Excerpt: Omar Khadr, Oh Canada

Four months after McGill-Queen’s University Press published Omar Khadr, Oh Canada, Khadr, then twenty-six years old, was returned to Canada on 29 September 2012 after being imprisoned for ten years at the US-run detention camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Nearly five years later, the current Canadian government has offered an official apology and “settled a multimillion-dollar lawsuit with Toronto-born former detainee for abuses that occurred during his U.S. detention in Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay.” In light of recent events, we revisit Janice Williamson’s edited collection in which over thirty contributors analyze Khadr’s background, his incarceration, the actions of Canadian authorities, and the implications raised by his legal case because the collection continues to offer important context to the current political discourse, both in Canada and abroad.

The following is an excerpt from Janice Williamson’s introduction, with links to the full piece as well as a detailed timeline of Khadr’s life, experiences, and key political milestones affecting his case and eventual return to Canadian soil.

Introduction: The Story So Far
By Janice Williamson

The Inside Story

The cover of this anthology pictures a sharp dialogue – a twinned trajectory investigating Omar Khadr’s experience and the Canadian world to which he expects to be released. We have gazed at images of Omar in photographic portraits and court drawings, but the screen-capture shots of his Guantánamo interrogation in 2003 provide an especially disturbing trace of the story – a diptych that displays the prisoner’s gestures of despair in a freeze-framed record of traumatic breakdown.

Omar Khadr’s critics look at his picture and see a man justifiably treated. Neither an innocent nor a victim, he is for them “the enemy” whose punishment cleanses us all. But others see Omar Khadr as a man – at first a boy – whose last decade has been barely a life. Canadian citizen and child soldier, Omar Khadr speaks back to many of us in the troubling echo of our national anthem’s opening words. In the title of this collection, the phrase “Oh Canada” is a direct address that asks us to reflect on what has been done in our name during the era of Omar Khadr, not only to the person but to our country. “To what world am I being released?” Omar asked in 2010 – and we might add, to what country?

Janice Williamson’s full introduction can be read here >

A detailed timeline from 1975-2012 can be read here >