Editorial

There Will Be Many More Maher Arars

On September 18, Justice Dennis O’Connor released his report on the investigation into the U.S. detention and deportation of Maher Arar to Syria. In September 2002, on a stopover in New York while returning home from Tunisia Mr. Arar was detained by U.S. security officials, acting on information forwarded by the RCMP that he had links to al-Qaeda. He was denied access to Canadian consular representatives and was secretly deported to Syria where he was subjected to torture and other inhumane treatment for over a year.

Justice O’Connor found that there was no evidence that Mr. Arar was ever linked to terrorist groups or was a threat to national security. The report was extremely critical of the RCMP, finding that the agency violated its own rules restricting the exchange of information with foreign agencies. Justice O’Connor concluded that, as a result, the U.S. FBI and other security officials were given an inaccurate and unfair picture of the activities of Mr. Arar and his family. In addition, he found that the RCMP blocked Canadian Foreign Affairs officials from trying to get Mr. Arar released and returned to Canada and leaked false information to the media in order to prejudice Mr. Arar’s attempts to obtain an inquiry into his mistreatment. He recommended that the government compensate Mr. Arar for his suffering and called on RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardeli to resign.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day expressed “regret” over Mr. Arar’s treatment, quickly pointing out that it had happened during the previous Liberal administration. The Liberals were equally quick to point out that Harper, Day and various other members of the current Conservative government had adamantly opposed any government actions to assist Mr. Arar at the time and had expressed strong convictions that the FBI must have had a good reason to do what they did. For his part, RCMP Commissioner Zaccardeli has said that he has no intention of stepping down and that Canadians have to “understand” that the abuses of Mr. Arar’s rights took place in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001 and the early days of the “war on terror”. Of course, everyone says that something must be done to ensure that such things do not happen again.

However, the fact of the matter is that it is virtually inevitable that such human rights abuses will happen again. The reason for this is that the Canadian state does not and never has accepted that Canadian citizens and residents have inalienable human rights. Even the Canadian Charter of Rights does not recognize such rights and places so-called “reasonable” limitations on all of the rights supposedly granted to Canadians. In other words, Canadians are granted privileges, not rights by the Canadian state. The reality is that the main role of the Canadian state is to protect the ruling economic and political elite – a tiny minority of the population – from the majority of working people. It is a capitalist state designed to ensure the continued domination of all of Canadian life by the capitalist class. When the state considers the interests of the capitalist class to be threatened it takes whatever measures it considers necessary – legal or illegal – to eliminate the threat.

In the case of Mr. Arar and numerous other Canadians who have suffered similar treatment, the “threat” perceived by the RCMP is, in fact, largely concocted by themselves and their counterparts in the U.S. as justification for the Bush regime’s “war on terror”. Everything from the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq to the threats against Iran, Syria and other countries is justified under the claim that a large and well-organized network of terrorists is poised to wreak havoc on the “West”. However, September 11, 2001 notwithstanding, there has never been any evidence that such a well-organized terrorist network actually exists. As a result the RCMP and the intelligence agencies in the U.S. and elsewhere have been reduced to concocting such evidence by staging elaborate sting operations and rounding up thousands of innocent people and labelling them terrorists. The media hype surrounding the apprehension of such “terrorists” is rarely matched by similar reporting when the “suspects” are released without charge, often, as in the case of Mr. Arar, after gross violations of their human and civil rights.

In order to prevent such travesties in the future three remedies are essential. The first is that the Canadian government should immediately withdraw from the U.S.-led “war on terror”, as numerous other countries have done over the past several years. The second remedy is to entrench in the Canadian Charter of Rights that Canadians have human rights which cannot be taken away under any circumstances, no matter how extraordinary those circumstances may be. The third is to vigorously prosecute any state or government officials who dare to violate the rights of Canadians. Unfortunately, none of the current parliamentary parties appear interested in pursuing such obvious remedies.

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