From this week’s print magazine. The story, in a nutshell, is this:

Charles Taylor’s brother-in-law, Cindor Reeves, risked his life to help the Special Court for Sierra Leone build a case against Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who controlled an army of murderous, drug-crazed child soldiers in next door Sierra Leone. Reeves is now a refugee claimant in Canada. Canada appears poised to kick him out.

All things considered, Helmut Oberlander, the 84-year-old veteran of a Second World War Nazi killing squad who has just been stripped of his Canadian citizenship and ordered deported, is extraordinarily lucky to have lived this long.

As a child, he first survived Stalin’s state-manufactured famine that killed more than two million Ukrainians in 1932 and 1933. Ethnic Germans such as Oberlander living in the Soviet Union were targeted during Stalin’s purges of 1937 and 1938, but Oberlander survived these as well. The odds against his long life grew even longer the moment Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Stalin deported hundreds of thousands of ethnic Germans to Kazakhstan and Siberia, where many were worked to death. Oberlander avoided this. He also avoided the fate of the more than 25 million Soviet soldiers and civilians who died fighting the invading Germans, or under their devastating occupation. Instead, he was drafted by the German army in 1941 and put to work as an interpreter for an Einsatzkommando mobile killing squad, a subgroup of the Einsatzgruppen task forces that murdered hundreds of thousands of thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet political commissars – usually by shooting the victims into mass graves. Oberlander’s unit was also issued a poison gas van.

How much choice the 17-year-old Oberlander had in his assignment is debatable. Many Ukrainians willingly collaborated with and fought for the Germans, whom they initially saw as liberators from a regime that had intentionally starved so many of them to death. More fought against them, recognizing Nazi Germany as a regime of unmatched genocidal brutality. There is no evidence that Oberlander ever killed anyone himself. The Federal Court judge who upheld his deportation order concluded that hiding his past involvement in a Nazi death squad deprived Oberlander of the right to Canadian citizenship. Continue…

Amount paid to Charles Taylor for his work on the reasonable accommodations commission: $182,187.50

Amount paid to Gérard Bouchard: $398,162.25

Bouchard’s explanation for the disparity in income is surprisingly simple: He did more work than Taylor did, and the two were paid by the hour. (According to Le Devoir, they both got $137.50 an hour.) Apparently, Bouchard could’ve charged even more, too. The Université du Québec à Chicoutimi sociologist says he worked for free from November 2007 all the way through to the final report’s completion at the end of March.

In the end, the commission came in way under budget—probably a good thing, considering the Charest government doesn’t seem enthused about having to actually follow up on the report.

Why are these men smiling? The very reasonable and accommodating Gérard Bouchard and Charles Taylor

“I don’t know many societies in the world where we could have had this type of exercise on such explosive subjects in such a serene context.” -Charles Taylor, as quoted by La Presse’s Yves Boisvert in his column today.

Quebec is a place where the past tends to speak very loudly, and it can be a confusing and schizophrenic place to be. Hope and despair are interchangeable; everything can be fine right up until everything goes to hell. It’s euphoric and fucked up, awesome and maddening. I love it.

Such was the range of emotions as I read the reams of ink spilled over the Bouchard-Taylor report on reasonable accommodations this morning and afternoon. Initial response: cautious optimism. By holding hearings across the province in which anyone and everyone could air opinions on the prickly subject of race, language and culture, no matter how ill-formed or hateful, Quebec underwent the equivalent of public root canal surgery. In doing so, the province held a very open and frank debate of the type you won’t likely ever hear in the rest of the country, even though you probably should. Not only did no one get hurt, the commissioners produced a cerebral, nuanced and at times ponderous report, larded with suggestions – encourage French, enforce secularism in the public domain – and feel-good bromides (see quote, above.)

Continue…

Marty’s post on the Bouchard-Taylor leak fiasco got me thinking, yet again, about what a peculiar beast the Bouchard-Taylor “commission” on reasonable accommodations is. Was. Uh, still is, until tomorrow’s news conference.

It’s still not entirely clear what Jean Charest was trying to accomplish by naming this commission. My very strong hunch is that he wanted to kick a nasty debate forward past the then-looming election and deal with the mess later. If his goals were as modest as that, it seems to have worked. If he was actually seeking wisdom on the proper saw-off between the standards of the metropolitan community and the immigrant communities (plural), well, he seems to have gone about it in odd ways. Continue…