Thread: Australia climate deal threat ahead of Copenhagen

SYDNEY — Australia's commitment to slash carbon pollution by up to 25 percent was in jeopardy Sunday, as rebel opposition politicians refused to support the deal.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants legislation on an emissions trading scheme, which would cut greenhouse gas emissions by between five to 25 percent from 2000 levels by 2020, in place ahead of a global summit on climate change in Copenhagen.

But it is uncertain whether the bipartisan deal, which was agreed by the governing centre-left Labor Party and opposition conservative Liberal Party, will pass the Senate after several rebel Liberals said they would oppose it.

"We should delay it and if that means talking it out, that means talking it out," former Liberal minister Kevin Andrews said.

His colleague Senator Nick Minchin said he too would oppose the law, arguing that Australia should not make firm commitments until other nations put theirs on the table at the talks in Copenhagen set to begin on December 7.

"It's about what's the right thing to do for Australia and in my view the right thing to do for Australia is not to rush this legislation through the parliament this week," he said.

The Senate rejected earlier legislation in August and on Friday missed a deadline for the passage of the laws, sparking deep divisions among the Liberal Party which has committed to supporting the bill.

If the Senate rejects the bill again, Rudd could call a "double dissolution" election.

But Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard said Sunday that the government was "not interested in an early election" and wanted the legislation passed in Monday's extraordinary parliamentary session.

"What we are interested in is delivering action on climate change because we understand the consequences of delay. Delay is denial," she told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Failure to pass the cuts would be deeply embarrassing for pro-green Rudd ahead of the Copenhagen talks, with the prime minister saying it would jeopardise Australia's ability to be "fully active in the negotiations."

Australia, the developed world's worst per capita polluter, is responsible for about 1.5 percent of global emissions.

Coming from a human rights group or Opposition dominated parliamentary committee, the analysis would be completely unremarkable.

In an exhaustive critique, the author concluded Canada's decision to hand over suspected insurgents to Afghan authorities with a history of abuse violated Canadian ethical values, could turn ordinary Afghans against foreign troops and likely increased the stress of this country's combatants. The policy might even have contributed to the alleged mercy killing of a Taliban fighter by a Canadian soldier, she wrote.

What is surprising about the assessment is who penned it: Major Manon Plante, a Canadian army officer, in a continuing-education thesis completed earlier this year -- and now posted on the Department of National Defence website.

"Based on the Afghan human rights track record and its primitive prison capacity, how the Government of Canada came to the conclusion that the Afghan authorities had the capacity to detain personnel is perplexing," Maj. Plante wrote in her 105-page paper. "The decision may have been legal but it appears that it may not have been the right ethical choice."

The opinion was voiced in an academic essay and clearly does not represent the National Defence Department's official position. But the fact that a member of the military is so critical of her own country's detainee policy underlines the depth of the controversy that was reignited this month by diplomat Richard Colvin's blunt testimony on Parliament Hill. Mr. Colvin alleged that all the prisoners taken by Canada and handed over to the Afghans were, indeed, tortured, a situation he claimed was no secret. Two top generals and a senior diplomat have since denied there was any attempt to overlook alleged humanrights abuses transpiring under Canadian noses.

Beyond the political sniping over who knew what, and when, however, the imbroglio raises some more fundamental questions. How did the scandal emerge out of the sands of southern Afghanistan, could the previous Liberal government have prevented it by making different choices, has the whole affair had any impact on the Afghan people themselves -- and are detainees even an issue any more?

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

The story began, in a sense, with a grainy 2002 news photograph that depicted Canadian commandos manhandling alleged Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters -- a picture that deeply embarrassed the Liberal government of the day.

The Canadians were members of the shadowy JTF-2 special forces regiment, but Jean Chretien, prime minister at the time, had said they were not even taking prisoners. Then came the photo and admissions by his defence minister that Canadians were, in fact, detaining people. In those days, the commandos and later a contingent of Canadian infantry soldiers sent to Afghanistan to mop up after the 2001 invasion handed over their detainees to the U.S. military.

That practice would come under increasing fire, as the Bush administration announced it would not treat prisoners in its war on terror under the provisions of the Geneva Conventions and set up the spartan Guantanamo Bay prison.

Amnesty International was among the human-rights groups urging Canada not to give its prisoners to U.S. forces.

"Here we were passing detainees over to a government that was refusing to acknowledge the applicability of the most important law governing armed conflict," said Alex Neve, the organization's Canadian chief.

Yet Canada was operating then with a relatively small force under the oversight of the United States, noted Lewis McKenzie, retired major-general and military pundit. Transferring prisoners to the Americans "was the obvious choice," he said. Then in late 2005, as Canada prepared for its historic, combat-heavy mission in Kandahar province, the Liberal government signed a formal agreement with the Karzai administration. Coming after the scandal over U.S. handling of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the accord set out that Canada would hand over prisoners to Afghan security officials, with few controls on what would happen then.

Mr. Neve says Amnesty raised concerns about the agreement immediately, warning of allegations that prisoners in the Afghan system were routinely abused and tortured. A report earlier this year from the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission concluded torture had long been widespread in the country's prisons and holding facilities.

Regardless, as Canada arrived in Kandahar, it unexpectedly found itself fighting pitched battles against actual formations of insurgents, the type of combat that is bound to produce scads of prisoners, Maj.-Gen. McKenzie said.

That detainees might be tortured was almost inevitable, charges Scott Taylor, editor of the military-focused Esprit de Corps magazine. Many of those in the National Directorate of Security, the Afghan intelligence agency that handles most of the detainees, were former members of KHAD, the country's notorious Soviet-era spy agency, he said. "We were incredibly naive," he said. "Anybody who would think there wasn't abuse in an Afghan prison ... give your head a shake. It's a whole different, violent society."

Finally, a newspaper story in early 2007 quoted a number of Canadian-captured detainees as saying they had been beaten, electrocuted and whipped at the hands of their Afghan captors, setting off the whole debate.

However, there has never been a proven case of abuse against a detainee captured by Canadians, the federal government said in a recent statement.

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WHAT ELSE COULD HAVE BEEN DONE?

The die was cast in the detainee affair by that 2005 agreement, revised in 2007 to impose a more stringent system of monitoring the detainees after they were transferred, involving the Red Cross, the Afghan humanrights group and Canadians. Amnesty asks, though, why Canada did not do what it always has in previous conflicts: set up a prisoner of war camp that followed Geneva Convention rules. NATO policy eventually stipulated that detainees be handed over to local officials, but the alliance did discuss building its own facility, Mr. Neve said.

Dutch officials suggested that the Netherlands, Britain and Canada -- the three countries other than the United States most heavily involved in fighting in 2006 -- set up a prison, Mr. Colvin reportedly said in an email. In retrospect, "it was a NATO failure that there wasn't a NATO jail," Maj.-Gen. McKenzie said. But he does not blame Rick Hillier, the now-retired general who was chief of defence staff at the time, for pressing ahead with the transfer plan, given the pressures he faced in leading Canada's first combat operation in 50 years. "I would have done the same thing," he said. In fact, setting up a separate facility, either alone or with NATO, would have been a huge undertaking, crippled by the lack of Pashto-language capacity in the Canadian Forces to sort out who they had captured, said Mr. Taylor of Esprit de Corps. The concept envisaged by Amnesty, however, would have seen Afghans providing much of the staff for such a prison, under close supervision and training from the foreigners, a spokesman for the group said.

Canada's goal, however, is to build up the capacity of the Afghan government, prompting it to invest $5.5-million into upgrading Kandahar prisons, and provide extensive training on human rights and other issues, the National Defence Department said in an email response to questions. "Canada is not in the business of building or running Afghan prisons."

Yet even in 2006, the Dutch and British had signed accords with Afghanistan that called for much closer monitoring of their prisoners, a template eventually followed by Canada once the scandal broke. Those arrangements are still not enough, though, Mr. Neve said, as they are based on the concept of monitoring, which he said means unearthing cases of abuse or torture only after they happened.

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SHOULD WE CARE?

According to the National Defence email, detainees captured by the Canadians are primarily people who have injured or killed NATO personnel or Afghans or are suspected, based on credible information, of planning attacks.

No one suggests Canadian troops themselves have acted in anything but a humane, professional manner with detainees. Should we care, then, if murderous insurgents are roughed up in local prisons that have long been notorious for their abuses?

"We detained under violent actions people trying to kill our sons and daughters," Mr. Hillier said this week in rejecting suggestions that innocents were captured.

Amnesty International and other rights advocates, however, argue that any military operation in which Canadian troops are involved should be consistent with the country's fundamental values and its international legal obligations, such as the Geneva Conventions and UN anti-torture edicts.

"It defines what kind of mission we're involved in," Mr. Taylor added.

Maj. Plante's thesis quotes unnamed colleagues as relating a different type of problem with transfers: insurgents captured by Canadians and let go later by Afghan authorities, a practice dubbed "catch and release." Some soldiers have seen "the same individuals on the battlefields over and over again," she said. She also cites the case of Captain Robert Semrau, the Canadian charged with killing a seriously wounded insurgent after a firefight with the Taliban. Maj. Plante speculates that Capt. Semrau, who has yet to be tried, might have worried about how the insurgent would be treated if handed over to the Afghans.

"Capt. Semrau appeared to have faced a moral dilemma ... as a result of his experiences regarding the handling and processing of the detainees."

Then there is the question of innocent detainees picked up mistakenly. In a 2007 interview, a former warlord based in Kandahar city, Ustad Abdul Halim, told the National Post that several members of his Noorzai tribe had been swept up for no good reason by Canadian troops. Often, the real Taliban detainees would be freed after their family or supporters bribed prison officials, while many innocents languished behind bars, he said, though his charges could not be substantiated.

Mr. Colvin alleged that many of the detainees are simple farmers. When Canadians do not speak the language and view Afghans as all looking similar, it is inevitable the wrong people will sometimes be picked up, a problem that is bound to anger civilians, Mr. Taylor said.

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DETAINEES TODAY

Just how many prisoners Canadian troops have taken in Afghanistan remains unknown. In its email response to questions, the National Defence Department repeated this week that it does not divulge such figures for "operational security" reasons.

It has been reported that as many as 600 were taken in 2006, when Canada was involved in a string of conventional gun battles with the Taliban, but the numbers have undoubtedly dropped considerably since then, Maj.-Gen. McKenzie said.

It is possible even that Canadians are trying to avoid the detainee issue altogether. During a 2008 operation west of Kandahar city, some Canadian officers indicated they would leave any capturing of prisoners to the Afghan National Army soldiers accompanying them.

Yet in a statement this week, the federal government indicated that detentions and transfers continue. In fact, three times this year,

Canada froze handing over of detainees to the Afghans. Twice, it was because of reports regarding alleged mistreatment of prisoners, the statement said, once because of problems of access to the prison.

Meanwhile, David Bercuson, a director of the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute, suggests that the Geneva Conventions be revised to reflect the modern reality of insurgency wars, where the enemy -- rather than a conventional soldier -- wears no uniform, uses women and children as shields and transforms himself into a civilian himself when the battle is over.

Read more: A question of torture
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