NOR DICITY
Al Pope, March 9, 2008
Searching for the good guys in Afghanistan
Last week, the Canadian government revealed that our armed forces are once again delivering detainees into the hands of the Afghan secret police, touting a new agreement that allegedly protects prisoners from human rights abuses.
If this sounds familiar, it may be because you heard it all last April, when press reports of torture in Afghan prisons forced the Harper government to re-open the deal struck in 2005 by chief of defence staff General Rick Hillier, when Canada began to hand prisoners of war over to the Afghans.
Come to that it’s not very much different from what we heard in 2005 when our troops stopped handing prisoners over to the Americans – suddenly infamous for their torture centres at Bagram, Abu Graib, and Guantanamo – and started handing them to the Afghan authorities instead.
The 2005 deal was a virtual copy of prisoner-transfer agreements signed by other NATO countries, but with one difference. Hillier, who had once dismissed his Taliban enemies as ‘detestable murderers and scumbags’ deleted the clause that called for follow-up on the treatment of the detainees.
Abuse in Afghan prisons was a well-established fact, and as time went on the evidence mounted that Hillier had signed his prisoners over to a gang of torturers. A U.S. State Department investigation of Afghan prisons revealed such cruelties as “pulling out fingernails and toenails, burning with hot oil, beatings, sexual humiliation and sodomy."
U.N. Human Rights Commissioner Louise Arbour, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and Canadian diplomats in Kabul reported that the Afghan National Police, the Minstry of the Interior, and the National Directorate of Security routinely practiced torture, and that some Afghan prisoners simply disappeared without a trace.
Still the Canadian forces continued to hand over prisoners with not even a token system in place to protect their human rights. Then in early 2007 thirty men who were originally detained by Canadian soldiers told the Globe and Mail that they had been “beaten, whipped, frozen and starved” by Afghan security forces.
Challenged on this in Parliament, the Conservatives went on the attack, House Leader Peter Van Loan going so far as to call opposition members Taliban sympathizers for raising the issue at all. Eventually, under the force of public opinion, the Harper government caved in and redrafted the deal to include a follow-up clause.
In November 2007, Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Rights Association won the right to pursue a case against the government on the grounds that the prisoner transfers violate the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, because the agreement was hopelessly inadequate to protect detainees from human rights abuses.
And then this February, the two NGOs received a curious letter from a government lawyer, informing them that the handovers had been secretly stopped in November, because Canadian military officials had finally uncovered evidence of torture that even they couldn’t ignore.
This new agreement, which the government once again claims will protect the prisoners’ human rights, calls for better paperwork, increased supervision, and sensitivity training for Afghan jailers. So if these simple measures will prevent torture, why weren’t they taken in 2007? In 2005?
As Alex Neve of Amnesty International told CBC News, the new measures are a step in the right direction (and long overdue), “But they don't solve it such that we can now confidently say there's no longer a serious risk of torture when prisoners are transferred.”
You could start to believe that the government of Canada doesn’t care about the human rights of the men it captures. Or that it doesn’t care much about its own troops, who according to Canadian legal experts could be charged with war crimes every time they transfer detainees into the known risk of torture.
The government of Canada doesn’t seem to care who it picks for allies or what their standards might be, either. If we can’t trust the U.S. or Afghanistan not to torture prisoners, what are we doing in a war with them in the first place?
This war is still going on more than six years since it began largely because the White House has taken a firm stand that there will be no negotiations with the Taliban, on the grounds that “we don’t negotiate with terrorists”.
In fact they do. They negotiated with the Northern Alliance, a gang of old war-lords and mujahedeen, to defeat the Taliban and create the Karzai government. If the Taliban are terrorists, so are most of the Afghan parliament. That may help to explain why their prisons are such well-known torture chambers.
It’s long past time for Canada to quit this war. Our forces are inadequate to the task, our side kills more civilians than the bad guys, and our friends are just as nasty as our enemies. General Hillier has been asking for a clear mandate for his troops in Afghanistan.
Here’s your mandate Rick. Bring ‘em home.
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