Canada has Neglected its own Child Soldier

by Travis Lupick; June 14, 2007 - The Georgia Straight
http://www.straight.com/article-95206/canada-has-neglected-i...

Canada has donated millions of dollars to the cause of rehabilitating and reintegrating child soldiers around the world, but no one in the Canadian government has ever attempted to help this country's own child soldier, a lawyer claims.

On June 27, Omar Khadr, the last remaining Canadian citizen held at the American detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, will have been detained by the United States without trial for exactly five years. This September, Khadr will celebrate his 21st birthday.

Muneer Ahmad, an American lawyer of Khadr's from September 2004 to June 2007, said he has visited him at Guantánamo on many occasions. In a telephone interview from Seattle with the Georgia Straight, Ahmad alleged that his former client has been interrogated countless times, has suffered physical torture, and has been threatened with deportation to foreign countries where he would be "raped by older men". When asked how he believed Khadr perceived himself after five years of imprisonment, Ahmad took a long pause before replying, "I'm not sure that he has that level of self-awareness, to be honest with you.…I think that is a part of him which has been lost."

Khadr was arrested for war crimes by the U.S. in Afghanistan when he was just 15 years old. The U.S. military accuses him of killing a U.S. medic with a grenade. Khadr is the only Canadian-born juvenile ever to be tried for adult war crimes in our country's history, according to his lawyer.

Michael Byers, a UBC political-science professor and author of War Law: Understanding International Law and Armed Conflict, has followed Khadr's case. He believes that Khadr, as a former child soldier, should be treated as a victim. "The proper response when he was captured would have been to take him back to Canada and to rehabilitate him in a secure environment, as we do with juvenile offenders in normal circumstances," Byers said.

Earlier this month, the New York Times reported that David Crane, the former United Nations–appointed chief war-crimes prosecutor for Sierra Leone, had stated he would not prosecute anyone under the age of 18. In speaking with the Straight, Byers echoed arguments that Crane, an American, has often made in the media. "The vast majority of developed countries would not prosecute someone who was 15 at the time they allegedly committed a war crime. It simply is not the international standard."

The child-soldier case is one that Khadr's lawyers have tried to make before. Ahmad alleged that at the same time the U.S. military was picking up Khadr and "throwing him into Guantánamo to be held and tortured", the U.S. government was spending millions of dollars in Afghanistan to rehabilitate child soldiers. "What is there that distinguishes Ishmael Beah from Omar?" Ahmad asked, referring to a Sierra Leonean ex–child soldier recently in the news for the publication of his memoir.

Ahmad believes it is widespread animosity toward Khadr's family that has kept the public silent. "But it's not his family that is at Guantánamo Bay; it's a Canadian kid named Omar Khadr," Ahmad said. "I've spent dozens of hours with him and he doesn't spend his days scheming about how to kill Americans and Canadians. He spends his days daydreaming about horses and hoping he'll be able to read the next Harry Potter book."

In a telephone interview with the Straight, Rodney Moore, a spokesperson for the Canadian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, would only say that it was up to U.S. authorities to decide how Guantánamo detainees were treated. When pressed about the boy's age, Moore highlighted what Canadian officials had done for Khadr. Last March, he said, a phone call between Khadr and his family was arranged by the Canadian government. "And that call was facilitated on humanitarian and compassionate grounds," Moore stressed. It was the first time Khadr had spoken to his mother in five years.

Since Khadr's capture in June 2002, he has spent at least half his time at Guantánamo Bay in solitary confinement. There, away from his family, friends, an education, and any chance of a normal life, he has grown old, Ahmad told the Straight. "My impression of him, from the very beginning, was that this was just a kid, and a Canadian kid…but over the years he has aged considerably." Khadr could not grow a beard when he entered the confines of Guantánamo. He has undergone puberty in solitary confinement, and has been denied a normal adolescence.

Byers does not sympathize with what the Toronto-born teen is alleged to have done, but instead of vilifying Khadr he blames the circumstances in which he was placed. "The normal situation you would get out of this is to regard Omar Khadr as a victim.…If he was on the battlefield, if he had been indoctrinated, the people responsible for his actions are the people who put him there."

Ahmad refused to call Khadr a terrorist or a child soldier, instead classifying the boy as a "child in an armed conflict". In such cases, Ahmad argued, international consensus recognizes the children involved are not responsible for their actions.

In subtle contrast, Byers argues it is by definition that the boy is just that, a boy, and therefore a child soldier. International treaties–most significantly the UN Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict–make clear that the detention of ex–child soldiers and other forms of punishment are not desirable outcomes for any party involved. Furthermore, Byers continued, "The [Canadian] legal system always takes into account the diminished capacity of people below the age of 16." Byers believes Khadr has been "grievously wronged" by both the American government for imprisoning him and by the Canadian government for failing to stand up for him.

"The truly tragic aspect of all this is he has probably been further radicalized by his experiences at Guantánamo Bay, so he might now pose a risk to society that he did not five years ago," Byers expressed with concern. "This doesn't mean that he can be abandoned. It means the responsibility to redress the situation is actually elevated even more."

This, however, may be where the story ends. Omar Khadr, Guantánamo detainee #766, a prisoner since he was 15, denied a trial and held behind razor wire and blacked-out goggles for five years now, may emerge as a true product of the system that has held him: a child borne of the "war on terror". It is Byers and Khadr's supporters' worst fear.

Ahmad, as Khadr's former lawyer, is slightly more optimistic, though still sees a grim future for the boy. "I think that if he is released he will lead a very, very quiet life. I think he'll spend a lot of time trying to recover from the trauma of Guantánamo.…I think that all he wants to do is to live in peace and let others live in peace."