
show that Colvin was quoting the International Committee of the Red
Cross as a source. Moreover, according to Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh, there is
“a compelling body of evidence on the risk of torture in Afghan jails”
coming from the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, Human Rights
Watch, Amnesty International, the Afghan Independent Human Rights
Commission, and others.
The
AIHRC reported in April 2009 that iron rods, electric shocks and
beatings were the preferred method of torture, most often done to
extract a confession. It indicated that cruel and degrading treatment
is “common in the majority of law enforcement institutions (in Afghanistan), and at least 98.5 per
cent of interviewed victims have been tortured.” Evidently, those are
the ‘values’ promoted by the foreign occupying powers, including Canada.
False
indignation aside, in this matter the Liberal Opposition does not have
clean hands. The Liberal government of successive Prime Ministers Jean Chretien and Paul Martin approved the military
intervention, the ongoing occupation, the propping up of the corrupt
and repressive regime of Hamid Karzai, and signed the protocols governing the
handing over detainees to the tender mercies of NATO’s client
government of drug and warlords in Kabul.
This
episode is a fitting climax to a failed imperial venture—one in which
Ottawa is a junior partner, hoping to reserve for the Canadian business
elite a piece of the pipeline action that would flow Caspian oil and
gas through Kandahar to western tankers at
Indian Ocean ports.
U.S.
President Barak Obama
is sending tens of thousands more troops to the area, so the quagmire
will deepen and sadly many more lives will be submerged in it. But the
signs of disengagement, due to popular disgust with the costly and
futile occupation, are widely evident.
In
Germany, the third-biggest troop
contributor after the U.S. and Britain, public support for the war
has plummeted. And in Britain, which has pledged
additional forces, an overwhelming 70 per cent favour
early troop withdrawal, in the latest polls. Like
Canada, the Netherlands is planning a pullout.
Increasingly, many of the 43 countries that remain in Afghanistan constitute a
coalition of the unwilling.
A
public judicial enquiry into the torture and cover-up scandal, which
the New Democratic Party is demanding, will apply some heat on the
Conservative minority government. Mass antiwar protest actions in the
streets will do more so. Mobilizing now against the governing liars and
warmongers will shorten the duration of the war, and could help to
deprive the Tories of a majority in the next federal election.
Toronto Trotsky School shows
SA growth
The
second annual Toronto Socialist Action ‘Trotsky School’, held Nov. 20-21 at the University of Toronto, was about 50% bigger and
even more exciting than the first edition. Under the theme “Education
for Activists”, the topics included: “Rosa Luxemberg,
a revolutionary for the 21st century”, “Is Fascism on the
rise in America?”, “Permanent Revolution,
Stalinism and the Transitional Program”, and “The Jobless Recovery, and
other absurdities of the capitalist economy”.
Attendance
at the four sessions ranged from 22 to 37 people, with 50 participating
overall during the course of the two days. A high school student and a
retired worker applied to join SA, and several others drew closer to
our party.
Socialist
Action Treasurer Elizabeth Byce welcomed
everyone and got the conference off to a rousing start on Friday
evening, followed by a superb presentation on ‘Red Rosa’ by leading
SA-USA comrade Adam Shils from Chicago. On Saturday morning, Shils spoke about the clash over Medicare and the
state of the U.S. labour and progressive
movements. The lunch break featured a film produced by the Fourth
International in 1990 titled “Workers of all lands, unite!”
In
the afternoon, this writer addressed the question of revolutionary
strategy, and Toronto SA executive member Julius Arscott
brought the economic crisis, and the false claims of a capitalist
re-bound, back down to earth. The SA literature table was a hub
of activity where over $110 was spent for books, booklets, and
political buttons.
That
same weekend, Socialist Action members sold 50 SA newspapers
to delegates registering for the Ontario Federation of Labour Convention at the Sheraton Centre (where
another 20 papers were subsequently sold).
Already
in the planning stages is “Socialism 2010”, the annual four-day
international educational conference that will take place at U. of Toronto, May 20-23. Please mark
your calendar now, send us your ideas about speakers and topics, and
get ready to have a great time.
OFL convention: Samuelson
passes featherduster to Ryan
Despite
dire threats to public services and jobs, and the tightening noose of labour concessions, it appears to be mostly
business as usual for a major component of the workers’ movement in
English Canada—with only the faintest hint of a much-needed change of
direction.
Nearly
1000 delegates to the tenth biennial convention of the Ontario
Federation of Labour, whose affiliates
encompass over 700,000 public and private sector unionized workers,
gathered for a five-day lacklustre talk fest
that acclaimed two new OFL executive officers, and re-cycled some
‘progressive’ policies.
Wayne
Samuelson, who for 12 years spoke with a loud voice but carried a featherduster, did not seek re-election as OFL
President. He passed the baton to Sid Ryan, Canadian Union of Public
Employees’ (CUPE) Ontario president since 1992. Ryan is portrayed in
the corporate media as “controversial” and “a polarizing figure” for
his outspoken opposition to labour
concessions and his solidarity with oppressed nationalities, including
Palestinian victims of Israeli apartheid.
Steelworker
Marie Kelley was acclaimed to the position of secretary-treasurer. She
takes over from Irene Harris, who also served as an OFL executive
officer for 12 years, the first eight as executive vice-president.
Re-elected vice-president was Terry Downey, who was an OPSEU executive
board member and regional vice-president before her first OFL term in
2005.
Samuelson
presided over the untimely termination of the Ontario Days of Action,
combined with the unfulfilled 1997 OFL mandate for a province-wide
strike to halt the Conservative Mike Harris government’s vicious
anti-worker offensive. That default led to a lack of effective OFL
response to the hundreds of millions of dollars in education cuts; the
undermining of public health care (especially home care); de-regulation
of environmental and work place standards; additional anti-labour laws, anti-human rights rules (criminalizing
beggars), and a big push of ‘Work Fare’ slavery into the private sector.
The
57-year old Ryan tried immediately to assuage concerns at the Ontario legislature. He said he
“comes to Queen’s Park in peace” and seeks to work with the Liberal
government to build a green economy and repair the gutted manufacturing
sector. In a bid to hasten the Canadian Auto Workers’ return to the
OFL, Ryan softened his criticism of CAW concessions to the Big Three.
To some, these words and gestures appear to be solely tactical. But the
policies approved by the convention do not veer off this course.
No
notice was served on the Liberal provincial government that any step in
the direction of slashing public services and jobs, that any targetting of OPSEU, CUPE, teachers or nurses,
would provoke an Ontario-wide shutdown. Instead, the OFL proposes a
mild “sustainable jobs strategy” that leaves all power in the hands of
crisis-wracked, profit-mad big business. There is not even a hint that
a shift to ‘green energy’ requires nationalization of Big Oil and the
entire energy sector to harness the necessary resources for green conversion.
Ryan
campaigned on a three-plank platform of a ‘new economy’, labour unity, and social solidarity. It remains to
be seen whether he will go beyond policy studies, roundtable talks with
experts, and the lobbying of bourgeois politicians. Ryan’s background
as a militant Irish working-class immigrant to Canada, and a stalwart
of the Ontario Days of Action, could serve him well, if he so chooses.
But no one can substitute for a militant mass movement—which OFL
policies have served to quell over time. The challenge (and urgent
need) at this time of economic crisis and employer offensive is to
build that movement in the only way possible—that is, with a
class-struggle programme, from the bottom up.
Canada unemployment still on the rise
With
joblessness, unemployment insurance applications, bankruptcies and food
bank usage still on the rise, claims of an economic rebound simply mock
the victims of the capitalist economic crisis. Canada’s 55 billionaires, and
their government in Ottawa, seem not to be much concerned;
their focus is on reigning-in public spending and reducing the debt at
the expense of working people.
Unemployment
in Canada is 8.6 per cent,
officially, though it is higher in Ontario, and actually double that
rate if discouraged workers and the involuntarily part-time and
under-employed are taken into account. Economists at Export Development
Canada, and at the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development, stress how “feeble” the ‘recovery’ is, and predict
growing joblessness throughout 2010 across the world’s most developed
economies. Of course, even prior to the crash in 2008, rates in the
less developed countries were already catastrophic.
An
indication of increasing desperation is the growth of dependence on
food banks, and the inability of the latter to cope with the demand. HungerCount’s annual report shows that of the
800,000 people who visited a food bank in March 2009, 72,000 were there
for the first time; close to 300,000 of the users were children. The
increased demand on food banks is due not only to the ‘recession’, but
to the disappearance of well-paid jobs in the manufacturing and
forestry industries, to be replaced by low-paying positions.
|