Funding Planned Parenthood, but not abortion

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 1:14 PM - 18 Comments

A few months ago, Conservative MP Brad Trost was boasting that the government had “defunded” Planned Parenthood. But after more than a year of public waffling, the CBC reports that the government is about to approve funding for the group.

International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda has decided to approve a proposal by the International Planned Parenthood Federation to provide sex education and contraception in five developing countries…

The proposal gets around the thorny issue of abortion by asking for money for sex education and contraception services, and does not include abortion services. The funding is worth $6 million over three years for Planned Parenthood to work in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Mali, Sudan and Tanzania, where abortions are illegal except in cases where the mother’s life is at risk.

Can South Sudan survive?

By Matteo Fagotto - Monday, July 11, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 0 Comments

William B. Plowman/Redux

Hands moving nervously, her gaze staring at a nearby table, Sarah Clero Rial still remembers vividly the memories of her troubled past. Rial is Southern Sudanese, now a single mom with three kids and a job in both the United States and her home country; in 1991, she was just a young African girl living in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, after having barely escaped the civil war that was raging in the south of the country at that time. “Living in the South was really tough. There were continued shortages and a lot of tension, stabbings and shootings. Many people were killed or simply vanished,” she recounts. “When my family decided to move to the North, we took the last train from Wau to Khartoum before the railway was closed.”

But even if moving to the capital saved her life, being a Christian and southerner was never going to be easy in the Islamic and Arab-dominated North. The rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) were fighting against a government whose policies were perceived as pro-Arab and oblivious to the lack of development in the South, and coming from that region meant arousing the suspicion of the Sudanese authorities. One day, Rial’s life changed abruptly and forever: arrested for wearing a traditional African skirt—unacceptable in a city governed by strict sharia-based rules—she was tied up and put on the back of an open police truck. Then she was driven around Khartoum for the whole afternoon, as a warning for whomever might have thoughts of doing the same.

“People were throwing dirt at me, launching all sort of insults. It was really humiliating,” she says. She was eventually released, but deep in her heart, her decision had already been made. “My personal revolution started that very moment,” she says. “I realized that I would have never changed my habits and accept to be a second-class citizen in my own country.”

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UN to send 7,000 peacekeepers to South Sudan

By macleans.ca - Friday, July 8, 2011 at 11:56 AM - 3 Comments

The UN is expected to approve the deployment of 7,000 international peacekeepers to South Sudan, which is set to become the world’s newest independent state Saturday. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says the mission should focus on protecting South Sudanese civilians and encouraging military and judicial reforms in the new country. After decades of civil war with northern Sudan — ruled by Arabs in Khartoum — South Sudan faces a plethora of social and economic difficulties. More than 80 per cent of the population is illiterate, and The Sydney Morning Herald reports that there are fewer than 500 doctors in the entire country. Furthermore, key elements of a peace deal with the North have not been hammered out. These include agreements on sharing oil, which is mostly extracted in the south and refined in the north. Also, the border has yet to be precisely demarcated, and thousands of northern civilians are fleeing to the south amidst bombing raids and attacks supported by the north’s president, Omar al-Bashir, who is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court.

Sydney Morning Herald

Sudanese Army cracks down violently on rebels

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 12:22 PM - 0 Comments

Thousands of rebels in the Nuba Mountains of central Sudan are refusing to lay down their weapons as government forces loyal to President Omar Hassan al-Bashir attempt to violently crush insurgencies in the area. The Sudanese Army and its allied militias have reportedly bombed several villages, executed elders, burned churches and vowed to shoot down any UN helicopters entering the region. Thousands of people are flooding into a rapidly expanding refugee camp as they flee the violence. Rebels in the area are demanding more political autonomy, just weeks before southern Sudan officially secedes and becomes an independent country. The New York Times reports that there will be many other restive areas in Sudan, even after the south secedes. The areas, which include the Nuba Mountains, Darfur, Blue Nile State and Kasala, are home to mostly non-Arab peoples and have a history of tension with the group of Arabs who govern the country.

The New York Times

'I actually don’t know quite what to tell these folks'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 5, 2011 at 9:44 AM - 82 Comments

Glen Pearson deals with defeat.

It was expected by most that I would win and the media sent its staff to my campaign office to cover the victory party that wasn’t. It became clear as the evening progressed that the vote split between myself and the NDP was proving fatal. Yet I’d had something of a premonition of the outcome during the last few days of the contest. At doors I canvassed I kept hearing certain stories about how I spent too much time in Africa, or that my voting presence in the House wasn’t too impressive. When I informed them that I only spent one week a year on that continent (Sudan), and that I take it on my holiday time over New Years and on my own dime, I could sense the hesitation in their voice. “Oh … that’s not what we heard when the Conservatives phoned us last night.”

This week: Good news, bad news

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Good news

Dens Villeneuve earned a best foreign film Oscar nod for Incendies (Jim Urquhart/Reuters)

Hope, for a change
Barack Obama used to have some powerful political magic, getting millions of Americans to buy into his vision of change. But a deep recession gave rise to Tea Party-style fury among voters and dealt the Democrats serious setbacks in the November elections. Now, just two months later, there are suddenly signs of hope. The economy is slowly improving and Obama’s poll numbers are on the rise. In this week’s state of the union address, he promised to keep the focus on jobs. We’ll see if Americans are ready to believe again.

Glad to go
South Sudan’s overwhelming vote for independence might displease Khartoum, but it’s a key step to ending one of Africa’s bloodiest, most intractable conflicts. Two million people have lost their lives in the war between the country’s mostly Arab rulers and rebels in the south, and there was no sign that the two sides could peacefully coexist. Enormous issues remain outstanding, not least the two sides’ long-standing dispute over oil rights. But this clear expression of democratic will brings U.S.-led efforts to find a permanent resolution one step closer to reality.

Heartbeat of Hunan
Last year, for the first time, General Motors sold more cars in China than in the U.S., and enjoyed large sales spikes in Russia and Brazil, too. An increase of 29 per cent—2.35 million cars and trucks—in China helped the U.S. automaker close the gap on world No. 1 Toyota, and GM recalled 750 laid-off workers to its Flint, Mich., truck plant. At a time when the effect of Chinese exports is front of mind, it’s good to see a North American company holding its own in such a key sector of manufacturing.

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The hard road ahead

By Kaj Hasselriis - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Trevor Snapp

With South Sudan’s recent referendum on independence from the North, which is likely to pass when the preliminary results, expected on Feb. 2, are announced, there has been much talk about how the nascent country, with its overflowing oil wells, could be “the new Middle East.” But the road to prosperity in the region isn’t paved—and it’s not even properly marked.

Juba, the South Sudanese city that is about to become the world’s newest capital, has one million people and one road sign. It directs motorists in two directions: the airport or the “ministries,” a stretch that contains most of South Sudan’s government buildings. If you want to go anywhere else, you’re at the mercy of unregistered teenaged motorcycle drivers who don’t know right from left. They give directions to each other according to the tallest trees and how many traffic circles are in between. Figuring out where to go at night is even worse: there are almost no street lights in the whole city.

This is the place that John Kerry, the head of the U.S. Senate foreign affairs committee, is hailing as “the birth of a new nation.” Most of the people in South Sudan are excited, too. More than three million of them voted in the historic referendum that is expected to turn their region into the newest country in the world. But just because South Sudan is about to claim independence doesn’t mean it’s ready to govern. The inconvenient truth is that the undeveloped city of Juba is the most highly developed part of the state. In an area the size of Manitoba, there are fewer than 100 km of paved roads. Most towns are tiny smatterings of mud huts, teeming with hungry children and bored young people. There’s no central electricity grid, no safe running water and no organized justice system. The medical system is rudimentary and there are just a handful of banks in the whole territory. When it’s born, the new nation of South Sudan is likely to join Zimbabwe at the bottom of the United Nations Human Development Index.

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Provisional results show South Sudan votes for independence

By macleans.ca - Monday, January 24, 2011 at 12:06 PM - 0 Comments

Early results from South Sudan’s referendum show that an overwhelming majority—almost 99 per cent of voters—have voted for independence. The referendum was part of the 2005 North-South peace deal, ending Africa’s longest civil war which claimed an estimated 2 million lives. The outcome was widely expected because of the North and South’s longstanding differences over oil, ideology, ethnicity and religion. The referendum headquarters in Khartoum will announce preliminary results in one week.

Reuters

The view from the north

By Erica Alini - Thursday, January 20, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 2 Comments

Ashraf Shazly/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Millions in southern Sudan lined up this week to cast their ballot in a referendum to decide whether the south should split from the north of the country. After a civil war spanning more than four decades, and half a century of economic neglect and violent persecution at the hands of the government in the north, most people are expected to opt for secession.

Meanwhile, in Khartoum, which will likely be the capital of a unified Sudan for just a few more months, President Omar al-Bashir is “in survival mode,” says Richard Downie, deputy director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington-based think tank. Faced with losing a chunk of the country the size of Texas, the Sudanese leader, who led a bloodless coup in 1989 and is accused of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur, is left to ponder which course of action will keep him in power. Downie says that a slew of conciliatory public statements plus a recent visit to south Sudan shows that al-Bashir is resigned to the idea of separation, and is trying to make nice with the international community. But “he is going to be under a lot of pressure from the hard-liners,” those who don’t accept the referendum, says Stephen Rockel, a professor of history at the University of Toronto. To appease them, al-Bashir is going to need to look tough during negotiations with the south, says Downie. After the results of the referendum are made public later this month, the north and the south have about five months to work out thorny issues like where the new border will be located and, most importantly, how to share oil revenues before actual secession takes place on July 9. It’s over this period, experts warn, that al-Bashir could decide to flex his muscle.

A master in the art of divide and rule, the seasoned dictator may rely on friendly militias in the south to foment disorder and extract more leverage at the table, says Downie. And linking him to the troublemakers would be difficult, he adds, since armed scuffles could plausibly flare up on their own in the ethnically diverse south.

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Dozens killed as southern Sudan votes on secession

By macleans.ca - Monday, January 10, 2011 at 3:25 PM - 1 Comment

Violence has not stopped voters in southern Sudan from waiting as long as eight hours in line to vote for independence from the north. So far, thirty people have died in clashes in Abyei, a border region between the South and the North, where Arab tribes and southern Dinka Ngok are blaming each other for starting the violence. The referendum is the result of a 2005 peace agreement that ended decades of civil war between the Arab-Muslim North and the Christian and Animist South. The oil-rich South is widely expected to vote for independence, which Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has pledged to respect. Voting will end Jan. 15 and the results will be known in February.

CBC News

Hypothetical commitments

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 4:01 PM - 0 Comments

As referenced by John earlier, here is Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon’s exchange with reporters on the subject of child soldiers and Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict. Continue…

Mitchel Raphael on senator Frum, princess Di’s lawyer and new lyrics for ‘o canada’

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, February 26, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 19 Comments

A Senator’s busy retirement

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

Tory Sen. Linda Frum held a book launch in her home for Anthony Julius’s new book Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. Julius, a lawyer and professor, famously represented Diana, Princess of Wales in her divorce from Prince Charles. Diana knew Julius because he had helped her sue a newspaper after its photographer invaded her privacy by snapping photos of her working out.

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

When Diana asked Julius to represent her for her divorce, he had never done that kind of legal work: “This would be my first divorce,” he told her. Diana quickly said, “It will be mine, too,” and said they would figure it out together. Attendees at the book launch included Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and recently retired senator Jerry Grafstein, who is part of a group of investors interested in buying the National Post, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette, and who will soon launch the Wellington Street Post, an online paper named after the famous street that runs in front of Parliament Hill. The website plans to cover politics from a federal perspective.

Bev Oda’s hair fascinates

Photographs by Mitchel Raphael

Three years ago, Liberal MP Glen Pearson, known for his humanitarian work in Sudan, asked the government for aid for Sudan, and $3 million was approved. The money went to such projects as women’s centres that helped on the educational and micro-enterprise front. When Pearson was in Sudan this year, he took with him pictures of International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda to show the Sudanese the minister who had approved the funds. They were surprised to learn it was a woman who had approved the money, and also that she was not white. But the most fascinating thing for them was Oda’s short blunt haircut. Sudanese women are known for their elaborate hairstyles.

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Michael Mariak Jok 1992-2009

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 10 Comments

Michael Mariak Jok was born Feb. 12, 1992, in Kapoeta, in southern Sudan. He was the third child of Elizabeth Mach and Jok Tuil, both rebel soldiers who met in Ethiopia, where they trained with the Sudan People’s Liberation Army. Mariak is the Dinka word for “disaster”; Michael, as he was later known, was born amidst the country’s recent civil war, which pitted the northern Muslim government against the mostly Christian south, and ultimately claimed two million lives, one of the last century’s most brutal wars.

Kapoeta, the crowded, de facto capital of the rebel-controlled south, was a shell of a town. The hospital, school and many buildings had been flattened by bombs. Food was scarce: most people survived on three kilograms of corn per week. Disease and malnourishment were rampant. Queuing for water could take six hours. Elizabeth and Jok, who stood seven feet tall, lived in a mud-walled hut (according to custom, Jok’s children took his first name as their surname). Continue…

'It's unprecedented that Canadian officials were directly responsible for the torture of a Canadian citizen'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 24, 2009 at 2:27 AM - 7 Comments

Abousfian Abdelrazik files suit, on serious charges.

Mr. Abdelrazik, who spent nearly six years in prison or forced exile while his attempts to come home were thwarted, returned to Canada in June after Ottawa was ordered by a federal judge to repatriate the 47-year-old Sudanese-Canadian.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday seeks more than double the $10.5-million the Harper government paid Maher Arar, the Canadian tortured in Syria. The role of Canada’s spies in Mr. Abdelrazik’s case was “far worse,” than in the Arar case, said Paul Champ, one of his lawyers. “Its unprecedented that Canadian officials were directly responsible for the torture of a Canadian citizen.”

'Why is the government refusing to have a public inquiry to lay to rest some of these allegations?'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 7, 2009 at 4:03 PM - 7 Comments

Apropos of Abousfian Abdelrazik (remember him?) and the questions still unanswered, here is the text of questions posed by Stephen Harper for Prime Minister Jean Chretien on Nov. 5, 2003.

Maher Arar was imprisoned and tortured in a Syrian prison. Canadian officials may have been involved in his deportation. Yesterday in an all party committee of the House, members of all parties basically unanimously demanded that the government hold a public inquiry into this situation. Why is the government refusing to have a public inquiry to lay to rest some of these allegations?

Mr. Speaker, it is completely acceptable that we would get the facts from other countries but we should be getting the facts from our own government of its role in this case. Consular officials visited Mr. Arar in New York and Syria, yet somehow the Prime Minister, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and the Solicitor General all refused to accept any responsibility. What is the government hiding? Why does the government refuse to disclose all of the facts of its role in this case?

Mr. Speaker, on this side we are prepared to have a public inquiry to get to the bottom of the truth. The government should be prepared to do exactly the same thing. Mr. Arar, members of the opposition and members of the government are asking for a public inquiry. The Prime Minister’s own whip says that no stone should be left unturned. I believe the Prime Minister’s successor will hold a public inquiry if he does not, so will the Prime Minister, for the benefit of all of us–

Let us storm the beaches of Sudan, Iran and Guantanamo

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 5, 2009 at 11:13 AM - 10 Comments

Apropos of all sorts of things, here is Stephen Harper’s answer to a National Post questionnaire in 2004 that asked “What have we learned from the William Sampson affair?”

Stephen Harper, Canadian Alliance: “We’ve learned that “soft power” doesn’t work when dealing with regimes that only understand hard power. Liberals cling to this doctrine, but in practice it has failed time and again. The highest duty of government is the protection of its citizens. Canada must ensure consequences when foreign governments torture or kill our people.”

'Why am I here?'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 12:18 PM - 0 Comments

Dutifully covered by Kady, video of Abousfian Abdelrazik’s opening statement to the press this morning is available in two parts, here and here.

More from Paul Koring, Joanna Smith, Terry Pedwell and Andrew Mayeda.

'The facts … do not support such an inference'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 10:22 PM - 12 Comments

An official response from foreign affairs to the Globe’s latest report on Abousfian Abdelrazik’s exile.

The inference drawn in today’s Globe and Mail article is not supportable and is in fact irresponsible. There was no such offer, as was suggested in the reporter’s questions. Despite DFAIT’s unequivocal statement to that effect in our response to the Globe and Mail reporter, this conjecture was reported as fact.

We reject the premise of the reporter’s question and the inferences he drew in the subsequent article.

Furthermore,  the facts of this case do not support such an inference. Mr Abdelrazik was released from custody in Sudan in July 2006, despite his inability to return to Canada at that time.

Following his release, he lived openly and at large in Sudan with his family, during which time he remarried and had a child.

'Restate our position'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, July 21, 2009 at 12:48 AM - 10 Comments

Paul Koring delves deeper into the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik.

The Harper government was warned shortly after it came to office in 2006 that Sudan’s notorious military intelligence agency was ready to “disappear” Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen, unless Ottawa allowed him to go home, The Globe and Mail has learned. Sudan wanted to “deal with this case for once and for all: we judge as significant their verbal reference to a ‘permanent solution,’” Ottawa was bluntly told by Canadian diplomats in the Sudanese capital, according to documents now in possession of The Globe.

Instead of protesting the threat or warning Sudan – a regime notorious for its human rights abuses – that Ottawa would hold it responsible if harm came to a Canadian citizen held in one of its prisons, diplomats in Khartoum were ordered by a senior Canadian intelligence official to deliver a non-committal response “notwithstanding the expected displeasure of the Sudanese.”

'I am here'

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 5:05 PM - 2 Comments

Abousfian Abdelrazik’s homecoming, twittered.

More from Canadian Press, Canwest and CTV. Video of the scene here. And, from earlier this week, Maher Arar’s plea for greater oversight of our national security agency.

Canadians deserve to know why so many of this country’s citizens, all of Muslim background, have been imprisoned and tortured abroad. Human-rights organizations, activists and national-security experts have been calling for the current government to establish the credible oversight agency that was recommended by Judge O’Connor several years ago. Their calls have landed on deaf ears. How many more victims will it take before our government realizes that it needs to act?

What now?

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, June 20, 2009 at 4:35 PM - 4 Comments

While Gerald Caplan details his outrage, Paul Koring raises new questions about this country’s treatment of Abousfian Abdelrazik. Last month, Ben Peterson raised a question that may soon be operative here too: should we consider prosecuting any Canadian officials complicit in torture?

Yes, high-level arrests could spark political controversy. But bypassing the law for fear of a backlash is cowardly and counterproductive. It would, in the long run, weaken our collective ability to fight for justice in the face of tyranny. It would undermine the rule of law. While the prosecution of high-level officials should never be encouraged, if they broke the law, they broke the law. Surely our democracy is strong enough to withstand the fallout…

Perhaps, once the staggering factual and legal complexities involved are sorted through, it will be determined that no Canadian officials should be prosecuted. I hope that’s the case. But these mazes should be navigated not with an eye for history alone, but also to potentially prosecute those involved.

Indefatigable in the cause of justice

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 19, 2009 at 12:09 PM - 10 Comments

Glen Pearson salutes Paul Dewar.

But the one person who stuck on this file and deserves full praise for the victory yesterday was the NDP’s Paul Dewar. Simply put, I found him indefatigable in the cause of justice for Abdelrazik. And I speak from personal experience, as we both sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee.  Against all odds, Dewar exhausted every parliamentarian option, time after time, not just in an attempt to exonerate an innocent citizen, but to prove that the Canadian parliament could be relevant in such a case. I watched as the government members of the committee fought him vociferously. But he worked the system  - very well. In key votes on the case, the three opposition parties worked together and won by one vote each time, Paul’s example being the key cause. I witnessed the discouragement on his face every time as the government refused to abide by the will of the committee on this. I would even text him on his Blackberry during committee in an attempt to keep him assured.  The hardest day came only three weeks ago, when the Foreign Affairs Minister pointed his finger in anger at Dewar over the issue, in a manner that was beneath the conduct of someone in such an exalted position.

The unanswered questions

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 8:46 PM - 16 Comments

Awhile after the Justice Minister’s unexpected announcement, Paul Dewar stood and asked if Stockwell Day or Vic Toews had, in their previous portfolios, received a request from the U.S. ambassador or the White House that Abousfian Abdelrazik be prevented from returning to Canada.

This would seem to be what prompted that question.

The Commons: And then, suddenly, an answer

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 6:27 PM - 23 Comments

The Scene. It was not otherwise a particularly remarkable day.

The Liberals persisted in asking the government to account for the current shortage of medical isotopes. The government insisted on doing no such thing. Jack Layton pouted about not receiving an invitation to the Prime Minister’s afternoon tea with Michael Ignatieff the other day. The Prime Minister jabbed his finger and waved his arms and declared the NDP an annoyance. John Baird scorned Mr. Layton with one answer and congratulated him on the birth of his granddaughter—Beatrice Dora Campbell, eight pounds and one ounce, born 12:03am Wednesday morning to Jack’s daughter Sarah—with the next.

Not even the early appearance of Irwin Cotler, the former justice minister rising immediately after Michael Ignatieff had dispensed with his three questions, seemed a cause for much concern. With the House breaking tomorrow for the summer, it appeared the Liberals were merely giving the venerable old lawyer a ceremonial opportunity to register a couple long-held grievances.

He asked first about Omar Khadr. Deepak Obhrai, the foreign affairs minister’s parliamentary secretary, rose with the perfunctory answer.

Mr. Cotler moved to the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, the Canadian still bunking at our embassy in Sudan, awaiting an answer to the cruel riddle of his situation. “Mr. Speaker, Abousfian Abdelrazik is another abandoned Canadian citizen. In spite of the Federal Court’s severe rebuke, this government continues to violate Mr. Abdelrazik’s rights by refusing to bring him home,” Mr. Cotler posited. “The government has had two weeks to read a judgment that is unequivocal in its findings of fact and conclusions of law. Every day it waits is a continued violation of Mr. Abdelrazik’s rights. Does the government plan on appealing the court’s decision while delaying justice at Mr. Abdelrazik’s expense, or will it heed the court’s order and immediately return Mr. Abdelrazik home to Canada?”

It was here that something truly astonishing happened. Continue…