How The Liberals Found Their Inner War Resister

AWOL Soldiers, Canadian Law, George W. Bush, International Politics, Iraq War, War Resistors

How Liberals Found Their Inner War Resister (Editorial)

Toronto-Foreign Affairs critic Bob Rae (Liberal)  would like voters to believe his party supports war resisters.

They do.

Kind of.

 
The Liberals, however, are a little late to the dance.Thus forgetting they’re partially responsible for the problems war resisters now face.

 And among the problems these AWOL soldiers face, whether it be threats within their home and/or host countries, and incarcaeration by their government, they all inevitably face deportations.

 The original motion Rae glowingly praises his party for passing in parliament (especially in this Toronto Star editorial) could’ve gone before the commons two years previously.

 That was, of course, when Rae was unemployed and looking for work.

 You see, MP Bill Siksay (NDP- Burnaby Douglas) introduced nearly the same worded motion, but Liberals refused to vote in favor at Immigration and Refugee Board committee hearings.
Going even further back, the Liberals were still in power when the first resisters Brandon Hughey and Jeremy Hinzman arrived in St Catharines, ON, and Montreal, PQ respectively.

 

 Key, in his testimony to the refugee board, said he had participated in 70 nighttime raids, blowing open home doors to allow his comrades to round up male Iraqis, shame Muslim women by exposing them in states of undress and deny captives basic humanitarian aid.

 The Paradox: Humanitarian Law and “Inevitable Reality of War”

 In another piece, I examined accepted parameters of war engagement, and what the state allows to be imposed on non combatants.

  “It is generally accepted,” the judge reasoned, “that isolated breaches of international humanitarian law are an unfortunate… inevitable reality of war.”

“An individual must be involved at the policy-making level to be culpable for a crime against peace. The ordinary foot soldier is not expected to make his or her own personal assessment as to the legality of a conflict. Similarly, such an individual cannot be held criminally responsible for fighting in support of an illegal war, assuming that his or her personal war-time conduct is otherwise proper.”

 

A “Legal War Crime”?

 After three days of listening to graphic testimony at the refugee hearing of South Dakota war resister Jeremy Hinzman, one observer sitting near me shakily remarks, “If you’re not a pacifist after sitting through this then nothing will make you into one.” In this harshly lit hearing room on Victoria, a refugee board adjudicator is going to have to rule on a most shocking proposition: whether this former soldier of the U.S. 82nd Airborne ought to be granted asylum because he fears participating in war crimes in Iraq.

 (Ed. -  Hopefully this chronological analysis of Mernagh’s coverage of the War Resistors legal battle to gain refugee status in Canada illustrates just how murky the law is. Follow the links to see how the issue has unfolded over the last 4 1/2 years.

 Clarity - with regard to war crimes and rules of engagement are no more apparent now than they were 40 years ago. Some may argue that, because a draft doesn’t exist, that it is “a matter of context”.

 But other factors emerge as the U.S. military attampts to find to new ways to keep recuitment quotas up. ‘Institutional’ and economic factors, some of them predatory,certainly can be arguments that a draft culture still exists.)

                                       ~Matt Mernagh

 Matt Mernagh is a writer for Toronto-based Now Magazine and a marijuana legalization/compassionate-use activist currently dealing with the courts in his own Kafkaesque journey. Comments can be left for Matt via editor@globalpundit.org

 

admin @ July 14, 2008