Torture is the worst act a human being can
commit, be it against another human being or an animal.
But
the question is if the debate taking place these days in Ottawa will
help end torture around the world.
Unfortunately,
whenever there's politics involved, I have serious doubts.
Our
politicians, in their comfy offices on the Hill, are judging the
actions of people facing death every day. Kandahar is not a region
in the Greater Toronto Area and Kabul is not Ottawa. Driving a car
or taking a walk in Ottawa does not have the same meaning in
Kandahar or Kabul. Our police cruisers look for speeders. In
Afghanistan, our soldiers are looking for pounds of explosives and
Kalashnikovs.
Of
course, we also want peace and democracy, but in the meantime, as in
any war, it's kill or be killed. We sent thousands of young
Canadians there to kill for peace, but undeniably to kill. More than
130 of them have so far been killed doing what they were asked to do
by politicians.
On
the other side, there are thousands of other young people, Taliban
and others, who are killed daily.
Now,
one cannot compare our soldiers with people who use terror to make
their points. They kill indiscriminately, they behead, they torture
and they use unlimited horror tactics in order to advance their
ideology. But this is exactly my point. They terrorize everybody;
they resort to any kind of action without any respect for life. Our
soldiers are not fighting a conventional war where the enemy is
respecting the same rules. Our men and women are up against people
with no respect for human life, no adherence to any rules and no
uniforms to shoot at.
Should
these people be tortured? Of course not, because this is the
difference between a soldier and a terrorist.
My
point is that in this meat grinder of a war—where there are no
visible boundaries between enemy soldiers and civilians, where your
life depends on how smart you are in seeing the difference between a
passerby and a suicide bomber, between a sniper and an onlooker,
between a car and a car-bomb—we are trying to apply the same law we
practise at Osgoode Hall. In a country where the practice of torture
sees no difference between a soldier, a terrorist, a child, a women,
or an elder, we want our soldiers, who sent 132 of their own back to
Canada in body bags, to stop everything because someone sent an
e-mail to Ottawa saying that the Taliban captured by Canadians are
probably tortured by the Afghans.
If
I understand it correctly, the explosive email was denouncing
torture in Afghanistan. Big scoop, in Afghanistan there is torture.
They
don't need an email from a Canadian diplomat to know that. Everybody
knows what's going on in Afghanistan: it's carnage. The headline on
the six o'clock news in Kandahar is, "Ladies and gentlemen good
evening. Thank God today was a very quiet day, only 25 people died,"
while our local newscast starts with the news of who won So You
Think You Can Dance.
Our
politicians in Ottawa look horrified by the Canadian diplomat's
email telling the world that there is torture in Afghanistan and,
probably, also Taliban guerrillas handed over by Canadians to the
Afghan army were tortured. They knew since 2002 what the situation
in Afghanistan was: bombing, beheading, torture, and the killing of
children, women and the elderly.
Now
they want to know what Defence Minister Peter MacKay knew about it
and if Prime Minister Stephen Harper was informed, because that's
the bottom line. The aim of many politicians is not the fight
against torture, but the need to implicate the opponent. I'd bet
that if today the news that the Prime Minister had committed an
illegal action, say signing a contract for a relative, the
opposition would drop the debate over "torture" like a stone and
start the tirade on corruption in order to have the Prime Minister
removed.
Writing
this doesn't mean that hypocrisy is the monopoly of one or two
political parties. Hypocrisy is a disease afflicting everybody.
On
a less important issue, for example, look at what the Ontario
provincial Conservatives are doing on the Harmonized Sales Tax. They
were in favour of it until the day Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty
decided to support it too. Now they're against it by preaching
honesty and branding themselves as defenders of the consumers.
Torture,
as I said, is the worst action humanity can be accused of and our
troops are in Afghanistan to promote democracy, the rule of the law,
freedom, and human rights. Our politicians can already enjoy all of
it in their comfortable offices in Ottawa. Our troops in Afghanistan
are in the middle of a democratic and human rights vacuum. The last
thing they need is another naive debate in Ottawa about details in
Afghanistan that everybody is already aware of and now are used for
political reasons instead of for solving the
problem.
