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War &
Repression
Take a Few
Hits
by Barry Weisleder / March 2007
February was a bad month for war mongers and enemies of
civil liberties in Canada.
At mid-month the Senate defence committee issued a
16-page report on Canada’s military role in Afghanistan
which portrayed the war there as futile. It branded the government of
U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai as repressive. The Afghan army and
police are, in the words of committee chair Colin Kenny, “corrupt and
corrupter.”
So much for the war to defend (or build?)
democracy. Then there’s the question of “security”. According
to the 11 Senators, Canada’s military presence, consisting of 2,600
soldiers mostly in the southern province of Kandahar,
has not improved the lives of Afghan citizens. “Life is clearly more
perilous because we are there,” the report concludes. It predicts
that in military terms alone it would take 20 more years to succeed, and
100 years and billions of dollars to create “the kind of society that makes
sense to us”.
With no evident chance of “success”, does the committee
take the next step and call for the troops to come home? No. It
advocates Band-Aids: 250 more Canadian Forces instructors and 60
police trainers, more money for Afghan police uniforms and salaries, and
finally, if other NATO countries don’t
send more fighting troops, it says Canada
should then “reconsider its commitment”. How’s that for logic and
decisiveness?
The next blow against the so-called war on terrorism
came not from a suicide bomber but from the Canadian Supreme Court.
On February 23 the high court unanimously struck down a law that allows the
Canadian government to detain foreign-born terrorism suspects indefinitely,
using secret evidence and without laying charges, while their deportations
are being reviewed. Six Muslim men are now under threat of
deportation, without an open hearing, and under “security certificates”.
The three men who brought the case are likely to remain jailed or under
strict parole because the court suspended its decision and gave Parliament
a year to introduce a law consistent with the ruling.
Despite its limitations, the decision is in stark
contrast to the legal situation in the United
States where in 2006, Congress stripped the federal courts of
authority to hear challenges to the open-ended confinement of foreign
terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
A federal appeals court in Washington recently dismissed 13 cases brought
on behalf of 63 Guantanamo detainees. Their lawyers said they would
appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
At a news conference in Montreal, defendant Adil
Charkaoui praised the Canadian court’s decision. “The Supreme Court,
by 9 to 0, has said no to Guantanamo North in Canada,”
said Charkaoui, who is under tightly controlled, electronically monitored
house arrest. Most of the men have been held for about four years
without being charged.
The decision is also the latest in a series of rebukes
to repressive measures taken by the Canadian state in the name of “national
security” after Sept. 11, 2001. Last September, a judicial inquiry
slammed the police for falsely accusing a Syrian-born Canadian, Maher Arar,
of terrorist connections. Those accusations, in 2002, led U.S. officials to
fly Arar to Syria, where he was jailed
and tortured. Earlier this year, the Canadian government reached a $9.75
million settlement with Arar and offered a formal apology. The commissioner
of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police also resigned for reasons related to
the affair.
The law, introduced in 2001, that provides special
preventive arrest powers and secret court hearings is set to expire on
March 1. The Official Opposition Liberal Party, as well as the Bloc
Quebecois and the labour-based New Democratic Party, oppose the extension
of the law being sought by the Conservative minority government. But
the opposition parties are reluctant to force an early election, which may
in any case be precipitated by the government’s next budget expected in
late March.
It is crucial for the anti-war movement, which was instrumental
in turning public opinion against the wars of occupation, to continue
demanding an end to the repressive legislation and for the removal of
Canadian forces from all parts of Afghanistan.
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