It would be irresponsible of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his government to avoid calling for a full public inquiry into the abuse of detainees in Afghanistan given the shocking revelations made at committee hearings over the last several days.
While the Helena Guergis-Rahim Jaffer scandal has created something of a distraction for the rest of the country, it is the testimony before the Military Police Complaints Commission that is growing increasingly worrisome. Not only have successive witnesses described Canadian troops handing over enemy combatants and allegedly innocent Afghan men to the Afghan authorities with the suspicion or knowledge that they would be tortured, there are also incendiary allegations that troops might have accidentally shot an innocent Afghan teen and tried to cover it up.
An interpreter — Ahmadshah Malgarai — dropped the shooting bombshell on the commission late last week. He has an axe to grind with the Canadian government, claiming it leaked his identity to the Taliban, which subsequently endangered his family. But he is not the only person who has told the committee of potential serious breaches of the Geneva Conventions, which make transferring an individual to a country that practises torture a war crime. Chief of the Defence Staff General Walter Natynczyk has since stated no such shooting took place, but it is not the shooting alone that is troublesome.
According to testimony before the commission, Canadian troops did everything they could to ensure detainees in their custody were treated appropriately. The Somalia scandal, in which a Somali teen was killed by a Canadian soldier, still hangs over the Forces. But Malgarai claims detainees believed to be lying were turned over to Afghan officials for torture and interrogation. Soldiers who have testified have said they believe their duty of safe custody ended when the handover took place and that the Department of Foreign Affairs was responsible for ensuring detainees were not abused.
Each new allegation is further proof the government needs to create a commission of broader scope to investigate the issue on a larger level. The Military Police Complaints Commission has a specific mandate implicit in its title — to investigate complaints against the military police of the Canadian Forces. But the central issue is a familiar one to Canadians. Much like the RCMP recently put a halt to the practice of Mounties investigating allegations against Mounties, the same should be true of the military. It should not be probing its own actions, not for fear of any unethical action, but for the perception of any. Somalia obscured the Forces in a veil of suspicion for years afterwards and while no one to date is insinuating our troops have done anything wrong, a full probe is needed to find out what happened and who was ultimately responsible.
Our soldiers are working in difficult conditions in Afghanistan in a stressful environment and by all accounts are doing nothing but excellent work. Rather than pointing fingers and trying to discredit witnesses, the government should try to get to the heart of the allegations of detainee abuse. It should protect our soldiers with action instead of inaction because the public is more likely to believe a commission witness than a member of Parliament shouting in the House of Commons.
