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Article Excerpt
Abstract
In 2002, Maher Arar, a dual Canadian and Syrian citizen, was detained and accused by American authorities of being a member of al Qa'ida. He was deported to Jordan and, ultimately, Syria, where he was imprisoned and subjected to torture for one year. In 2007, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology and 10.5 million dollars (Canadian) in compensation. Drawing on contemporary theoretical accounts of multiculturalism, security, and the state, and utilizing parliamentary debates and American and Canadian print media accounts between 2002 and 2007, we examine the statements of public officials in Canada and the United States to show how the story of Arar, from his deportation to the apology, has been framed in contradictory ways. These contradictions spin on three main dualisms: Arar's guilt versus innocence; Arar's status as a Syrian versus Canadian; and the rule of law versus exception. It is argued that these contradictions are of tremendous theoretical significance for understanding the contemporary Canadian state as one in which multiculturalism and liberalism co-exist with racialization and exception.
Resume
En 2002, Maher Arar, un citoyen ayant la double nationalite canadienne et syrienne, fut detenu et accuse par les autorites etats-uniennes de faire partie d'al Qa'ida. Il fut deporte en Jordanie, puis en Syrie, ou il fut emprisonne et torture pendant un an. En 2007, le Premier ministre Stephen Harper presenta des excuses officielles accompagnees d'une compensation de 10,5 millions de dollars. Dans cet article, a partir de theories contemporaines sur le multiculturalisme, la securite et l'Etat, et en reference aux debats parlementaires de meme qu'aux media ecrits entre 2002 et 2007, nous examinons comment les discours officiels publics se contredisent, aussi bien au Canada qu'aux Etats-Unis, et ce depuis la deportation d'Arar jusqu'aux excuses publiques qui lui ont ete presentees. Ces contradictions decoulent de trois formes de dualisme : d'abord, la culpabilite d'Arar par opposition a son innocence, ensuite son double statut de citoyen canadien, mais aussi syrien, et enfin, la regle de droit en concurrence avec la regle d'exception. Cet article montre que ces contradictions sont tres importantes sur le plan theorique pour comprendre comment, dans l'Etat canadien contemporain, liberalisme et multiculturalisme coexistent avec un phenomene de 'racialisation' et de rejet de la difference.
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On behalf of the Government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you, Monia Mazigh, and your family for any role Canadian officials may have played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced in 2002 and 2003.
Although these events occurred under the last government, please test assured that this government will do everything in its power to ensure that the issues raised by Commissioner O'Connor are addressed.
I trust that, having arrived at a negotiated settlement, we have ensured that fair compensation will be paid to you and your family. I sincerely hope that these words and actions will assist you and your family in your efforts to begin a new and hopeful chapter in your lives.
--Prime Minister Stephen Harper
January 26, 2007
The case of Maher Arar, a dual Canadian and Syrian citizen, has captured considerable public attention in Canada and elsewhere. While traveling through the United States on his Canadian passport in 2002, American authorities detained and accused Arar of being a member of al Qa'ida, and then deported him to Jordan. Arar was ultimately sent to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and subjected to torture. Facing mounting public pressure, the Canadian government pressed for his return, which was granted in 2003, and eventually established a fact finding commission to also assess whether and how Canadian officials were culpable. As a result of this commission--which reported in 2006--Arar was cleared of any wrongdoing. Moreover, in 2007 Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued an apology for any role Canadian officials may have played in this extraordinary rendition, as well as 10.5 million dollars in compensation to help Arar and his family begin "a new and hopeful chapter"
In light of extensive media coverage of this case, its broad outlines are familiar to most Canadians and even many non-Canadians. However, as yet there has been limited scholarly and theoretical attention paid to the Arar case from the vantage point of racialized violence. To rectify this situation, we examine the statements of Canadian and American public officials between 2002 to 2007 to reconstruct how "the story of Arar" has been variously told by political elites both in the Canadian House of Commons and through the North American print media. Mindful of the ways in which these two powerful institutions shape public discourse through a complex web of inter-elite influence (Van Dijk 1997, 34), we utilized the search term "maher arar" to examine all relevant discussions in the Canadian House of Commons Hansard between September 2002 and January 2007. In addition, utilizing the term "maher arar" as a headline and lead paragraph search, we pulled articles from four significant newspapers in the United States and Canada. For Canada we examined the two English-language "national" newspapers, the Globe and Mail and the National Post, and for the United States we examined the New York Times and the Washington Post. A temporal division between Arar's initial deportation and his homecoming and then his homecoming and the government-issued apology served as the organizing framework through which we read the material.
In the tradition of critical discourse analysis, this paper focuses on "the way social power, abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context" (Van Dijk 2001, 211). As opposed to critical linguistics with its emphasis on grammatical and semantic analysis (Fairclough 2003) or quantitative content analysis (Druckman 2005, 257-275), our method involves a close textual reading (Kellner 1997, 7; Van Dijk 2001, 213) to highlight the way in which elite discourses interpellate subjects through particular ways of seeing, understanding and 'knowing' (Macdonnell 1986, 41), or what Stoler, drawing from Foucault, calls 'grids of intelligibility' (2002, 369). As the story of Arar will show, these grids shape not only what kinds of stories are told, but also what kinds of stories are possible. Indeed, the results yielded in the newspaper searches for both rime periods were quantitatively different, with the period from deportation to homecoming generating only 35 results and the period from homecoming to apology generating 497 results. It should be recalled that in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001 there was a re-securitization of policy and policy discourse in the United States and Canada around combating "terrorism," (Abu-Laban 2004 and 2005) and relatedly a narrowing of the bounds of legitimate dissent in both countries (Booth 2001; O'Neill 2003; Turk 2004; Thobani 2008). The comparatively scant media coverage devoted to Arar in the period of his deportation is one quantitative illustration of the way in which context may foreclose particular narrative possibilities.
By focusing our qualitative analysis on the statements of public officials, we show how the "Arar narrative" may be mapped in different ways. The dominant Canadian narrative posits Arar's case as a simple tale of guilt versus innocence, in which the federal government's commission ultimately determined that an innocent man was wrongfully accused. Yet, through a more critical reading of the statements made by public officials, we identify two other dualistic discourses lurking below and working in tandem with that of guilt/innocence. The first dualism spins around Arar's status as a Syrian citizen (foreigner) and his status as a Canadian citizen and full member of Canada's immigrant-receiving and multicultural polity. The second dualism spins around a tension between the force of law (where coercive power allows that racialized violence is possible) and the rule of law (where the Canadian government's commitment to human rights, both nationally and domestically, limits the force, or at least legitimacy, of repression).
Our particular interest in retracing the Arar case relates to what it may tell us about the contemporary Canadian state, its commitments to human rights norms and multiculturalism, and the ways in which these discourses of state serve as grids of intelligibility which contour the bounds of Arar's story. By contextualizing the literature dealing with foreign policy and multiculturalism within select state-centred critical literatures we seek to bridge liberal and critical analyses in order to reconstruct a more complex and nuanced recounting and analysis of Arar's story. We, therefore, argue that the dualisms in "the story of Arar" are of tremendous theoretical significance for understanding the contemporary Canadian state as one in which multiculturalism and liberalism co-exist with structural violence in the form of racialization and exception.
In making this argument, we take a fivefold approach. First, we overview the literature dealing with Canadian foreign policy and multiculturalism, as well as more critical literature on the state which draws attention to racism and violence. Second, we retrace the story of Arar by highlighting two important timelines--from his deportation and imprisonment in Syria to his return to Canada; and the period following his return up until the apology issued by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in January 2007. Third, we analyze the (dual) citizen dualistic discourse across both of these timelines, followed in the fourth section by a consideration of the force of law/rule of law dualism. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of explicitly acknowledging structural violence both for our theoretical understanding of the state, as well as human rights.
THEORIZING STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE IN A MULTICULTURAL LIBERAL STATE
One dominant grid of intelligibility, reflected in popular, partisan, and academic discussions of Canada, is the discourse of liberal human rights. Canada's commitment to human rights has been an important outgrowth of the post-World War Two era (Ignatieff 2000; Kymlicka 2007) and is routinely expressed as a Canadian national value to its citizens and potential citizens who immigrate (Jenson and Papillon 2001; Wilton 2008). The focus on human rights has round expression as well at the level of foreign policy (which in the immediate post-Cold War period explicitly took a focus on human security), as well as in domestic policy (for example, in multiculturalism). In this section we situate the policies/discourses of human security and multiculturalism within a broader theoretical framework that explicitly considers structural violence and the state.
Human Rights as Foreign and Domestic Policy and the Challenges to the Dominant Grid of Intelligibility
Canada's foreign policy has been critically important in shaping not only Canada's interactions on the global stage, but also Canadian national identity. In particular, owing to Canada's relatively strong emergence in the immediate post-World War II period, Canada has consistently pursued a twin-foreign policy track of expanding bilateral relations with the United States and increasing multilateral relations through work in international organizations (Macdonald 2004; Keating 2002). During the Cold War, this positioning was aided by a strong national consensus around pursuing a doctrine of "middle power" internationalism (Macdonald 2004, 292-293) which came to emphasize values of human rights, liberal democracy, and peacekeeping.
In keeping with the post-World War Two emphasis on human rights, in the 1990s Canada also began to pursue a strategy emphasizing human security. Although under the current government of Prime Minister Harper, human security has been less stressed, the human security emphasis was at its strongest during the years in which Liberal Lloyd Axworthy was Minister of Foreign Affairs in Canada (1996-2000). According to Axworthy, human security "puts people first and recognizes that their safety is integral to the promotion and maintenance of international peace and security" (Axworthy 2001, 20). From Axworthy's understanding, "the security of states is essential but not sufficient to ensuring the safety and well-being of the world's peoples" (ibid.). Of course, human security, while promoted by Canada in a particular period of norm entrepreneurship (Knight 2001), is not a specifically Canadian invention. As Irwin (2001, 5) notes, in its stress on respecting the equal moral worth of all people, human security is firmly entrenched in the Western liberal tradition of cosmopolitan ethics. This tradition also finds echoes in the United Nations Development Program Human Development Report of 1994, the United Nations Charter and Universal Declaration of Human Rights (ibid.) and even in the work of organizations like the Red Cross dating back to the nineteenth century (McRae 2001, 16).
Even in its strongest articulations, human security was subject to criticism. For example, the priorities emphasised in this framework (human rights and individual security) have been highlighted by some as limited or narrow, given that there are...
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