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.”
Although large chunks of the exchanges between Ottawa and its embassy in Khartoum have been blacked out by government censors, the heavily-redacted documents still show that the threat to kill Mr. Abdelrazik was being taken seriously by Canadian officials.
“The message is as shocking as it is clear,” said Paul Champ, one of the lawyers acting on behalf of Mr. Abdelrazik, who was finally allowed to return home last month after a Federal Court judge ruled that the government had violated his constitutional right to enter Canada and ordered him repatriated, after more than six years of imprisonment and forced exile.
“Canadian officials were told in no uncertain terms that Sudanese military intelligence would execute Mr. Abdelrazik if the Canadian government failed to repatriate him,” Mr. Champ said, referring to the chilling e-mail exchanges between Canadian diplomats in Khartoum and senior officials in Ottawa in March and April of 2006 – years after Mr. Abdelrazik was first imprisoned, apparently at the request of Canadian intelligence operatives in 2003.
“I wouldn't say that Canadian officials were necessarily giving Sudanese intelligence the green light to pursue a ‘permanent solution,' but what's sickening is they were clearly indifferent to that outcome,” Mr. Champ said.
Despite a stark March 21, 2006, warning to Ottawa from Canada's top diplomat in Khartoum that “this is, in effect, our last chance [to] keep military intelligence from taking expedient measures to deal with this case … and there is strong evidence that most of Sudan's ‘disappeared' did so at the hands of military intelligence,” Ottawa's response was ambivalent.
“You should restate our position and make no further comment,” Canadian diplomats in Khartoum were ordered in an e-mail marked “secret” from John Di Gangi, then the director of foreign intelligence at Canada's Foreign Affairs department.
The long-standing official Canadian position was that Mr. Abdelrazik's plight was consular – meaning a routine case of a Canadian imprisoned, albeit without charge, aboard – and didn't warrant special treatment, notwithstanding the shadowy and still-unexplained involvement of Canadian and U.S. anti-terrorist agents who interrogated him in Sudanese prisons. And while Ottawa wanted to the case treated as routine, the Sudanese were of the view that they had detained Mr. Abdelrazik at the behest of Canadian intelligence agents and now wanted Ottawa to take responsibility for repatriating the Canadian citizen.
“No consideration is being given at this time to any kinds of special flight for the subject's return to Canada,” Mr. Di Gangi added.
That was before the Bush administration added Mr. Abdelrazik's name to the UN Security Council's terrorist blacklist which – for the next three years – became the Harper government's reason for denying him even a temporary travel document to return to his wife and children in Montreal.
