General Says Canada Fears for Afghans

November 23, 2009, Ottawa, Canada (New York Times) — Canada’s top military officer said Sunday that on more than one occasion, Canada did not turn over Afghan prisoners to the Afghan government, fearing for their safety. The acknowledgment by the officer, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, the chief of the defense staff, appeared inconsistent with Canada’s assertions that such prisoners had not been tortured.

The brief remarks by General Natynczyk at a news conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, came amid a vigorous campaign by the Conservative government to discredit the testimony of a senior Canadian diplomat, Richard Colvin, who told a parliamentary committee last week that “the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured” during his time as second in command at the embassy in Kabul in 2006 and 2007.

Mr. Colvin detailed his efforts to warn the Canadian government and military about instances in which, he said, prisoners had been sexually abused, beaten, stabbed, shocked, and burned. He said that those warnings were ignored and that he had been ordered not to document the allegations. Canada’s practices regarding Afghan prisoners, Mr. Colvin said, were “un-Canadian, counterproductive and probably illegal.”

The government, which earlier used national security laws to block Mr. Colvin from cooperating with a military police commission’s inquiry into the prisoners’ fate, responded by attacking Mr. Colvin’s credibility. The defense minister, Peter MacKay, dismissed the testimony from Mr. Colvin, now assigned to the Canadian Embassy in Washington, as “hearsay, second- or third-hand information, or that which came directly from the Taliban.”

He said that Mr. Colvin had not witnessed torture and that Afghan prisoners lacked credibility because they are “people who throw acid in the faces of schoolchildren and who blow up buses in their own country.”

The treatment of Afghan prisoners has been a delicate issue in Canada, which has about 2,700 soldiers in Afghanistan. Canada began turning over the prisoners to Afghanistan under an agreement reached in December 2005, less than a month before Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government won its first election.

Amnesty International and other rights groups tried unsuccessfully to get a Canadian court order blocking the program after they found what they said was evidence of prisoner abuse. After initially rejecting those claims, Mr. Harper’s government signed a second transfer agreement in 2007 that it said included stringent safeguards.

Until Sunday, the government had only acknowledged stopping the transfers because of torture concerns once in November 2007. General Natynczyk said transfers had been stopped “more than one time,” but did not offer any details.

Mr. MacKay, who spoke at the same international security conference in Halifax as General Natynczyk, did not back away from his earlier position. “Not a single Taliban prisoner turned over by Canadian forces can be proven to have been abused,” he told reporters. “That is the crux of the issue.”