Canada’s Child Soldier
Today’s release of the Omar Khadr interrogation tapes once again demonstrates how different is truth is from the disinformation we’re fed by our governments.
Whether we like it or not, Omar Khadar, a brain-washed, misled young boy, is Canada’s own child soldier. The tapes, ordered released by a courageous Judge Richard Mosley on insistence of defence counsel, reveal a story of duplicity, deception and abuse — by Canadian authorities.
Toronto Star national security reporter Michelle Shephard, who wrote the book on Khadr — Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr – also wrote her paper’s story of the tapes today.
Her account is straight-forward, unemotional reportage of what the initial tapes show of the interviews. But she told me today she thinks “there’s a possibility Khadr could be back in Canada by next year.”
“Much of what was in the tapes I had covered in my book,” she added.
Anyone who wants to understand Canada’s betrayal of its solemn oath to recognize the circumstances under which child soldiers are recruited into battle, and its failure to live up to its international obligation in this case, should read Guantanamo’s Child. (John Wiley & Sons Canada Ltd., $18.97 at Amazon.ca.)
The book opens with a graphic account of the firefight between U.S. Special Forces and a Taliban squad in Afghanistan: “The grenades came down in a shower burst in the early morning heat, falling one after another with sickening thuds. The U.S. Special Operations Forces under attack couldn’t believe how many were being thrown, seemingly tossed by a company of soldiers, not the five or six men housed in the compound built of mud, straw and stones.”
Omar Khadr, badly wounded, was seized in that fight. He was held as an illegal combatant and transferred to Guantanamo where he has spent the past six years. Whether he threw or did not throw the grenade that killed Sgt. Christopher Speer is, unhappily, no longer the point. The point is that he has never received the treatment that a child soldier is entitled to under international law.
The Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child makes the use of anyone under the age of 18 in combat illegal. States that capture such child soldiers have an obligation to treat them in a humanitarian fashion, and to attempt to rehabilitate them.
No one knows whether Omar Khadr would be a security threat today. But there are proper steps that can be taken to rescue this Canadian citizen from the legal morass into which he has been trapped for more than a third of his life.
Michelle Shephard sees pressure “building steadily” to get Khadr out of Guantanamo.
“I’m not sure if Prime Minister Stephen Harper will change his stance before Khadr’s trial but I think with the upcoming change in the U.S. administration (and both presidential candidates saying they’d shut Gurantanamo) there’s a possibility Khadr could be back in Canada by next year.”
Khadr is scheduled to face military trial at Guantanamo in October.
Whatever the outcome, there’s sure to be an update to be written on Guantanamo’s Child. “I hope to add a chapter or two,” Michelle says.
