Omar Khadr has spent his entire life as a piece in someone else’s game.
First, a child soldier, brought to Afghanistan to a war he didn’t really understand. It doesn’t forgive his actions, but let’s be clear here, if he committed a crime in Canada he would have been subject to a publication ban and he would have had his youth criminal record expunged. If you’re angry about that, I’m sorry you live in a civilized country.
But, he was a prisoner of war in Afghanistan, and as a result his rights were largely ignored. The kid was tortured – which is more about spite than gleaning useful information – and imprisoned in Guantanemo Bay.
Since being captured, he has become a game piece in politics, and has been ever since. At first, he was a symbolic prisoner, someone used to represent the mistreatment of anyone that might be considered a terrorist, whatever their culpability might be.
The Canadian government settling for $10.5 million has kicked him back into the spotlight, as the right wing in the country has decided that he is an easy villain. Now, Khadr has become a poster boy for terrorism in their view, because they want to depict their actual enemy, the sitting government, as weak on terrorism and somehow mean to veterans.
To be blunt, he is also a way for racists to be racist in a socially acceptable way, a symbolic scary brown person onto whom they can project all of their illogical fears about everyone who looks slightly different than they do.
The debate about Khadr has very little to do with Khadr, in the end. He is just a name, and to be frank most of the people upset that the government settled his case don’t actually know anything about it. He would have had a significant pay out from the government either way, whether it was through a settlement or through the courts - the treatment of Khadr was a clear violation of his charter rights, no matter what you think of his crime. The Conservatives might be crowing that they would have fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, which just means that they would have paid a big bundle of money for legal fees on top of the eventual, inevitable pay out.
My hope for Khadr is that he can be a person now, rather than a game piece, though I don’t actually know if that is possible at this point. He has not, at any point in his life, been in control of his own destiny. He has always been part of someone else’s war, whether that war was fought with bombs, with words, or with pithy images on social media.
Frankly, if I was him, I’d change my name, move to the Yukon and try to stay far away from the cynical political battles. I don’t know if this is the path he will take, but at the very least if we never hear the name Omar Khadr again, it’s the best case scenario for everyone involved.
