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rfmcdonaldCanada's military mission in Afghanistan is not exactly covering itself with glory.
I find myself increasingly disturbed that any number of taboos, like the government's involved in the torture and/or imprisonment of Canadian citizens, say, or the complicity of the Canadian military in the rape of children, seem to have fallen of late. Really, people, this isn't that hard.
The International Criminal Court should probe allegations some Canadian officers serving in Afghanistan told subordinates to look the other way when Afghan soldiers and local interpreters sodomized young boys, says one of Canada's leading human-rights lawyers.
University of British Columbia international law and politics expert Michael Byers, who was among a group of academics who sought to have former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet detained as a war criminal, said he plans to ask the ICC to begin its own inquiry into the charges.
In a story published yesterday in the Star, former Canadian soldier Tyrel Braaten said that during his tour of duty in Afghanistan in 2006, he witnessed Afghan interpreters bringing young boys inside buildings at Forward Operating Base Wilson, a remote Canadian base outside Kandahar. The boys were then sodomized by the interpreters and Afghan soldiers, Braaten said.
Other Canadian soldiers have complained to chaplains and military medical personnel that officers told them not to get involved because the sodomy was tantamount to "cultural differences."
If the allegations are true, Byers said, they will reflect more poorly on the Canadian military than the scandal in the 1993 in Somalia when Canadian soldiers tortured and murdered a Somali teenager who snuck into a Canadian base.
"We're spending $18 billion on this mission in Afghanistan and it's engaged the hearts and minds of 33 million Canadians in different ways," Byers said in a phone interview from London. "The rape of children in a conflict zone is at least as serious as the torture of that young Somalian during the Canadian mission there."
I find myself increasingly disturbed that any number of taboos, like the government's involved in the torture and/or imprisonment of Canadian citizens, say, or the complicity of the Canadian military in the rape of children, seem to have fallen of late. Really, people, this isn't that hard.
