Why Canada won’t let Abousfian Abdelrazik come home
Wednesday, October 15th, 2008While the public waits for answers about Canadian complicity in the overseas detention and torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin, startling evidence is emerging about Canadian complicity in the detention and torture of yet another Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrazik, in Sudan.
It should come as no surprise that the Canadian government is blocking his return to Canada.
According to just-released testimony by Sean Robertson, a senior foreign affairs official, the Harper government was presented with evidence that Abdelrazik was tortured in Sudanese prisons after being imprisoned there at Canada’s request.
Robertson testified that when Deepak Obhrai, Canada’s junior foreign minister, travelled to Khartoum to question Abdelrazik last March, Abdelrazik said he’d been whipped with cables and lifted his shirt to show the scars still evident more than two years later.
Predictably, Obhrai isn’t taking calls from the Globe and Mail’s Paul Koring, who wanted to know what, if anything, Obhrai and other government officials, did about it.
In a story in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Koring writes:
It’s clear from thousands of pages of classified documents dating back to 2002 that the highest levels of government had been kept informed about the jailing of Mr. Abdelrazik in Khartoum, his interrogation by CSIS officers while in prison, his release and the refusal of the successive government to renew his Canadian passport.
Abousfian says he was harassed by CSIS in Canada before traveling to his native Sudan to visit his ailing mother, where he was detained by Sudanese officials in September 2003. The Canadian government has not challenged an assertion in one of its own documents that Abousfian was detained “at our request.” He spent the next two years in Sudanese prisons where he says he was repeatedly tortured, and at one point, interrogated by two CSIS agents. Now he just wants to come home.
CSIS, of course, doesn’t want yet another Canadian to come home and tell a story implicating the agency in his overseas detention and torture. In a memo written on October 16, 2003, just ten days after Maher Arar’s release and return to Canada, CSIS said:
We judge it unlikely that, should Abdelrazik’s detention in Sudan become public knowledge, there would be the same sort of outcry that surrounded Maher Arar’s arrest and deportation from the USA.
Well let’s hope CSIS was wrong. So far, the Harper government has been blocking Abdelrazik’s return, likely at CSIS’ urging. No wonder, given that the Iacobucci report is about to be released, pushing the El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin cases, and questions about Canadian complicity in their overseas detentio and torture, back on the public agenda.
Given that the Harper government has always liked to blame the Liberals for what happened to Maher Arar, it’s likely CSIS isn’t having to apply a lot of pressure.
