Sadly, ‘justice’ is a faint hope
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau properly set out on Thursday what Canadians expect, and indeed deserve, in the aftermath of the crash of UIA Flight 752, a tragedy that has devastated so many families across the country.
They want “closure, transparency, accountability and justice,” he said. And, he added, “this government will not rest until we get that.”
It’s a big promise, and certainly justified given the totally unsurprising revelation that the plane did not fall out of the sky of its own accord.
Multiple intelligence sources, we now know, believe the plane was likely brought down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile minutes after taking off from Tehran airport. Even if, as the prime minister quickly added, “this may well have been unintentional.”
But while Canadians expect and deserve all that, how on earth does the government expect to deliver anything close to it?
Begin with transparency. A tragedy on the scale of UIA 752 should be investigated by experts from around the world, as international accords require, with information shared freely. Public safety should be the sole priority. Iran itself has signed onto that principle by joining international conventions on air safety.
And if Canadians are going to get answers, and be confident they can believe the results of any investigation, their own aviation safety experts should be fully involved, on the ground at the crash site as quickly as possible. Not just as observers but as active participants.
Yet, to no one’s surprise, this isn’t happening. Foreign Minister François-Philippe Champagne on Thursday could only say that Iran is “open” to letting Canadian safety experts in, even though Ottawa has no diplomatic relations with Tehran.
But are those experts on their way? Actually, no. The best Canada has so far is a promise from Ukraine to share information once the Iranians allow its inspectors to examine the doomed plane’s black boxes. Second-hand access through a friendly third party, in other words.
Indeed, there’s no reason to think the Iranian regime will permit a truly transparent investigation and many reasons for it not to let that happen. Especially if those “multiple intelligence sources” are right, and the finger does in the end point to some hapless Iranian air-defence official who pressed the launch button at the wrong time with catastrophic results.
It would make no sense for the Iranians to deliberately bring down a passenger plane, containing many of its own people and zero Americans. But miscalculations in times of war happen all too often; memories quickly flashed back to 1988, when a U.S. navy ship shot down an Iranian airliner with 290 civilians aboard, mistaking it for a warplane.
Which leads to accountability. It’s hard enough for even the most democratic government to investigate its own ranks, figure out what went wrong, and identify those responsible for tragic errors. For a regime as secretive and defensive as Iran’s, under intense pressure from the outside world and riven by rival factions, it’s totally unrealistic. The Iranians may want for their own purposes to get to the bottom of what happened. But from what we’re learning, it’s most likely to turn out to be a major embarrassment, not something they’re eager to talk about.
Finally, justice and “closure.” Families mourning the deaths of sons, sisters, mothers and grandfathers across Canada certainly deserve that. But in the absence of transparency and accountability, it’s hard to imagine how anything approaching justice will be achieved. Closure, in the end, will be for each family to manage in its own way.
Trudeau says his government won’t rest until Canadians who lost loved ones on UIA 752 have answers. That’s a fine promise. But the sobering reality is that they’re likely to end up with a lot less than they, and all of us, deserve.