Canadian soldiers of the International Security Force watch a group of Afghan civilians being held for questioning near the site of an explosion in Kandahar, Afghanistan, May 12, 2008. A suicide car bomber attacked a convoy of Canadian troops that day in the southern city of Kandahar, killing a passing civilian and wounding two soldiers.
ALLAUDDIN KHAN/AP FILE PHOTO
OTTAWA–Who or what killed a Dutch- and British-backed proposal to build or renovate a safe prison facility for all Afghan detainees taken in southern Afghanistan?
It is one of the mysteries raised by diplomat Richard Colvin's allegations before a committee of MPs.
The Dutch proposal first came to light after a June 2, 2006, email authored by Colvin was reported by the Star last month. The email remains largely censored due to government concerns over "national security."
In a letter this week to the committee, Colvin further revealed the separate detention facility was "a serious proposal that in spring 2006 was actively being pursued and promoted by two of our principal NATO allies" who remained "interested through 2007."
It is not clear why the proposal went nowhere, although Colvin may have been partly responsible because he told Ottawa that the Red Cross rated Sarpoza prison in Kandahar province, where the Canadians were based, as the best of a bad lot in southern Afghanistan.
Colvin's June 2006 email outlined reasons the Dutch wanted to build a separate jail in Kandahar to hold detainees captured by Dutch, Canadian and British soldiers. Prison conditions in Uruzgan – where Dutch forces were deploying – were crowded, dirty and disgusting. The Red Cross gave it a rating of 33 per cent, whereas it gave Sarpoza prison in Kandahar 67 per cent.
The Dutch option was to have been discussed by Dutch, British and Canadian defence ministers at a NATO meeting in Brussels on June 8, 2006, but no public record exists of the talks.
No one in the office of Gordon O'Connor, who was defence minister at the time, responded to requests for an interview.
Dan Dugas, spokesman for the current minister, Peter MacKay, who was foreign affairs minister at the time, could not address the specifics of the proposal. But he said, "Canada's position has been that Afghans are sovereign and we are there to help them build their capacity in all things, not to do things for them."
According to Colvin, the proposed prison would have been a "sovereign Afghan facility, run by the government of Afghanistan, but with ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) mentors, monitors and management support."
"This would have ensured that detainees were held in appropriate conditions, free from abuse," he wrote in Wednesday's letter to rebut claims by Canadian officials that there was no option but to hand detainees to the Afghan intelligence forces' National Directorate of Security-run prison in Kandahar.
Colvin wrote that the U.S. renovated a wing of an Afghan prison in Kabul to international standards, and embedded American soldiers and jail guards to improve detainee handling practices.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a U.S. diplomat who served in Kabul at the time declined to directly address the issues Colvin has raised, but told the Star there were occasional reports of mistreatment in Afghan detainee-handling facilities. The diplomat said the U.S. – which also built its own prisoner handling facility at Bagram – was concerned that any mistreatment of detainees would damage Afghanistan's image in the U.S. and possibly put U.S. military and economic assistance to the country at risk.
The Dutch ended up transferring detainees to prison facilities in Kabul, according to Colvin's letter to the committee, where they could be monitored and "kept free from harm."
"The Canadian embassy proposed this solution, but it was rejected on the basis that detainees would take up too much space on C-130 flights to Kabul," Colvin wrote.
He said the embassy proposed another solution that was rejected: that Canadian-captured detainees be transferred straight to Sarpoza prison, which was under the control of the Afghan ministries of justice and the interior. The idea was to bypass the NDS facility run by the Afghan intelligence service.
A source at the Dutch embassy in Ottawa said only that the Dutch believed there were other ways of dealing with the detainee issue in Afghanistan than the Canadian approach.
A spokesperson for the British high commission in Ottawa could not shed light on why the proposal for a separate facility did not proceed, but said British forces handed over detainees to ISAF detention facilities monitored by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Source:.thestar.com/
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