A rchive Date
[ 01-02-2004 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Canada ]
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[http://www.canoe.com/Columnists/mansur_toronto.html
Innocent victim of the war on terror
Understanding how a case such as Maher Arar's could have happened
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
February 1, 2004
Maher Arar, the Syrian-born Canadian citizen and resident of Ottawa, is clearly innocent of the accusations for which he was detained in New York and then deported to Damascus, Syria.
Otherwise, he would not have been freed by the Syrians.
But his 375 days of confinement and torture have made him a high-profile victim of the war against terrorism, waged globally ever since 9/11.
Arar, his family, and all Canadians deserve the public inquiry Prime Minister Paul Martin finally called last week, after enormous pubic pressure, into how such a grotesque mistake was made. A mistake that took away the rights of a Canadian citizen and subjected him to imprisonment and torture while he was denied any legal representation.
The initial reluctance of the Canadian government to hold such an inquiry is not hard to fathom. The war against terrorism is unlike any previous war.
Much of the intelligence required to pursue this war, to defeat an enemy almost invisible until it strikes, cannot be exposed to the light of day, or it will be undermined.
And the ugly reality of any war is the cost borne by the innocent, the inevitable collateral damage the good are forced to pay in defeating evil.
Thus far, most of the discussion in the media surrounding Arar's case - aside from their collective outrage over the RCMP's recent raid on a reporter's home in a search of her sources - has been about technicalities.
That is, mainly concerned with where the fault lies in the loop of intelligence gathering and sharing among security agencies in Canada, Syria and the United States. And of the failure of oversight needed to protect the innocent, like Arar.
Clearly, these intelligence agencies saw Arar as someone having contacts with individuals suspected of being connected with the global terror network of Osama bin Laden.
Some reports suggested Canadian and U.S. intelligence officials believed Arar trained at an al-Qaida terrorist camp in Afghanistan.
Arar vehemently denied he had even been to the country, said his false confessions of being linked to terrorism had been extracted under torture, and added that the campaign of media leaks against him was a smear to divert public attention from the need for an inquiry into his case.
Since 9/11, suspicions of being a terrorist have often carried dire and even lethal consequences, as Arar, and all of us, have sadly discovered.
But there is also a need to appreciate the situation within which security agencies are operating, and the wider historical context of the Mideast.
This may also provide a partial explanation of how a case such as Arar's could have happened.
Buried deep in the public testimony Arar gave in Ottawa on November 4, 2003 lies a possible clue to his misfortune.
Arar stated: "They (the American security officials) said they wanted to know why I did not want to go back to Syria. I told them I would be tortured there. I told them I had not done my military service; I am a Sunni Muslim; my mother's cousin had been accused of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, and was put in prison for nine years."
To understand why Arar may have been wrongly targeted as a terrorist suspect, it is necessary to understand some of Syria's recent history and its relationship with western intelligence agencies following 9/11.
The fact that Arar is a Sunni Muslim and that a member of his family had been accused of being part of the Muslim Brotherhood may well explain why he ended up on a Syrian watch list. And why that information ended up being shared with American and other intelligence agencies.
The al-Qaida network of terrorists, organized and funded by Osama bin Laden and his Egyptian associates, is predominantly Sunni. Their connections with the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots in Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and elsewhere in the Arab-Muslim world, are extensive.
In the post-9/11 world, enemies of the Syrian regime also became terrorist suspects to the Americans.
It is now acknowledged that Syrian security agencies have co-operated with their western counterparts in sharing information, in identifying terrorist suspects and in tracking, arresting, or eliminating them since 9/11.
All this, in part, is the most likely explanation of what actually happened in the Arar case.
The one common characteristic of all dictatorships is their preoccupation with survival. They have long memories of their foes, and the reach of their security agencies is wide.
Murky politics
In the murky world of Middle Eastern politics, made even more complicated by 9/11, there is to be found one explanation for the fluid nature of political calculations.
This is the old precept of "my enemy's enemy is my friend" which would explain the sharing of information between Syrian and U.S. intelligence about suspected terrorists.
None of which, of course, justifies what happened to Arar.
He was born in Damascus in 1970, and was a teenager when his family moved to Canada in 1987. Yet he was aware, according to his testimony, of the violent history of his native country and how it affected his family, plus the compulsory military service Syria expects of all its able-bodied males.
Syria was torn apart in a brutally savage civil war between 1979 and 1982. It began with skirmishes by the Muslim Brotherhood against the ruling Baath party, and rapidly escalated into an attempt to overthrow Syrian dictator Hafiz Assad.
Syria is an Arab republic and its majority population is Sunni Muslim. Its internal politics, until Assad's seizure of power in November, 1970, were highly unstable and driven by periodic coups and counter-coups. In Syria - as in Iraq until recently - Arab nationalism remains the ideological instrument of Baath party dictatorship.
The Baath version of Arab nationalism, devised by two Syrians in the 1940s, was an amalgam of nationalist and socialist ideas with reference to Islam as the common heritage of all Arabic-speaking peoples.
The Muslim Brotherhood was first organized in Egypt.
It is the oldest fundamentalist organization in the Middle East, and it is exclusively Sunni.
Its doctrine, influenced greatly by the rigid conservatism of the Wahhabi sect in Saudi Arabia, considers the Shiite minority and other smaller sects as heretics.
Syria's Assad belonged to the Alawi sect within Shiite Islam. This placed him and his Alawiite supporters in a precarious position with the fundamentalists.
In October, 1981, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt was gunned down by officers belonging to a secret cell of fundamentalists. For Assad in Syria, the message of the Muslim Brotherhood's terror was unmistakable.
He responded when the insurgency climaxed in a general uprising in Hama, a conservative Sunni stronghold in central Syria, in February, 1982. The Hama uprising was crushed. The death toll was estimated as high as 10,000.
Brutal dictatorship
Assad's Syria was no less a brutal dictatorship than any other Arab state and, as in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, a minority held power. In Saddam's Baghdad, the Sunni minority was the power elite; in Assad's Damascus, the Alawiite minority.
Assad ruled Syria for three decades. He eliminated all internal opposition to the Baath party following the fundamentalist insurgency, yet in restoring communal order he maintained a policy of reconciliation with his adversaries, provided they were prepared to repudiate their past. He died in June, 2000 and was succeeded by his son, Bashar.
There are lessons to be drawn from the whole ugly episode of what unjustly happened to Arar and the public inquiry will be a good instrument to reveal them.
That said, the public also needs to appreciate what can be prevented (as was the case with would-be millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam and as was missed in the Air India disaster) if security agencies act more vigilantly - and carefully - with available information on individuals disposed to terrorism.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. He can be reached at smansurca@yahoo.ca
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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