Canadian immigration policy is a joke.Our pablum sucking Liberal government should be ashamed that they indirectly contributed to this tragedy by harboring known terrorist.
The Canadian conservative opposition is totally ineffective due to internal conflict and the socialist are using the opportunity to continue disastrous policies.Our only hope is that the U.S.A. reads the riot act to our Prime Minister.
Fidel's buddy.
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September 13, 2001
A conduit for terrorists
By Stewart Bell
National Post
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Tom Hanson, The Canadian Press
Members of Canada's diverse communities are affected by terrorist activities in their homelands. In 1999, ethnic Kurds rioted in Ottawa.
TORONTO - Reports that at least two of the terrorists responsible for the devastating strike on the World Trade Center may have travelled from Canada have again put Ottawa's immigration and counter-terrorism policies -- already under fire over the Ahmed Ressam affair -- in the spotlight.
But even if the suicide attacks at New York and Washington are not directly tied to Canadian-based terrorist cells, critics contend the federal government's weak response to the threat has nonetheless contributed to an international climate that has allowed terrorism to thrive.
Through negligence and indifference, the Canadian government has permitted virtually every major terrorist organization to operate within its borders. From South Asia to the Middle East, there is hardly a struggle in the world that is not dependent at least in part on Canada.
The al Qaeda group of Osama bin Laden, the Middle Eastern extremists Hamas and Hezbollah, the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, the Sikh militant groups fighting India -- all have a presence in Canada. So does the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), Mujahedeen, Al Jihad, Colombian rebels and Armed Islamic Group of Algeria.
"With perhaps the singular exception of the United States," Canada's leading intelligence official, Ward Elcock, said in his 1998 testimony to the Special Senate Committee on Security and Intelligence, "there are more international terrorist groups active here than any other country in the world."
Canada's vulnerability to infiltration by terrorists is deeply entrenched. Its refugee laws are probably the most lax in the Western world. Anyone who arrives on Canadian soil and claims to be a refugee is entitled to a hearing, a lawyer and generous welfare benefits. Government-funded programs pay for language training. Well-paying jobs are readily available, and for those seeking to hide out or raise money, ethnic communities provide both cover and a pool of victims.
Security background checks are routinely done, but it is no easy task to investigate someone from half-way around the world, particularly if there is a war or upheaval in the country, and especially when they are not forthright about their past, or even their true identity.
Given the nature of terrorism, it is hardly surprising agents of political violence seek out and exploit the weaknesses in the Canadian system to support their campaigns.
"There are a variety of factors which explain why Canada is vulnerable," Mr. Elcock said in his Senate committee testimony, breaking the agency's traditional silence on intelligence matters.
"Our borders and our coastlines are long. Our society, like all developed countries, is comparatively wealthy -- a source of technology, of equipment and funds. As with other democracies, our openness and respect for rights and freedoms limit the ability of the state to suppress terrorism in a ruthless, repressive fashion.
"We, uniquely among developed countries, exist alongside the United States, one of the world's pre-eminent terrorist targets."
The Senate intelligence committee's January, 1999, report noted that while Canadians have not been major terrorist targets, the country was a "venue of opportunity" for terrorist groups, a place where they may raise funds, purchase arms and conduct other activities to support their organizations and their terrorist activities elsewhere.
Facilitating the work of the hard-core terrorists are networks of sympathizers who operate within migrant communities. Canadian cities are probably the most ethnically diverse in the world, and some of those émigrés remain touched -- through family, religious and cultural bonds -- by violent conflict in their homelands.
When Turkish terrorist leader Abdullah Ocalan was arrested in 1999, hundreds of ethnic Kurds rioted in Ottawa. In 1992, Mujahedeen members forced their way into the Iranian embassy in Ottawa using iron bars and a sledgehammer. The Tamil Tigers have an extensive fundraising system in Toronto that finances the war in Sri Lanka.
"Canada is susceptible to the spillover from foreign wars and civil strife for a number of reasons: Its open society and relatively porous borders, its activist international policies and robust defence alliances, and the presence in Canada of various 'homeland' communities," the Security Intelligence Review Committee said in its annual report tabled in Parliament in October, 2000.
Sympathizers provide essential assistance to the terror campaign but assuage their guilt by limiting their activities to lobbying, donating money, or perhaps even loaning out their passports. But in reality there is no clean line between committing terrorism and supporting it. As the Federal Court of Appeal pointed out in its ruling on the case of Manickavasagam Suresh, the leader of the Tamil Tigers' Canadian branch, those who raise money to buy bombs are as culpable as those who actually plant them.
Like most Western nations, Canada was preoccupied with the Cold War when terrorist organizations began expanding their networks into Europe and North America. The bulk of RCMP, and later Canadian Security Intelligence Service, resources were devoted to counter-intelligence rather than counterterrorism.
But while Canadian agents were monitoring Soviet spies, conflicts in Iran, Turkey and India began spilling into Canada. With the Soviet economy in collapse and the East Bloc countries going their own way, insurgents and terrorists could no longer count on Moscow or Washington to provide them with money, weapons or safe havens. They were forced to create their own support networks, usually within diaspora communities in the West.
The push for an independent homeland for members of India's Sikh faith heated up in the early 1980s, setting off a wave of migration to the West, as thousands fled violence and a police counter-insurgency crackdown in the predominantly Sikh state of Punjab. Canada began accepting large numbers of Sikhs as a matter of policy, and the majority settled in Vancouver and Toronto, where they established temples, non-profit societies and ethnic newspapers that became battlegrounds for the war back home.
The militant faction of the community quickly seized control of the Sikh institutions in Canada, using them as a pulpit from which to advance the cause of Khalistan, the sought-after Sikh homeland.
Talwinder Singh Parmar, a Punjabi-born farmer's son, came to Canada in the early 1970s, worked at a sawmill and established a wing of the Babbar Khalsa, or Tigers of the True Faith, in Kamloops, British Columbia -- even managing to secure charitable status for the organization from Revenue Canada.
He set up an office in Vancouver that was called the Consulate of Khalistan. Enraged by the Indian government's 1984 attack on the Golden Temple at Amritsrar, the holiest shrine of Sikhdom, Parmar plotted his revenge, promising that planes would fall from the sky.
In 1985, bombs hidden in luggage were placed aboard two planes at Vancouver International Airport. One of the bombs exploded at Tokyo's Narita Airport, killing two baggage handlers. The other detonated aboard Air India Flight 192 off the coast of Ireland, killing all 329 aboard. It took the government until 1996 to take away the Babbar Khalsa's charity status.
The case of Iqbal Singh also illustrates the ease with which terrorists have operated in Canada. In December, 1990, Singh fled India for Nepal by taxi and then, using a false passport, went to Thailand with the help of an agent named Subash. After two months, he flew to Korea using a second false passport, then flew to Vancouver and Toronto.
His refugee claim was rejected initially, but he appealed and was accepted as a refugee in December, 1993. CSIS identified Singh as a "key member" of the Sikh extremist group Babbar Khalsa International.
His activities included "tasking members," fundraising, recruiting, organizing meetings abroad and in Canada and organizing protests. He was arrested and ordered deported, but before he could be sent back to India, from his jail cell in Toronto, he applied to immigrate to Belize. In exchange for investing in the country, he was made a citizen of Belize. Canada let him go and he now lives freely in Belize City. The worst Canada could do was deport him back to India, and it failed even at that.
Meanwhile, another independence struggle was moving to Canada. The Kurdistan Workers Party was established by Abdullah Ocalan in 1978 to agitate for an ethnic Kurdish state, to be known as Kurdistan, which would include parts of Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. At the Second Congress of the PKK in 1982, a long-term strategy was forged which envisioned a build-up to a full-scale uprising in 2000.
An important part of the plan was the killing of collaborators, mostly Kurds who did not adhere to Ocalan's hard-line militancy. Almost 2,000 were killed between 1984-91, some of them in Europe. Money -- $24-million -- to pay for the struggle was extorted from exiled Kurds in 1992 in Germany alone. Because of Turkey's location on the fringe of Europe, countries such as Germany and France took in most of the Kurdish refugees, but Canada became an important part of the international PKK network in the early 1990s and was used as a safe haven for militants who had overstayed their welcome in other Western countries.
Hanan Ahmed Osman, a.k.a. "Helin," came to Canada in November, 1994, using a false British passport. During a customs search, officers found she was carrying photos, documents on PKK military and political strategy and a map of NATO military and satellite installations in Turkey.
A diary was also found, containing notes taken during PKK training, CSIS alleged. Helin was deported but a second agent, Aynur Saygili, arrived at Mirabel Airport, north of Montreal, aboard a Swiss Air flight. She claimed refugee status but would not answer detailed questions and refused to speak to CSIS agents. She quickly took on a leadership role within PKK circles but was arrested in May, 1996, at the Kurdish Cultural Centre in Montreal and deported.
"As only a partial list, individuals and groups here have had direct or indirect association with: the World Trade Center bombing, suicide bombings in Israel, assassinations in India, the murder of tourists in Egypt, the Al Khobar Towers attack in Saudi Arabia and the bombing campaign of the Provisional IRA," Mr. Elcock has testified.
"The wanton use of violence to achieve political ends is contrary to our core political and moral values. I do not believe that Canadians want their country to be known as a place from which terrorist acts elsewhere are funded or fomented. We cannot ever become known as some R and R facility for terrorists," Mr. Elcock said. "In other words, and I will be as blunt as I can be, we cannot become, through inaction or otherwise, what might be called an unofficial state sponsor of terrorism."
But one might argue that Canada has already become an "unofficial" terrorism sponsor. A top secret list of Tamil Tigers "front organizations" compiled by CSIS lists the names of no less than eight groups in Vancouver, Ottawa, Montreal and Toronto, some of them funded with grants from the federal, provincial and municipal governments.
The federal government's response has been underwhelming.
Although Canada has no counter-terrorism law, the government appears in no hurry to correct that gaping hole in its security system. The Liberals have drafted a law that would deny charity status to groups that fund terrorism, but it has stalled, in part due to opposition from such lobby groups as the Canadian Islamic Congress.
There has been talk of a law that would ban terrorists from fundraising, but it is not considered a policy priority within the Department of Justice, which is instead focusing on the development of anti-gang legislation.
In addition, some Liberal MPs have attended rallies for the Tamil Tigers. Two federal Cabinet ministers, Paul Martin and Maria Minna, were guest speakers at a May, 2000, dinner hosted by the Federation of Associations of Canadian Tamils, which CSIS and the U.S. State Department have labelled as fronts for the Tigers.
The Liberals get their support largely from the major urban centres, such as Toronto, where the largest number of new immigrants live, The party fears that any anti-terrorism policies will be perceived as racist or anti-immigrant, costing it support. But crying racism is a ploy used by extremists with their own agendas.
What the policy makers in Ottawa have failed to grasp is that Canada's ethnic communities are the main victims of terrorists seeking money and support for homeland conflicts. Critics contend that Canada welcomes refugees from war-torn lands, and then abandons them once they arrive.
The seriousness of the threat posed by Canada's weak security practices came to worldwide attention after Algerian terrorist Ahmed Ressam boarded a ferry in Victoria, B.C. on December 14, 1999 and made the crossing to Port Angeles, Washington. In the trunk of his car, Ressam had concealed enough explosives to level a building.
His target was Los Angeles airport, one of the world's busiest. The plot was a made-in-Canada operation. Ressam had come to Canada as a refugee and lived in Montreal, where he was associated with a radical Islamist cell. As he approached the Port Angeles Customs inspection post, he became nervous and an agent ordered a search of his car.
The plot to "punish America" in the name of Islam was stopped, but only because one border agent had a hunch. Had she been feeling more charitable that night, hundreds of lives might have been lost. Her catch was a last minute save; the plot could have been stopped years earlier if the Canadian government had been awake to its role as a major terrorist base.
As Canadian politicians are quick to point out, Canada itself is not a major terrorist target. But when terrorists are using it as a staging ground, building bombs, buying equipment and raising money to attack allies, assassinate democratically elected world leaders and strike against civilians, the nation clearly has a serious problem. |
