International Human Rights Day

Involvement in the rendition to torture of Canadian citizens, residents and others; secret trials and
security certificates; and unjust imprisonment of its own citizens are just some of the violations of
rights carried out by the Harper government.

On November 29, the Harper systemic dictatorship announced that the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CHMR) being built in Winnipeg will not receive additional money from the federal government next year to cover projected cost overruns. The Department of Canadian Heritage says that museum officials will have to make do with the money already allotted to them. "Our government's commitment to the museum is unchanged -- $100 million to build the museum and $21.7 million per year to operate it," said James Maunder, spokesman for Heritage Minister James Moore. "That is our commitment, and there will be no new funds to the museum."

The Harper dictatorship's Bill C-42, An Act Amending the Museums Act and making consequential amendments to other Acts, received Royal Assent in Canada's Parliament on March 13, 2008, with support from all political parties, creating the CHMR as a national museum, the first new national museum in over 40 years and the first outside of Ottawa. Construction began in 2009 and is expected to finish in 2012. The CMHR budget is $310 million and funding so far is $100 million from the Harper dictatorship, $40 million from the province of Manitoba, $20 million from the city of Winnipeg, and $125 million in private donations.

Of course, the fact that the Harper dictatorship is promoting a "Museum for Human Rights" is ludicrous. The Harper dictatorship does not support human rights in any way, shape, or form. It only supports the rights of the monopolies under the guise of high-sounding phrases. The Harperites are violating human rights around the world. Abroad, the Harperites are engaged in an aggressive war in Afghanistan and just participated in the massive bombing of Libya. Plans are afoot for more armed interventions in Syria and Iran. At home, state security forces were sent to violently attack the G20 demonstrators in Toronto in 2010. The Post Office workers and the Air Canada workers were barred from striking in 2011 by government legislation and threats. A law has just been pushed through Parliament against the will of the farmers in order to destroy the Canadian Wheat Board. The treatment of Canada's First Nations speaks volumes of the Harper dictatorship's attitude towards human rights.

The CMHR was first suggested in 2003 by the owner of the Canwest media monopoly, Izzy Asper, an unquestioning supporter of serial human rights violator Israel[1] and a close friend of many of Canada's political and business elite. The idea grew out of the Asper Foundation's Human Rights and Holocaust Studies Program (1997). The current chair of the CMHR is Arni Thorsteinson, former director of Onex, a company which supports human rights by participating in the war industry via its ownership of Raytheon Aircraft and its partnership with the CIA front and Bush family-linked Carlyle Group.

Part of the CMHR will focus on the Holocaust.[2] It is likely that the message conveyed will be misleadingly similar to that of other such museums in North America. In general, Holocaust museum commentaries imply that the Holocaust occurred because the Nazis were just evil people. There is no provision of the historical context of the Second World War, no mention of the Nazis being supported by the big German industrialists, and no mention of the collaboration of the Anglo-American industrialists with the Nazis. There is also no mention of how, beginning in the 1920s, racist eugenic "scientists" in the U.S. cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists, many of whom would become the murderous doctors of the concentration camps.

Also omitted from such commentaries are the Zionist leaders' secret negotiations and deals with the Nazis. One example is the August 7, 1933 "Transfer Agreement" by which the Third Reich allowed Zionist leaders to send 60,000 Jews and $100 million to Palestine in exchange for an end to the world-wide Jewish-led anti-Nazi boycott. A second example is how in 1937, Nazi Untersturmfuhrer Adolf Eichmann met in Egypt with Feival Polkes, an agent of the Zionist terrorist organization, Haganah, regarding collaborating to facilitate emigration from Europe to Palestine. A third example is the 1944 agreement by Rudolf Kastner of the Jewish-Hungarian Aid Committee to remain silent about the mass transportation of 850,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz and to pay SS officer Kurt Becher $1.6 million in exchange for Kastner being allowed to take 1,684 Jews out of Nazi-dominated Hungary on a train to Switzerland.

In December 2010, various reactionaries began objecting to the content and organization of the CMHR. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress is the state-supported organization which in 1940 brought together all the most reactionary Ukrainian circles by illegally seizing the assets of the progressive Ukrainian organizations in Canada. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress and the so-called Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which exists to whitewash the war crimes of Nazi collaborators, began complaining about the CMHR's "neglect" of the "Holodmor." This is the name that they give to the mythical man-made famine in the Ukraine in the 1930s, a fable concocted by the Nazis and then widely publicized by the Hearst Press in the U.S. in order to attack the Soviet Union, communism and Stalin.[3] Recent CMHR announcements suggest that the reactionaries will be accommodated and that the "Holodomor" will now be given a place in the museum.

Harper aims to use the CMHR as a propaganda tool against the communists and other progressive forces by lying that they are "human rights violators" just like the Nazis. The well-worn term "totalitarianism" will once again be freely used to falsely suggest that the Nazis and the communists were the same, even though it was the Soviet Union who won the admiration of the world's people by leading them in defeating the Nazis. The CMHR is part of the ongoing campaign recently launched in Europe and North America aimed at falsifying history, blocking the forward progress of society, preventing democratic renewal, and concealing and continuing the crimes of imperialism against the working class and people.

The real victims who should be commemorated by the CMHR are the countless millions worldwide who have been slaughtered by those in power to protect and advance their anti-people interests. The victims include all those killed in the anti-fascist war, as well as the Palestinian people, the people of Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Mozambique and the rest of Africa, Indonesia, Chile, Argentina, Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya to name only a few. What is in the interests of the world's people is not a museum in Canada to push Harper's fascist agenda and divert from the deeds of his own dictatorship but a museum to commemorate all those victims of cold war "democracy."

Notes

1. More than 20 resolutions have been passed by the United Nations condemning Israel's violations of human rights.

2. The term holocaust comes from the Greek word holókauston, an animal sacrifice offered to a god in which the whole (holos) animal is completely burnt (kaustos). For hundreds of years, "holocaust" was used in English to denote great massacres, but since the 1960s, the term has come to be used by various scholars and popular writers to refer exclusively to the genocide of Jews.

3. The disinformation about the famine, which was first disseminated by the Nazis in 1933 and then picked up by the pro-Nazi Hearst press in the United States, was aimed particularly at the collectivization of agriculture by the Soviet Union as part of its program to build socialism. Many of the oligarchs who supported the Nazis had huge landed estates that they wanted to keep out of the hands of the people. For example, the family of Nazi Field Marshal von Kleist was one of the largest landowners in Germany.

Harper Government to Hand Over Detainees
to U.S. Torturers

The imperialist mission of the U.S. and its NATO allies in Afghanistan, including Canada, is a gross violation of human rights. Now, Canada and the U.S. have worked out a method to incarcerate and violate the rights of all those who resist their subjugation, further integrating Canada's military forces with those of the U.S. The Harper government has put in place an arrangement to normalize gross violations of human rights by handing over those it captures to the notorious torturers and abusers of the U.S. military. To its shame, this is the Harper government's response to its participation in the violation of Afghan detainees human rights in the notorious detainee scandal in which the Harper government tried to cover up its criminal role in the torture and mistreatment of Afghan detainees.On December 9 the Harper government announced that it had signed a detainee-transfer arrangement on November 18 with the Government of the United States to "facilitate the transfer of detainees captured by the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan to the custody of U.S. Forces at the Detention Facility in Parwan, Afghanistan." The announcement clearly shows that the Canadian military is still engaged in a counter-insurgency war against the people of Afghanistan,

rather than a training mission, as they constantly repeat. Making the announcement Minister of Defence Peter MacKay stated: "With the transition of Canada's combat mission in Kandahar to a new training mission centred in Kabul, it became apparent that a new arrangement was needed for the Canadian Forces to continue their important work in Afghanistan. The facility in Parwan is used by ISAF allies, builds Afghan institutional capacities and allows for Canadian monitoring of detainees."

According to the agreement: "Canadian Forces may transfer into the care, custody, and control of U.S. Forces any Detainee who:

2. Is assessed by the military forces of both Participants to pose a continuing threat to stability and counter-terrorism efforts in Afghanistan or to the safety and security of coalition forces or the civilian population of Afghanistan, or a threat to export terrorist violence beyond the borders of Afghanistan; and,

3. Is determined by U.S. Forces to meet established criteria for detention in U.S. military detention facilities in Afghanistan."

To cover up that it is a common U.S. practice to use torture in various forms against those in their "care and control," under the heading: "Treatment of Transferred Detainees" the agreement states that "[a]t all times while a transferred Detainee is in the care, custody, and control of U.S. Forces, U.S. Forces are to ensure that the transferred Detainee is treated humanely and in accordance with U.S. law and policy, and applicable international law, including Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions."

Then, to make it appear as if Canadians do not have to worry about another "detainee scandal," the agreement "permits" the Red Cross and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission to visit detainees. "Representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (ICRC) and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) are to have full access to transferred Detainees and the facility in which they are held, for the purposes of monitoring the welfare and conditions of detention of transferred Detainees." Except of course, the agreement states, "as required for reasons of imperative military necessity"-- which essentially means they can have full access, except when the U.S. doesn't want them to.

Outlining how detainees are to be questioned, the agreement establishes that Canadian officials participating in U.S. interrogations must do so on the basis of U.S. practices. "Canadian Government officials are to have full access to transferred Detainees and the facility in which they are held for the purpose of being present during and/or conducting or participating in any questioning of transferred Detainees. During such access, Canadian Government officials are to comply with U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) policies and procedures should they conduct or participate in intelligence interrogations, detainee debriefings, or tactical questioning of any person who is in the custody or under the effective control of the U.S. Department of Defense."

Concerning the mistreatment of detainees which will no doubt take place, the agreement puts responsibility for investigation in the hands of the abuser. "The Participant whose military forces exercised care, custody, and control over the transferred Detainee at the time the mistreatment is alleged to have occurred is to investigate the allegations and, when appropriate, prosecute those responsible."

The agreement then outlines how to deal with Canadian citizens who are captured and transferred to the U.S. "[I]f a transferred Detainee is subsequently discovered to be a Canadian national, U.S. Forces, upon Canadian Forces' request, are to return such transferred Detainee to Canadian Forces' care, custody, and control."

The agreement also implies that the U.S. may take its own "legal" actions against detainees, outside of the Afghan legal system. "U.S. Forces are to consult with Canadian Government officials prior to the initiation of any U.S. legal proceedings involving a transferred Detainee and notify Canadian Government officials whether any Canadian-sourced information will be used in the proceedings, as well as of the outcome of any U.S. legal proceedings involving a transferred Detainee."

Under duration, there is no end date for the arrangement. In addition it clearly spells out that the agreement is not even legally binding under international law. "This arrangement is not intended to have legally binding effect under international law."

Hidden Aims of the Harper Dictatorship's Canadian Museum of Human Rights

Notes

Harper Government to Hand Over Detainees to U.S. Torturers

Hidden Aims of the Harper Dictatorship's
Canadian Museum of Human Rights

Harper Government to Hand Over Detainees
to U.S. Torturers