Shooting The Messenger

The Toronto Sun's little old lady desk, permanently staffed by Peter Worthington has come out against the harsh but necessary words of Senator Romeo Dallaire. Evidently in ConWorld, learning from past mistakes and bitter experience is just not good enough. Not when those soft palmed heroes of having done nothing more dangerous than risking a papercut are in charge. Why should this nation listen to a man who has witnessed the tragic results of ignoring human rights? Heavens forfend we heed the words of a retired general whose dainty bosses at the U.N failed to give an ear to his warnings, let us not learn from the genocidal results of those errors.

Now we live in a world where trouser pissing cons squeal and beg for ethnic cleansing of teh scary brown folk. We will forgive ourselves any and every crime against persons and peoples provided we can drag the stinking carcass of our misdeeds up onto the altar of GWOT. And as long as we have apologists for war crimes, men like Peter Worthington, who would trade their ideals for a pat on the head, we can continue to nod like ignorant sheep. Worthington admits that Dallaire tried to warn his U.N employers about the situation in Rwanda. Somehow that is conflated into his not being fit to comment upon our own perilous slide toward enabling state sanctioned terror, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Well that's a snappy trick.

Irony in Dallaire's testimony to a Commons foreign affairs committee on human rights, is that he was an abysmal failure in protecting human rights when he was a general in command of the UN mission in Rwanda in 1994.

Some 800,000 Tutsis were murdered in a genocidal rampage that Dallaire was forewarned about. UN headquarters in New York ignored his warnings* (it was his first UN command).

Isn't it always the way with politicians and their pets. When a man like Dallaire returns victorious from battle, his soft assed political bosses raise their voices and claim victory for themselves. When those battles fall to the other side the generals and soldiers have failed. The most disgusting piece of Worthington's shameless take is in spinning his own past experience at war.

Khadr was 15 at the time, and by UN definition was "a child soldier" whom Dallaire and others say should be "rehabilitated, not prosecuted."

I, too, as technically a former "child soldier" in the Canadian navy in World War II at age 17, think it ludicrous that Khadr is on trial for murder when he was fighting in Afghanistan in 2002 for the Taliban cause he believed in, against an invading army.

Well let us just note where situations diverge Mr Worthington. Khadr had been draqged into Afghanistan by his family at what age, 13, 14? He was wounded and captured at the age 15. Since that time he has been held against Geneva Convention dictates under the made-up designation of "illegal enemy combatant". He has been imprisoned in a concentration camp setting where his captors have knowingly practiced torture. He has had no due process, he faces an eventual kangaroo court of dubious process and legality.

Now then Peter Worthington, among history's greatest villains were the Nazis whom you fought as a young man, before the Geneva Convention and subsequent Protocols regarding child soldiers. Regardless, had you been captured in battle you would have been a prisoner of war and afforded the same standard of treatment as a prisoner of war. Even the reviled Nazis of WWII maintained a standard of honour in combat that seems to exceed that by which we, the supposed good guys, conduct ourselves. If we are prosecuting a war on terror, a great, moral and global crusade, it certainly behooves us to exceed the minimum limits of humane treatment of prisoners. And by God if you have one, we should surely be able to best the Nazis when it comes to international standards of war and combat.

Don't believe me, here's what the Red Cross has to say:

In international armed conflicts, children with
prisoner-of-war status benefit from the protection
of the Third Geneva Convention and cannot be
prosecuted for taking part in hostilities. Children
treated as civilian internees are entitled to the pro-
tection granted by the Fourth Geneva Convention
of 1949 and Additional Protocol I of 1977, as well
as by human rights law.

- detained children should always be housed separately from adult detainees, except where they are lodged with their families;
- if the child is not freed and in the event of prolonged detention, the child should be transferred as soon as possible to an appropriate institution for minors;
- the child should have direct, regular and frequent contacts with his or her family;
- food, hygiene and medical care appropriate to the child’s age and general condition must be provided;
the child should spend a large part of the day in the fresh air whenever possible;
- the child should be able to continue his or her schooling.

Even with the manufactured, non-legal status ascribed to Khadr and the detainees in Guantanamo, their treatment flies in the face of international law and human rights. How does this make us better or different than those we are fighting? Simply put, to fight criminals we have allowed ourselves to become criminals. Peter Worthington, impotent old man, can sit in his chair and call Romeo Dallaire a fool, he can twist the truth into as many convolutions as he pleases but the truth remains. Khadr is an illegal prisoner, as a child soldier, his continued imprisonment is a crime and a black stain on the United States. The abject failure of Canada's governments, under the Conservatives and the Liberals, to seek his release and repatriation makes us complicit in that crime.

* Emphasis mine