Vol. 73/No. 48      December 14, 2009

Richard Colvin, a former senior diplomat with Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, testified November 18 before a House of Commons committee. He charged that Afghans who were detained by Canadian soldiers and later handed over to Afghan authorities were all likely tortured. Colvin worked in Kandahar for Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs in 2006 and later moved to Kabul where he served as second-in-command at the Canadian embassy.

Colvin told the committee the he wrote reports about his visits to Afghan prisoners and sent them to Ottawa. He said those in custody were not “high value targets.” Many were just local people in the wrong place at the wrong time. “In other words, we detained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent people,” Colvin said.

David Mulroney, who was a manager of Canada’s mission in Kandahar at the time Colvin made his reports, denied to the House committee that he had hushed up the reports that prisoners were being tortured.

A Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey indicates Canadians are twice as likely to believe Colvin’s claim that the government was aware of the torture of prisoners turned over by Canadian soldiers than the government’s denials.

The government is mounting a counteroffensive to rebut Colvin. Richard Hillier, the former head of the Canadian armed forces and top commander of Canada’s troops in Afghanistan, dismissed Colvin’s claims as “ludicrous and lacking in substance” when he testified at a Commons committee hearing.

Canada’s troop deployment in Afghanistan is scheduled to end in 2011, but Ottawa’s military commitment to the imperialist occupation has already been extended twice—in 2006 and 2008. Canadian troops based in Kandahar, where the fighting is fiercest, have suffered proportionally higher casualties than troops from other countries.

In another example of growing opposition to the war in Canada, some 400 people attending a meeting here November 24 heard Malalai Joya, a suspended member of Afghanistan’s parliament, call for the immediate withdrawal of all U.S., Canadian, and other foreign troops from Afghanistan. The Quebec Federation of Women and Echec à la Guerre (Oppose War) group organized the meeting at the University of Quebec in the center of Montreal.

Joya was elected to the Afghan parliament in 2005, but was suspended from the legislature two years later for repeatedly criticizing the Afghan regime. She has been speaking on many campuses across Canada against the occupation of Afghanistan.
 
 
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