Bashir Makhtal is a Canadian trapped in an Ethiopian jail. Two years: No charges. No trial. Here at home, his cousin has hounded officials and politicians for action. Only very recently did a senior Harper minister finally step in. What took so long? And why is Bashir Makhtal still in prison? Louisa Taylor investigates
Said Maktal is campaigning for the release of his cousin Bashir Makhtal, a Canadian held without charge or trial for the pas two years in an Ethiopian jail, Dec. 23, 2008.Photograph by: Chris Mikula, The Ottawa Citizen
Makhtal, Bashir A., writing this letter from an Ethiopian prison cell, in Addis Maximum Security Fed. Pol. detention center, in Addis Ababa:
Unfortunately, it was not possible for me to write this information before today. Even now, I'm writing it with maximum risk and in a very difficulty condition and I don't know if I'm going to succeed to get it out from this preson.
The words dash across the pages in a half-printed, half-written script. They are formal, at times almost bureaucratic, but they speak of anger and fear and hope, of a Canadian trapped in a foreign jail with no way to communicate with the outside except for messages smuggled beyond prison walls.
The letter from Bashir Makhtal is a plea to the Canadian government dated May 2007. He says he is an innocent man who wants his government to get him out. At this point he'd been in an Ethiopian jail for five months without knowing what the charges are against him.
He's still there.
Bashir Makhtal and about 100 other foreigners were swept up in "Africa's Guantanamo," a little-known chapter of the U.S.-led war on terror in which a series of illegal "rendition" flights took terror suspects from Kenya to Ethiopia, one of the key allies of the U.S. in the Horn of Africa.
Once in Addis Ababa, the detainees were interrogated by security officials, including agents of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Over subsequent months, the detainees were released without charge -- all except Bashir Makhtal and one Kenyan, who has essentially been declared a non-citizen by Kenya. There's no such confusion about Bashir, who has been Canadian since 1994.
Officials at Foreign Affairs have protested to their Ethiopian counterparts in Ottawa and in Addis Ababa. They've extracted promises that Bashir's legal rights would be observed (they haven't been), that consular visits would be allowed (just two so far), and that he would be given a fair trial (instead he was brought, blindfolded and without a lawyer, before a secret military tribunal operating in Amharic, which Bashir doesn't understand.)
The government of Stephen Harper resisted doing anything at a senior level until late last December, when Transport Minister John Baird visited the Ethiopian ambassador in Ottawa to express his concerns -- two years after Bashir's arrest.
Three weeks later, Bashir's case was sent to civilian court and he was moved to a less restrictive prison. He has now met his lawyer and had three court appearances, each of them adjourned for lack of a translator.
Yesterday, Bashir's relatives were allowed to visit him for the first time. He gave them a message for the Canadian government -- one he has sent before. "Please tell my government I'm never, ever going to have a fair trial here," Bashir whispered. Back in Canada, one person has lived and breathed this case as if his own life depended on it. Said Maktal is not a lawyer, or an activist, or a diplomat. He is Bashir's cousin, a 36-year-old chemical lab technician and Hamilton father of three. He and Bashir spell their surname slightly differently, but they grew up together and consider themselves brothers. Said is most at home with Bunsen burners and test tubes, but for Bashir's sake he has learned to lobby politicians, hound Foreign Affairs and organize demonstrations.
Said believes his cousin is no terrorist, that he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. At no point has Ethiopia produced evidence to suggest otherwise.
"I'm personally moved by the case," says Mr. Baird, who became involved after members of Ottawa's Somali community lobbied him to step in last summer.
"This gentleman was in a third country and brought to Ethiopia without any due process. It's just unacceptable, his experience to date."
So why didn't a senior member of the Harper government step in sooner to make sure the rights of a Canadian abroad were protected? Why is Bashir Makhtal still in jail?
To answer these questions we must ask another: Who is Bashir Makhtal?
In 1969 I was born in Ogaden, Ethiopia, and fled to Somalia in 1976, because of the Ethiopian seppression and its cruel atrocities. Since 1976 till I was migrated to Canada in 1991, I was living in exile without the presence of my parents, brothers and sisters. I grew up in Mogadishu, Somalia with my exiled uncle and did all my schooling there up to secondary, which I graduated in 1986.
It is late afternoon in the shady courtyard of a comfortable home in Mogadishu. Nine-year-old Said is playing dice with his 12-year-old cousin, Bashir. They make an interesting pair: tall, lean, soft-spoken Bashir and small, round, chatterbox Said.
But the two have grown close in the year since Bashir arrived from Ethiopia after his own father died. They share more than blood -- they share the name of their grandfather, Makhtal Dahir, one of the leading figures of the early Ogaden resistance in the 1950s.
The people of the Ogaden, the majority of whom are ethnically Somali, have long fought to be independent of Ethiopia.
The fight has become so bloody during the past decade that critics of the Ethiopian government make comparisons to Darfur. Ethiopia says it is responding to attacks by insurgents determined to win independence.
"The fact that we carry the name of 'Makhtal' means Ethiopia was always after my family, and so many of my relatives have been beaten, put in jail, you name it," says Said.
Bashir immigrated to Canada in 1991. Within a few months the 22-year-old was working as a security guard in Toronto while studying computer science at the DeVry Institute of Technology. He became a Canadian citizen in 1994, and soon after got a job as a programmer at the CIBC bank. A year after that, Said's family moved to Kitchener.
Bashir appeared settled in his new life, hard-working and perpetually answering work calls on his pager. But in 2001 -- after 10 years in Canada -- Bashir announced that he wanted to start a trading business
in East Africa, potentially far more lucrative than his bank job.
It was a surprising move that Said didn't understand until after his cousin's arrest, when he discovered that Bashir was financially supporting most of his seven siblings in Ethiopia, along with numerous nieces and nephews.
Bashir's business trading second-hand clothes took him all around the region — Djibouti, Kenya, Dubai. He would fill up a shipping container of clothes in one country and sell it in another for thousands of dollars profit. By 2006, he was successful enough to support a family, and in the fall he married Aziza Osman, a Kenyan woman living in Nairobi. A month later, he left on a sales trip to Somalia and Djibouti.
Under the rule of a Muslim fundamentalist group, the Islamic Courts Union, Mogadishu had become stable enough to be worth a look for an adventurous businessman. But the United States was deeply unhappy with such a strong Islamic force in the Horn of Africa, and was supporting the rival Somali federal government, which was widely loathed by the people for its reputed corruption. Ethiopia had troops in Somalia protecting the federal government, which was reduced to operating in another part of the country. Throughout the fall, Ethiopia threatened to invade Mogadishu to oust the Islamic leaders.
In early December, Bashir called Said from Mogadishu.
"He said 'Can you believe I went back to our old house?'" said Said. "He was excited. But by then I had no confidence in the situation in Somalia. I told him to get out. He told me not to worry."
A few days before Bashir's scheduled return to Nairobi, all flights to Kenya were cancelled. By the time the Ethiopians invaded on Dec. 23, his best chance to get out was to travel 1,500 kilometres by car to the Kenyan border. Somalis by the thousands were fleeing the fighting, many of them streaming to the same border post, Liboi.
On Dec. 30th, I was reached Kenyan border immigration through main and legal road to obtain an entry visa as I used to do in Jomo Kenyatta Airport.
Just outside of the immigration office, about 700 - 1000m, I was illegally arrested at gunpoint and taken away from me my freedom and my valid Canadian passaport, which is still on the hands of Kenyan authority to my knowledge.
Weeks went by and Said did not hear from Bashir, which was not unusual when his cousin was on the road. What was unusual was the call he got in early January from the Ogaden Community Association, asking him to come to the group's Toronto office. "Nothing to worry about, just come." Said went, assuming it had something to do with his late grandfather, Makhtal Dahir.
When Said arrived, one of the leaders took him into an office, closed the door and told him Bashir was in jail in Nairobi. His wife, Aziza Osman, had hired a Kenyan lawyer and sent word through the Ogadeni grapevine to find Bashir's Canadian relatives. Through his shock, Said got the message: It was up to him to fight for his cousin.
In the days that followed, Said called the consular office at Foreign Affairs, he talked to the Kenyan lawyer, he spent hours online and on the phone trying to understand what had happened.
The Liboi border post is a busy spot, accustomed to receiving waves of Somali refugees. By the time Bashir arrived at Liboi at the end of December 2006, things were extremely tense. Ethiopian jet fighters were flying overhead, villagers could hear gunfire in the night and the Kenyan government had beefed up security. Rumours went around that border guards had orders to keep Somalis out, lest they be fighters for the Islamic Courts Union, the fundamentalist group the Ethiopians were purging from Mogadishu.
It's not clear why Bashir, travelling on a Canadian passport, was picked up. Said has heard that his cousin was carrying between $15,000 and $30,000, which he presumes was profit from the sale of the second-hand clothes in Mogadishu. Said speculates that hungry border guards got a whiff of Bashir's wealth and used arrest as prelude to a shakedown. Bashir was never charged with anything in Kenya, although after the rendition Kenyan police alleged -- without presenting evidence -- that he was a financier for the Islamic Courts.
During the first two weeks of his detention, Bashir's letter says, he was bounced from one Nairobi prison to another and subjected to five separate Kenyan police investigations, each of which concluded he had not violated any Kenyan laws. Canadian officials and his Kenyan lawyer were allowed to visit him, and he told them his passport had been taken away.
Then during one interrogation, Bashir noticed that one of his questioners was wearing the uniform of a Kenyan guard, but was clearly Ethiopian in his looks and speech. "From that moment on, he was scared they were going to send him to Ethiopia," says Said. "He knew they were going to say if he's a Makhtal, he must be ONLF."
Ethiopia considers the Ogaden National Liberation Front a terrorist organization, but it's not on the terror lists of the United States or Canada.
Suddenly, Bashir had trouble getting access to embassy officials and to his lawyer, who joined other lawyers in filing a motion for release of the dozens arrested at the border. A hearing was set for Jan. 22, 2007, but within days a prison guard told Bashir that he and the other detainees were to be deported to Somalia the next day. Such a deportation is illegal under international law since Bashir is Canadian, not Somali, and terrifying to an Ogadeni because Somalia was then under Ethiopian control. Bashir managed to make a frantic call to his lawyer, who called the Canadian High Commission in Nairobi, but no help came in time.
Saturday, Jan. 20, Bashir and more than 25 others were led onto the tarmac in Nairobi, their legs shackled and their hands cuffed.
I refused to board the aircraft and screamed, on the runway, loud and clear, that I'm Canadian citizen and you have no rights to deport me to Somalia with Ethiopian Army and my life is in danger if you do so. I asked to deported to my country instead.
Feb. 16, 2007, Said Maktal is at the Sussex Drive headquarters of Foreign Affairs to show consular officials a priceless document: a letter from Bashir smuggled out of an Ethiopian prison.
It is the first anyone has heard from Bashir since the rendition flight almost a month earlier, and it confirms Said's worst fears: the detainees were flown to Mogadishu and then to Addis Ababa. In spite of repeated denials from Ethiopian authorities, the letter proves they have Bashir. Said's hands shake as he shows the diplomats the letter.
"I was thinking Canada is a big country that gives a lot of aid to Ethiopia, my cousin is innocent, Canada will bring him back home as soon as possible," recalls Said. "But I had questions in my heart -- some of those diplomats had seen my cousin in Nairobi, yet they let him disappear. Who am I, who is Bashir, is the relationship between these two governments (Canada and Ethiopia) more important than our citizenship?"
Bashir's deportation echoes the "rendition" of Maher Arar, the Canadian software engineer deported to Syria by the United States in 2002. Between mid-January and early February 2007, Kenyan security transported at least 85 foreign nationals from Kenya to Somalia on three separate flights. A handful of others were later driven over the border. Most of them then disappeared, only to surface months later in Ethiopian jails.
The sweep has been documented by human rights groups, including several reports by Human Rights Watch.
"There are 22 other people whose names were on flight manifests, whose whereabouts we don't know anything about," says Jennifer Daksal, senior counter-terrorism counsel of Human Rights Watch.
About 18 different nationalities were represented -- Brits, Americans, Swedes, Kenyans and the lone Canadian, Bashir Makhtal. "The detainees from the United Kingdom were flown to Somalia but the British managed to get them released there, before they could be moved again," says Ms. Daksal.
Once in Addis Ababa, many detainees report being interrogated by the FBI and Ethiopian security about the Islamic courts Union and the ONLF. At around the same time, CSIS agents arrived at Said's home. Said says they had been investigating Bashir's life in Toronto, and told him they didn't believe Bashir was an extremist.
Foreign Affairs won't comment on specifics of Bashir's case, but it's clear the prison letter changed little. The Ethiopians continued to deny having Bashir, and no official protests or complaints from the embassy could change that. Diplomacy had hit a wall.
"I was so naïve," says Said. "After that, I knew I had to find my own way."
He hired Maher Arar's lawyer, Lorne Waldman, and began to line up meetings with MPs to pressure the Conservative government to step in. He created a website -- http://www.makhtal.org -- to publicize the Free Bashir Makhtal campaign. He stayed up all night calling Ethiopia, cultivating sources in the prison and arranging to get some of Bashir's relatives out of the country. In the mornings, he called Foreign Affairs for news.
For a long time, they had little to say. In April 2007, Ethiopia finally admitted having Bashir and the others, but refused to allow Canadian diplomats to see him. Bashir, however, said plenty through smuggled letters and messages. In his letter of May 2007, he says that he was beaten and forced to record a false confession to various crimes. Two months after that, according to Human Rights Watch, a fellow detainee saw Bashir briefly and reported that "he was limping. He had a deep cut in one of his legs. He looked weak. He looked so famished."
Foreign Affairs say it has made "numerous high-level representations" on Bashir's behalf, including two visits to Addis by Alberta MP Deepak Obhrai, parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs -- but not until well into 2008, when Bashir had been in solitary confinement for more than a year. Sixteen months after his arrest, Canadian diplomats were finally allowed to visit him, with Ethiopian officials looking on. Around the same time, he was repeatedly taken before a secret military tribunal conducted in Amharic.
All my Human Rights were taken away from me and were abused. I don't have access for the justices, family, my embassy and was deprived the information. I'm not allowed to have radio or to get information from other people. I don't know what's going on in the world. I'm still in 2006.
For two long years Said has put everything into the fight for Bashir. He is tired of sweet talk from diplomats, empty promises from politicians, midnight calls from relatives. He's tired of struggling to be a good husband and father while also being a good cousin.
But sometimes, in the lab late at night, Said thinks about his cousin sitting alone in some windowless cell. That's when he'll take a break and say a special prayer.
"In Islam, we feel so close to God at night," says Said. "You sacrifice your sleep and you pray and you cry. You feel the feeling of being close to God, that He might hear you better."
Said's spirits got a boost last summer when several Somalis in Ottawa formed a group to focus attention on Bashir's case. They organized a strategy session with Amnesty International. Sitting in a room at the Sandy Hill Community Centre with 50 strangers who cared what happened to his cousin gave Said new hope.
"Whatever the case with guilt or innocence, this man deserves due process," says Fowsia Abdulkadir, a public servant and prominent member of the Ottawa Ogaden community. "So many Somalis travel in the Horn of Africa ... It's easy to see that if it happened to Bashir, it could happen to me."
In the early stages of Bashir's story, Said felt like the politicians he met were listening; John Baird, for one, told him last summer that Bashir's case was now "high profile." Said says he has seen no evidence of that.
He looks at the 2008 case of Brenda Martin -- in which a Conservative cabinet minister flew to Mexico to secure the release of the Canadian convicted of fraud -- and wonders why something similar wasn't done for his cousin a long time ago. Is it because Bashir is a black? Is it because he is Muslim? Or is it because the Canadian government doesn't want to help a citizen trapped in the war on terror?
Mr. Baird says Said's expectations were unrealistic.
"A foreign government can't just demand certain things from another government," he says. "The fact that you've got a senior minister involved I think shows the significant amount of attention we're paying to it."
Yesterday's visit from family was not only the first since he was arrested, it was the first time Bashir had seen his now elderly mother since she sent him to the safety of Said's family in Somalia at the age of 11. Although he tried to be upbeat in front of her, the relatives told Said they were shocked by how thin Bashir is, and they worried for his psychological state.
Bashir now has access to a lawyer and his case is in a public court, but experts say this is a time to step up pressure, not ease off.
"It is vitally important that Canada stay engaged in Addis Ababa and in Ottawa at very senior levels," says Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada.
"It's still disappointing that the prime minister has not become involved in this case, as far as we know," Mr. Neve adds. "That's often what it takes to get another government to take notice ... to very clearly convey that Canada is genuinely concerned and demands steps be taken to protect the rights of the Canadian citizen involved."
Bashir is due back in court on Friday. Said will be waiting by the phone.
ltaylor@thecitizen.canwest.com
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