Dissent from Iranian Revolutionary Guard emeritus

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

The only Iranian ever to have led his country in battle against the United States has sparked uproar in Iran by seeming to compare recent crackdowns on public dissent to similarly harsh repression enacted by the shah —who was overthrown by the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Retired Rear Adm. Hossein Alaei is the founder of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps navy, and in 1988 led Iran in a two-day naval skirmish against the United States in the Persian Gulf. This month he published an essay in the daily newspaper Ettelaat in which he raises hypothetical questions the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, might have asked himself after being forced into exile:

“If I had not ordered the security forces to shoot at the people and taken measures to calm them down, wouldn’t I have reached a better outcome?” Continue…

Afghanistan book reviews: The Savage War and The Long Way Back

By Michael Petrou - Monday, January 23, 2012 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

Readers hoping to better understand Afghanistan and the outside world’s involvement in the country since 9/11 have been well served by Canadian authors of late.

Terry Glavin’s Come from the Shadows: the Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan has been reviewed in this space already. Next up are The Savage War: the Untold Battles of Afghanistan, by Canadian Press defence correspondent Murray Brewster, and The Long Way Back: Afghanistan’s Quest for Peace, by former Canadian and UN diplomat (and current Conservative MP) Chris Alexander. Continue…

Cindor Reeves leaves Canada

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 9:26 PM - 0 Comments

Cindor Reeves, a man who risked his life to bring one of the most blood-soaked tyrants of the last 25 years to justice, has left Canada following a deportation order against him.

Reeves was once the brother-in-law of Charles Taylor, a Liberian warlord and then president of the country who is now on trial in The Hague, accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Taylor is there in large part because Cindor Reeves helped the Special Court for Sierra Leone build its case against him. Reeves did this at great personal risk, and without asking for anything in return. The Special Court put Reeves and his family in a witness protection program in Europe. Unhappy there, Reeves came to Canada and applied for refugee status. When he did so, Reeves lost the protection of the Special Court, which effectively abandoned him.  Continue…

Update on Iranian political prisoner

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 9:31 PM - 0 Comments

Behrouz Javid Tehrani, an Iranian democratic dissident who has spent most of the last decade in Iranian jails, was released late last month. I’ve written about him here.

On shooting a deer

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

London looks/Flickr

This began long before I was born. More than fifty years ago my father, 20 years old, attended a job fair for teachers in Toronto. The lines for local school boards were long, so my father applied for a job in a community on the north shore of Lake Superior called Pass Lake. It was farther from home than he had ever been. The recruiters said it was mostly inhabited by Danes. “Danes are good people,” my grandfather told my father when he got home. My grandfather had immigrated to Canada from northern Greece a few decades earlier. I don’t know where he had encountered Danes before.

My dad spent three years in Pass Lake, and another elsewhere in the north. It made a tremendous impression on him. Everyone hunted and fished up there, so my dad did, too. He’s told me about fish caught and deer shot so often that I can recite the stories as if I had been there. There was the huge pickerel that unexpectedly hit a Canadian Wiggler on a scorching summer day; the steelhead that was hauled out of the pool beneath Portage Falls and then fell back into the water when a poorly tied knot unraveled; my dad’s first deer, of which he was immensely proud, until a local man, blind and gruff, gripped its leg and pronounced it the size of a dog. Continue…

Musharraf must have known where Osama bin Laden was hiding: MP Chris Alexander

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 9:10 PM - 0 Comments

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf surely knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding in a compound a short walk from a Pakistani military academy, says Conservative MP Chris Alexander, who previously served as Canada’s first resident ambassador in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban.

“I can’t prove Musharraf’ knowledge, but everything I know about Pakistan’s system would tell me that he as chief of the army staff and he as president would have known,” Alexander said during a speech today at the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa.  Continue…

Canada, Syria, and Suncor Energy

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 12:07 PM - 0 Comments

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird says Canada has not blocked Suncor Energy Inc.’s operations in Syria because the natural gas it extracts is used solely to generate electricity for civilian use. It would be “negative, not positive” to cut off hospitals and families, he added.

This is, at best, is a dubious claim. Suncor’s partnership in Syria is with a state-owned company. Revenues go to the regime. Some of those revenues may be used to keep the lights on in hospitals. Some may be used to massacre peaceful protesters. Canada isn’t allowing Suncor to continue working in Syria out of humanitarian concerns.  Continue…

Gun control and the Toronto Star

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 1, 2011 at 2:41 PM - 0 Comments

“Tories delist sniper rifles, self-loading weapons,” says the front-page Toronto Star headline, followed by text in the body of the story claiming that such weapons will be “declassified” under the Conservatives’ bill to kill the long-gun registry.

It’s unclear exactly what the Star means here by “delist” and “declassify.” Currently, firearms in Canada are classified three ways: as non-restricted; restricted; or prohibited. Roughly speaking, most rifles and shotguns are non-restricted; restricted firearms include many handguns, and rifles or shotguns that are deemed to be too short; and prohibited firearms include automatic rifles, as well as some handguns. The Tories aren’t reshuffling how various firearms will be classified. A gun that was non-restricted previously will remain so. What’s changing is that gun-owners will no longer have to register non-restricted rifles.

The Star lists several examples of firearms its says will soon be “freed from the binding controls that now see them listed with the RCMP-run database.” It’s a little more complicated than that.   Continue…

Spain honours a Canadian who joined its fight against fascism

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 21, 2011 at 2:54 PM - 4 Comments

Jules Paivio

Yesterday, under grey skies by the banks of the Ottawa River, Spain fulfilled an old promise to a 94-year-old Canadian.

In 1938, Spain’s republican government was fighting a doomed war against a fascist insurgency led by the Spanish general Francisco Franco and backed with troops and hardware by Hitler and Mussolini. In a futile effort to force Franco to send his Italian and German allies home, Spain announced it would do the same to the thousands of volunteers who had come from around the world to share its struggle.

The Spanish government held a goodbye parade in Barcelona for the departing internationals. Dolores Ibarruri, the Spanish Communist leader more popularly known as La Pasionaria, gave a speech: Continue…

Taliban could have been our “best partner” to fight terrorism: Globe reporter

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 2:54 PM - 3 Comments

Globe and Mail reporter Graeme Smith had this to say during a panel discussion convened by This Magazine to discuss a decade of international intervention in Afghanistan:

“Afghanistan had a functioning country in some ways before we came in in 2001. That’s a qualified statement: the Taliban had been relatively successful in establishing a regime and you could argue that if you were looking for a partner to fight terrorism—a partner to take on al-Qaeda and make sure that the country would remain stable with some kind of rule of law—in 2001, your best partner would have been the Taliban.”

Afghanistan was neither functioning nor stable prior to 2001. It was a wasteland that at least three million Afghans had fled, seeking refuge in Pakistan and Iran. Many more were internally displaced. I saw thousands of them in the fall of 2001. They lived and died in shallow pits covered with scraps of cloth and plastic. They hadn’t run from American bombs; they ran from the Taliban.  Continue…

Iranian-Canadians fear Canada is becoming refuge for Iranian regime-linked officials

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 5 Comments

An impressive list of Iranian-Canadians, including top scholars, has penned a letter to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney expressing their concerns about the number of Islamic Republic regime-linked individuals who are setting up camp in Canada. Most notable of late has been Mahmoud Reza Khavari, who until recently helped run an Iranian state-owned bank that has been blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council for allegedly funding Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He’s now believed to be living in his three-million-dollar Bridle Path home.

“For years members of the Iranian-Canadian community have been concerned that high ranking members of the Islamic Republic of Iran and their relatives are securing residency status in Canada and funnelling their investments to this country. Our expressions of concern to various Members of Parliament are seldom given proper due, and are generally dismissed with mere suggestions that we proceed to inform Canadian authorities of any individuals with ties to the Government of Islamic Republic.”

[...]

“Turning a blind eye or failure to act by the Canadian Government with respect to Mr. Khavari would send a signal to other high ranking members and Government functionaries of the Islamic Republic of IRan that Canada represents a safe haven to which they may escape with impunity. Moreover, a display of moral clarity and vigilance by the Canadian Government will deter international figures with sullied associations from arriving on our shores.” Continue…

Bringing Afghanistan’s democrats out of the shadows

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 12:28 PM - 5 Comments

It is fitting that Terry Glavin begins his book Come from the Shadows: the Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan with a quote from George Orwell — who once said it is not enough to oppose fascism; one must stand against totalitarianism in all its forms.

Orwell, a far-left anti-fascist who took a bullet in the throat while fighting Franco’s brutes during the Spanish Civil War, was angered by the inability of too many of his fellow leftists to counter dictatorial thuggery in those with whom they shared a common enemy. Stalinists got a free pass because, ostensibly, they opposed fascism; they didn’t deserve it.

Glavin, also of the left, is frustrated by the limits of his supposed comrades’ solidarity and internationalism. Afghanistan’s democrats — its students, human rights activists, women, socialists and secularists — should, by rights, be championed and supported by the western left. They are, after all, fighting for the same things liberals in Canada struggled for and earned over the last century. What’s more, they’re fighting for these rights against an explicitly fascistic strain of religious and ethnic extremism embodied in the Taliban. Continue…

David Cameron comes to Ottawa

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 10:56 PM - 8 Comments

The invitation had been “dangling” for months but, British sources say, plans for British Prime Minister David Cameron’s first bilateral visit to Canada — and the first by a British prime minister since Tony Blair in 2001 — only got under way two weeks ago.

It was then something of a scramble to prepare statements and speeches. Quoting Churchill is always a reliable crowd pleaser on these occasions, and both sides were soon eyeing the great wartime leader’s “Some chicken! Some neck!” speech delivered in the House of Commons in December 1941. Continue…

How’s “reconciliation” with the Taliban working out?

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 2:03 PM - 10 Comments

Burhanuddin Rabbani, former Afghan president and chair of the body tasked with making peace with the Taliban, has been assassinated.  Continue…

Omar Samad on Mullah Omar’s public relations

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Omar Samad, Afghanistan’s former ambassador to Canada, tackles Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar’s recent letter:

For most Afghans though, the biggest concern remains Taliban ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), long accused of interference in Afghan affairs through different proxies. It is difficult to imagine a change in the widespread Afghan mistrust towards Pakistan’s ruling apparatus as long as the ISI continues to provide sanctuary and logistical support to militants, and exercise command-and-control authority through rogue elements over key militant networks. Continue…

The price of peace with the Taliban

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 3:49 PM - 13 Comments

I wrote earlier this summer about moves, in Afghanistan and in Western capitals, to negotiate with the Taliban an end to the war in Afghanistan. These efforts are continuing. Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar has admitted to contacts between his organization and the Americans — although he says discussions have been about exchanging prisoners rather than a political settlement. Credible reports suggest these have been much more substantial.

The prospect of a negotiated end to this war is tantalizing and becomes more so the longer it goes on. But proponents of a settlement need to ask, and answer, several questions about what such a process would entail. Continue…

DFAIT’s spinning on Syria and sanctions

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 12:57 PM - 4 Comments

When I wrote this article about the ongoing uprising against Bashar al-Assad’s dictatorship in Syria, the Department of Foreign Affairs’ webpage on Canada-Syria relations noted that Canada is the third-largest direct foreign investor in Syria, mostly due to a $1.2 billion Suncor/Petro-Canada gas project. The website was then amended to remove this reference.

It’s fair to assume that the Canadian government was embarrassed by the extent of Canada’s business investment in a country whose government has already slaughtered some 2,000 people. I contacted Foreign Affairs to find out their explanation. Continue…

Iranian police crush grave threat to national security

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, August 4, 2011 at 2:59 PM - 1 Comment

It’s beyond parody.

Access-to-Information: credit where it is due

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 6 Comments

Last month I wrote about the results of an access-to-information request to the Immigration and Refugee Board, which yielded some 4,000 pages on Cindor Reeves. Nothing in those documents changes my conclusion that the board, as well as the federal government, which intervened in the case through the minister of public safety, has shown gross incompetence and perhaps worse in handling this case.

I should point out, however, the the IRB responded to my access-to-information request quickly and thoroughly. This shouldn’t be worth noting, but given the terrible record of virtually every other government department I have dealt with on access-to-information, it is. Indeed access requests on Reeves made to other departments remain in limbo as I write this. Continue…

Update on Mansoureh Behkish, jailed in Iran

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, July 12, 2011 at 10:43 PM - 0 Comments

Mansoureh Behkish, sister of Toronto man Jafar Behkish, was released from Tehran’s Evin Prison on Saturday.

The government’s case against Cindor Reeves stinks

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, June 23, 2011 at 4:50 PM - 0 Comments

Since beginning four years ago to dig into the story of Cindor Reeves — the man who helped bring former Liberian president and warlord Charles Taylor to trial in The Hague, and whom Canada is now deporting — I have occasionally worried that there might be some missing piece of the puzzle that I didn’t have. Perhaps the government has information about Reeves that would explain its determination to send him back to Liberia, where he faces murder, other than incompetence, malice, and a perverted sense of justice. Continue…

Canadian man fears for his sister jailed in Tehran

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

A Canadian man who has already lost five siblings and a brother-in-law to the Islamic regime in Iran now fears for the life of his sister, Mansoureh Bekhish, arrested earlier this month and currently held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.

Jafar Behkish immigrated to Canada almost a decade ago. During the 1980s, six members of his family, all communists, died violently. One was killed in a shootout with government security forces; one was assassinated; four were jailed, tortured, and executed.

Jafar’s sister, Zahra Behkish, took a cyanide tablet when she was arrested. But Jafar, who was detained at the time, learned that she had been seen alive in prison. She was reportedly revived, and then tortured and killed. Continue…

Amrullah Saleh and the Afghan detainee controversy

By Michael Petrou - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 11:43 AM - 7 Comments

Amrullah Saleh was head of Afghanistan’s secret police, the NDS, during the time that Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin alleges detainees transferred to the NDS by Canadian Forces were tortured.

As near as I can tell, Saleh has not spoken to media about these allegations (though he has addressed them in letters and reports — including to the former Afghan ambassador to Canada — that have been made public).

I met with Saleh in Kabul. The bulk of our interview concerned his involvement in the political movement opposed to a peace deal with the Taliban. We did, however, briefly touch on the detainee issue. Here, for the record, is what he said:  Continue…

The cost of a peace deal in Afghanistan

By Michael Petrou - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:24 PM - 6 Comments

My second article from Afghanistan is about Afghans opposed to President Hamid Karzai’s Western-backed efforts to reconcile with the Taliban.

This movement is, I believe, consequential, and may present Afghanistan’s international allies with a biting dilemma.

“After a lot of effort and many, many hundreds of millions of dollars, you may reach that peace deal,” Mahmoud Saikal, a former Afghan deputy foreign minister who is now organizing against Karzai, told me. “But you will have lost the Afghan people.” Continue…