`ORGY OF DESTRUCTION'
Monia Mazigh on 9/11's other victims
Saturday marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington. In 2002, Monia Mazigh's husband, Maher Arar, was swept up in the anti-terrorism crackdown that followed — an innocent man flown to Syria where he was imprisoned and tortured before finally being returned to Canada. She writes today about the short and long-term impacts of the War on Terror.
I remember my mother calling me from Ottawa in September 2002. I was in Tunis with my five-year-old daughter and my eight-month-old son. I was discouraged, confused and exhausted. My husband had disappeared a few days earlier.
“Your wedding picture … ,” she said sheepishly. I didn't understand. “It is on the front page of the Ottawa Citizen,” she continued. “I hid all the copies I have found at my ESL class … I didn't want people to know about the case. … My God, what are we going to do?”
She was crying. I was silent listening to her sobbing. The emptiness of the long-distance call was agonizing for both of us.
Shame. Yes, we felt shame. My mother was ashamed that my wedding picture — meant to capture a private, happy moment in our lives — was now being used as public, creepy evidence that my husband, Maher Arar, allegedly associated with al- Qaida, had disappeared. A bearded young man and his young, smiling bride with her beige head scarf, now a Muslim couple separated by forced physical distance and skewed international laws.
A life was destroyed. A new one arose. That is what the post-9/11 period meant for my family.
Nineteen years later, I still envision the moment of this phone call in my mind. Over and over.
The year when my husband was arrested by the FBI at John F. Kennedy Airport and subsequently “rendered” to Jordan, then to Syria, was a ghost year for me. Exactly like the “ghost plane” that transported him from New Jersey to Amman. It was a real plane, owned by a shadowy corporation whose registration didn't exist, a stratagem to avoid accountability. A sneaky tool adopted in the “War of Terror” to transport prisoners to torture so nobody could see, nobody could hear, nobody would be held accountable.
Maher was imprisoned and tortured in Syria for almost a year before finally being released. A commission of inquiry in Canada cleared him of any links to terrorism and the government apologized. But that year was a ghost year for me.
I lived through it without realizing the daunting task in front of me. A single mother of two children living on social welfare. The wife of a now-suspected terrorist who split her time between writing letters to politicians, giving interviews to journalists and meeting human rights activists.
Once an aspiring academic, I realized that my career would never be back on track; my reputation would never be the same as before. That “before” that I cherished in my worst moments when I watched my children growing up under the cloud of shame and fear. That same “before” that made me believe the illusion that Canada was a country of rights and would protect all its citizens.
Instead, the illusion of rights was swapped for the illusion of security. Security became a commodity sold by governments to their populations. And the populations bought into that narrative. For decades, many believed in it. They gave mandate after mandate to policy-makers who issued law after law to “protect us” from “them” — the terrorists. Unbeknownst to some, this illusion of security was built by confiscating and violating the rights of the “others.” You give security to some by grabbing it from others.
We were the “others.” Four governments conspired to “erase” my husband's rights: Canada, the U.S., Jordan and Syria. These governments had never totally agreed on common values, but they arrested, rendered in the middle of the night, tortured, blindfolded and imprisoned in dungeons without charges. Co-operation in the age of the War on Terror.
That same sort of co-operation in the War on Terror killed — both directly and indirectly — close to two million people, the majority in Muslim countries, and created 38 million refugees and displaced persons worldwide.
At home, it started with Bill C-36, the first anti-terrorism legislation in Canada, passed by the Jean Chrétien government in 2001, and ended with Bill C-51, the anti-terrorism act 2.0 version passed by Stephen Harper in 2015. Each time a bill like this is made into law, a right is taken from some groups to satisfy the rest. At the beginning, the evil had one image: Muslim terrorists. But over the years, it has become anyone who challenges prevailing norms. Environmental groups? Charitable organizations? Indigenous groups? Gradually, they became the “other.” A perfect recipe for a polarized world. A scary world.
With the fall of Kabul into the hands of the Taliban and thousands of questions in the minds of many about the future of the civilians, very few words have been said about the human consequences of the War on Terror. Was it really worth it? Did it make our world a better place?
Perhaps after 20 years of craziness and devastation, it is time to properly examine this orgy of destruction and abuse. It is time to look at our common humanity and know each other not through bombs, drones or infrared goggles, not through the “clash of civilizations” but rather through common dreams for a better world for our children.
Perhaps, a world where wedding pictures stay safe inside family albums and continue to remind us of happy moments in our lives.
This illusion of security was built by confiscating and violating the rights of the `others.'