Child Soldiers & Canadian, Omar Khadr

Where the HELL is Stephen Harper and what the HELL is he doing?

OTTAWA-Rejecting the argument that Omar Khadr was a child soldier when captured in Afghanistan and should be rehabilitated rather than prosecuted, a U.S. military judge has pushed his war crimes trial forward and prompted Canada’s opposition parties to demand he be brought home.

U.S. Army Col. Peter Brownback’s ruling yesterday supports the Pentagon’s position that there is no minimum age for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay and that international law does not prohibit the trial of someone under the age of 18, Khadr’s lawyers said.

A copy of that decision was provided to the lawyers, but had yet to be released publicly.

“We don’t believe it’s a fair process,” Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion told the Toronto Star yesterday after meeting Khadr’s U.S. lawyers. “They don’t want to take into account that he was 15 years old.”

Last fall, Dion publicly urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to call for Khadr’s trial before a traditional U.S. court, not at the military commissions at the offshore U.S. naval base in Cuba where Khadr has been held for almost six years.

“They didn’t do so,” Dion said. “We are asking for him now to be back in Canada.”

Similar demands were raised by MPs in Parliament yesterday but Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier did not stray from the government’s position that it will not interfere with the Guantanamo trial.

 The Star

One child soldier’s story:

In his book, A Long Way Gone, [Ishmael] Beah reveals his teenage self as a ruthless child soldier, co-opted by the government. “The idea of death didn’t cross my mind at all and killing had become as easy as drinking water,” Beah wrote in his 2007 bestseller. “My mind had not only snapped during the first killing, it has also stopped making remorseful records, or so it seemed.”

In early 1993, Beah was separated from his family during the Sierra Leone civil war. When he discovered his two brothers and parents had been killed by the rebel army, he became a teenage soldier for the government, killing rebels and civilians alike.

Now Beah is a UNICEF ambassador, the world’s most famous former child soldier. He has spent the last year travelling, talking about his plight and recovery.

In February, when UNICEF protested the trial of Guantanamo detainee Omar Khadr, the Canadian who was 15 years old at the time of his capture, Beah started looking into Khadr’s case. Beah struggles to understand why he has been embraced despite the crimes he committed , while Khadr is being prosecuted by the U.S. with Canada’s support.

“I think one of the problems with this case is the reason people don’t have compassion for Omar Khadr, but have compassion for people like me. (It) has to do with how removed it is from people’s lives. It’s easy for people here to say, `Oh we forgive child soldiers,’ because it’s not affecting them directly,” he said in a recent interview.

“But you can’t say that one person’s life is more valuable. So, if a 15-year-old kid in Sierra Leone, in Congo, in Uganda, in Liberia, if they kill somebody and shoot somebody in the war it’s fine, but as soon as that kid kills an American soldier or … they are no longer a child soldier, they are a terrorist.”

The Star