[Indigsol] Tomorrow 8am: Home Demo in Support of Abousfian Abdelrazik

[Angela Schleihauf]

Please forward widely

*** *Home Demo in Support of Abousfian Abdelrazik

When: Thursday, June 18th, 8am

Where: Lawrence Canon's house 116 Marcel-Chaput

The demo will be followed by an info picket at Chemin d'Almer (turns into
Tache)/St. Remo (near Champlain bridge- west end. It is about a 20 minute
bike ride from down town)

Finish time: 11am in time for demonstration at Peruvian Embassy

Related Article:
Canada’s shame: the incarceration, torture, and exile of Abousfian
Abdelrazik
By Guy Charron and Keith Jones
23 October 2008

For more than five years, the Canadian state has victimized Abousfian
Abdelrazik, a 46-year-old Canadian citizen of Sudanese origin, and, in so
doing, negated and illegally redefined Canadians’ citizenship rights.

In August 2003, Abdelrazik was arrested at the behest of the Canadian
Security Intelligence Services (CSIS) by Sudan, a country that Canada
routinely condemns for gross human rights violations. Subsequently, CSIS
agents traveled to Sudan to participate in his interrogation.

Sudanese authorities first held Abdelrazik for 11 months, during which
time he was brutally tortured. He was released in July 2004, only to be
arrested again in late 2004 and imprisoned and abused for a further 7
months.

Shortly after his first release, the Sudanese government said it had found
no evidence supporting Canadian and US claims that he was an Islamic
terrorist. Ultimately, Khartoum would issue a formal document exonerating
Abdelrazik of the charge that he was an al-Qaeda operative.

But the Canadian state has systematically blocked Abdelrazik from
returning to Canada, thereby stripping him of his fundamental rights of
citizenship.

Abdelrazik has never been charged, let alone convicted, of any crime
either in Canada or Sudan. Nor has the Canadian government initiated
proceedings to strip him of his citizenship. (Naturalized citizens who
obtained their citizenship fraudulently or who have committed certain
crimes can lose their status as Canadians.) Yet Ottawa has prevented
Abdelrazik from rejoining his wife and children in Canada and condemned
him to live in isolation and poverty in Sudan.
The “smoking gun”

Civil liberties groups and the World Socialist Web Site have charged that,
in the name of “the war on terror,” the Canadian state has collaborated
with foreign governments in the detention without charge and torture of
Canadian citizens.

A lengthy public inquiry into the case of Maher Arar—a Canadian of Syrian
origin who was apprehended by US authorities, then “rendered” to Syria
where he was held for more than a year and tortured—essentially
whitewashed the role played by CSIS, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
(RCMP), and the Canadian government. Justice Dennis O’Connor recently
criticized the RCMP for labeling Arar a terror suspect and passing that
information on to US intelligence agencies without qualification. Yet he
ruled that Canadian authorities had played no role in Arar’s rendition to
Syria and had otherwise made good faith errors in conniving in his
detention and interrogation.

In respect to Abdelrazik, however, CSIS documents, first revealed by the
Globe and Mail last spring, openly boast that the Sudanese government
arrested Abdelrazik “at our request.” Moreover, this past summer,
government lawyers effectively confirmed CSIS’s role in Abdelrazik’s
arrest, when they did not contest his lawyer’s claim of Canadian
government responsibility in court proceedings aimed at forcing Ottawa to
repatriate him.

Abdelrazik, who came to Canada in 1990 as a political refugee and became a
Canadian citizen in 1995, was long under investigation by Canadian
authorities. Indeed, so obtrusive and aggressive was the state
surveillance that it apparently was a factor in his decision to visit
Sudan in March 2003 to see his ailing mother.

By inciting Sudanese authorities to jail Abdelrazik in August 2003, CSIS
officials were able to get around Canadian constitutional prohibitions on
holding persons without charge and to contract out Abdelrazik’s
interrogation to a regime that, like Syria’s, has repeatedly been
condemned for its abuse of prisoners.

The complicity of the Canadian state in Abdelrazik’s torture is
underscored by the current Conservative government’s indifference to the
treatment he received while in captivity.

Abdelrazik said he informed his CSIS interrogators that he was being
abused and subsequently complained to other Canadian officials, but they
showed no interest in his mistreatment.

This past March, Abdelrazik met with Deepak Obhrai, a Conservative MP and
the parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs, and lifted his shirt to
show the scars his torture had left. But a memo prepared soon after by a
senior Foreign Affairs bureaucrat dismissed Abdelrazik’s claims.
“Conditions in Sudanese prisons are very difficult,” wrote Odette
Gaudet-Fee, the department's Africa consular case-manager. “But this does
not amount to torture or mistreatment." Abdelrazik, insisted Gaudet-Fee,
"would not have been targeted for mistreatment any more than other fellow
detainees."

An affidavit drawn up by Abdelrazik’s lawyer cites him as testifying:
“Around December 2003, conditions worsened greatly, after some prisoners
escaped from the prison. I was transferred to a solitary cell of about 1
by 2 meters, which had carpeted floors. An air conditioner was made to run
almost constantly, which made the room unbearably cold. Often I was told
to stand with my hands and face against the cell wall. Twice a day I was
let out to the bathroom, during which time I was also beaten. The beatings
were administered with a rubber hose of about 2 feet in length, applied to
my back, head and legs. This abuse was in the context of interrogation by
the Sudanese about the prison escape that had taken place, and
interrogation by the two men who were introduced to me as Canadians [i.e.,
the CSIS agents].”

The Canadian government likely played a role in prompting Abdelrazik’s
second lengthy incarceration as well, although US intelligence-security
agencies were almost certainly also involved, since Washington was, by all
accounts, demanding that Khartoum treat him as an al-Qaeda operative.

Sudanese authorities re-arrested him shortly before Liberal Prime Minister
Paul Martin paid a visit to the country. Abdelrazik had indicated he would
try to see the Canadian prime minister to apprise him of his plight
An exile in all but name

What is incontrovertible is that the Canadian government made sure
Abdelrazik was unable to leave Sudan after his original imprisonment and
to this day continues to deny him the right to return to his home and
family.

Soon after his first release in 2004, Abdelrazik’s wife paid for an
airline ticket to bring him back to Canada. But Air Canada and Lufthansa
refused to issue Abdelrazik a ticket because, soon after he had traveled
to Sudan in the beginning of 2003, his name had been placed on a no-fly
list, presumably at the behest of the Canadian government.

At one point, the Sudanese government offered to repatriate Abdelrazik on
a private plane, but the Canadian government aborted this project by
refusing to pay the costs.

The question of costs is a transparent excuse. On repeated occasions since
the summer of 2004, Canadian government planes have travelled to Sudan for
official trips by Canadian representatives, including Liberal Prime
Minister Paul Martin in 2004 and Conservative Foreign Affairs Minister
Maxime Bernier in 2008. But Ottawa has consistently refused to provide
Canadian citizen Abdelrazik with an airplane seat. (This is in striking
contrast to the treatment Ottawa accorded Brenda Martin, a Canadian woman
who was jailed in Mexico for her reputed involvement in a scam. The
Conservative government pressed for Martin to be repatriated to Canada,
then dispatched a government-chartered jet to bring her home.)

In an attempt to cover its tracks, the Canadian government repeatedly
claimed in recent months that it would provide Abdelrazik the necessary
travel documents if he were to find an airline willing to transport him
back to Canada despite the no-fly ban the Bush administration issued
against him on the day of his second release from Sudanese prison. But
when Etihad Airway said it would give Abdelrazik a seat on a flight to
Toronto on Sept 15, 2008, the government failed to honor its promise.

Ottawa had been advised of Abdelrazik's travel plans three weeks before
the planned flight, but only on Sept 26, 11 days after Abdelrazik was to
have returned to Canada, did the government matter-of-factly inform his
lawyer, "In light of the complex issues...it was clear that these matters
could not be resolved in time for your client's travel which you scheduled
on Sept. 15.”

The Canadian government has likewise blocked Abdelrazik from leaving Sudan
via sea, by categorically refusing to issue him a valid passport. (His
passport expired during his first imprisonment.)

"There is no right to a passport,” asserted the Canadian government in a
document meant to prep officials on how to respond to journalists'
questions regarding the Abdelrazik affair. “It is a privilege that is
subject to a certain number of restrictions. One consideration is whether
a person poses a risk to the national security of Canada.”
Redefining citizenship rights

Abdelrazik has been denied his fundamental rights of citizenship and on
the basis of allegations that the government clearly knows are
unsustainable in a court of law. Otherwise, it would be seeking his
extradition to Canada, not exiling him.

In the process, the Canadian government has surreptitiously redefined the
rights of citizenship.

That this is being done apparently under pressure from the US makes it no
less pernicious.

A secret document prepared by Canadian intelligence and Transport Canada
security officials this past April and obtained by the Globe and Mail
says, “Senior government of Canada officials should be mindful of the
potential reaction of our U.S. counterparts to Abdelrazik's return to
Canada as he is on the U.S. no-fly list.

"Continued co-operation between Canada and the U.S. in the matters of
security is essential.”

Furthermore, it must not be forgotten that if Abdelrazik today finds
himself stranded in Sudan, it is only because Canadian authorities incited
Sudan to arrest him in the first place and have been complicit in his
lengthy detention without charge and his torture.

>From his second release in July 2005 until this spring, Abdelrazik lived
as a stateless person in Khartoum who was forced to sleep each night in a
house under the control of the police. Due to the publicity recently given
his case, Abdelrazik has been able to compel Canadian authorities to
provide him a form of refuge in Canada’s Khartoum embassy compound. But,
according to press reports, he has been treated there like a prisoner. For
weeks, embassy staff refused even to speak to him.

The state victimization of Abdelrazik has taken place under Liberal and
Conservative governments alike. Paul Koring, the Globe and Mail journalist
who has played the leading role in drawing public attention to the
Abdelrazik case, recently wrote, “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.”
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