Khadr’s fate should serve as a wake-up call
Collection’s editor says Khadr ‘has been wronged’
CANADIANS ARE NOT WILLING TO SEE THAT WE HAVE BECOME THE BAD GUYS IN THIS STORY. JANICE WILLIAMSON
Janice Williamson knows that few Canadians have lost sleep over Omar Khadr and his experience with U.S. military justice. She hopes to rattle that slumber with a 450page wake-up call.
A professor in the department of English and film studies at the University of Alberta, Williamson is the editor of Omar Khadr, Oh Canada, a new book just published with McGill-Queen’s University Press. It’s a compilation of 30 essays, articles, poems and screenplay excerpts — all of them weighing in on Khadr’s background, his incarcerations, the actions and inactions of Canadian authorities and the implications raised by his legal case.
Contributers include the authorial likes of George Elliott Clarke, Charles Foran and Kim Echlin, but also Romeo Dallaire, Maher Arar and Marina Nemat, as well as scholars from across the country. One of Khadr’s Edmonton lawyers, Dennis Edney, makes an appearance in the text of a speech he delivered on Islamophobia at King’s University College in the fall of 2010. The Edmonton Journal’s Sheila Pratt, who has writ- ten extensively about the case, contributes a piece on Khadr’s Canadian defence team.
The various writers may differ on issues such as radical Islam and Canadian multiculturalism, but they find a common voice in their conviction that Khadr’s treatment has been shameful and unjust.
It’s a jeremiad, but in Williamson’s view, an entirely necessary one.
“There’s a way in which Canadians are not willing to see that we have become the bad guys in this story,” Williamson said.
Her comment came this month, just a few days after the United Nations Committee Against Torture took Canadian officials to task for complicity in Khadr’s ill-treatment at Guantanamo Bay, criticizing government delays in approving his request to serve out his sentence in Canada.
“He is a citizen who has been wronged, and he deserves justice,” Williamson said. “He also deserves to be treated like a human being. The fact that many of us are completely disinterested in his case — I mean he’s a human being, who even now is in solitary confinement. He’s been in solitary confinement since October 2010.”
Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 and charged with killing a U.S. soldier during a firefight. He was transferred to the U.S. air force base at Bagram and then to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, where he remained without trial until October 2010, the only citizen of a western country not repatriated.
He finally surrendered a guilty plea to murder and war crimes, a plea bargain many believe was initiated only to avoid trial in a sham military court and the risk of a life sentence. He got eight years and is expected to return to Canada within the next few weeks to serve the balance of his prison sentence here.
“He’ll be returned and imprisoned because his sentence was one year in Guantanamo, seven years in Canada,” says William- son, who sees Khadr as a child soldier who should never have been jailed in the first place. “My hope is he will be protected and he will be given an opportunity to have some kind of education.”
There have been a couple of other recent books documenting the Khadr case, including Guantanamo’s Child by Toronto Star journalist Michelle Shephard and The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies and Whitewashing of Omar Khadr by conservative commentator Ezra Levant. Williamson has some time for Shephard’s book and none at all for the controversial Levant’s, but she bristled at the suggestion her book might serve as the polar counterbalance to Levant’s particular world view.
“I think the book is actually very middle of the road, very mainstream. It’s not about a balance between his book and my book. His book is inadequate. His book discounts the law and many of the international organizations that define what it means to be in the modern world,” Williamson said.
“This book is . . . 30 distinguished Canadians trying to explore what is, I think, a very painful incident in Canadian history. When people look back on this era after 9/11, they will see that some Canadians, Muslims and Arabs, were shamefully mistreated.
“And I think one of the reasons why Canadians can’t see that is because there has been a wave of hysteria that has swept through Canada.”