Captive in Canada

My brother’s three months in solitary

Source: Toronto Star - 6-apr-08

In the end, his charges were stayed. ‘The authorities ruined my brother’s future, his reputation and abused him physically and psychologically - all for, according to them, absolutely no reason’

Anonymous
Special to the Star

A time comes when silence is betrayal. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers and sisters.

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

It’s been nearly two years since the raid on our house, since the day they took my brother and another relative. Since that day, my family and I have lived in silence. It’s an emotional topic for me and talking about it means reliving that pain all over again. But I feel obliged to let Canadians know about our experience and what we continue to experience each and every single day.

It was June 2, 2006 - around 11 p.m. That night was a nightmare for me and my family. Earlier that day, a relative was arrested while coming home after grocery shopping. We sat at home, in shock, wondering what had just happened. None of us shed a tear, I guess out of sheer disbelief. It was getting late, and my other brother wasn’t home yet. He’d been out with his friends. So my mother and I went out looking for him. We were just around the corner of our house when a pack of cars stopped at the end of the street and the SWAT team came running towards our house pointing guns at us. As soon as we got inside, they broke in, all the while yelling at us, asking us all to come down to the front door.

One by one they called us out of the house to be searched. My dad was the first to go. He had been in such a shock that after he’d heard about our relative’s arrest, he’d gone back to his room and started working on his business files. And when he came down, he’d brought his papers and pen with him to the door. One of the officers glanced at the papers and pen in his hands and yelled at him: “DROP YOUR WEAPONS! DROP YOUR WEAPONS RIGHT NOW!” And with all those guns pointing at us I thought to myself, what were they expecting my father to do? Hit them with a pen? They pulled my dad by his collar and he tripped. I asked them to go easy on my father because he was already in a state of shock. Their reply made me feel sick to my stomach. They said: “We know that already, that’s what we have the ambulance for.”

Then they handcuffed him and took him for questioning, and we didn’t see him for the next couple of hours. They searched us all and then had us wait outside in the rain with babies in our arms. They waited for my brother to come home, and when he did they put him in a car and took him. We didn’t know where he was taken and what had happened to him. They finally told us that they had actually arrested him. We spent the night at our neighbours’. The next morning we received a call from my brother; he told us he was being held at a police station. I asked him how he was and he told me not to worry, but I could hear the quiver in his voice. I knew he was only trying to be strong so as not to hurt us.

The drive to the courthouse was, again, like nothing I had ever experienced before. At first, we didn’t even know how to get to the Brampton courthouse. It’s actually a bit humorous how we tried to find our way to court. We saw helicopters above our car and simply decided to follow their lead, and that landed us right at the courthouse. The moment we got out of the car we were surrounded by swarms of media, cameras and microphones shoved in our faces. Despite us asking them to leave us alone, they continued to hassle us until we had finally got in.

But our ordeal didn’t end with that. After being searched and sniffed by dogs, we were asked to wait in a long line of people to get into the courtroom. They were allowing only 50 people inside, and most of the people ahead of us were non-family members.

I remember seeing my brother in the courtroom, shackled and handcuffed with the other accused. They were escorted in groups of five. You could even hear the rattling of the chains before they entered the courtroom. I remember seeing them all with weak smiles reassuring their families that they were all right when they really weren’t, and that we - the families - had to be strong. Even these minor attempts to reassure us were stopped by the guards. They made sure that the accused made no eye contact or had any sort of communication with their families. The guards were intimidating. It’s like they were implicitly telling us that our brothers were now under their control. I recall a relative telling me once about his first night at Maplehurst prison. He said the officers had dragged him by his neck and choked him until he couldn’t breathe and then one of them said to him: “I own you now. You do what I say. You eat when I say you eat, you sleep when I say you sleep and you sh– when I say you sh–.” This was repeated with all of them at Maplehurst.

My brother shared with me his anguish on his first night. He said:

“When I got out of the car I was surrounded by police dogs, SWAT team, and the bright camera flashes and the reporters screaming. I went inside and I was strip-searched. For the first time in my life I felt so humiliated. Then I was put in a cell for about five hours or so till it was early morning and the whole night I couldn’t sleep because of the cold concrete bench, and there was no water so I was really thirsty. But when I’d ask for water or my sweater back so that at least I could sleep or something, they’d just say, `Its not a f—–n’ hotel.’”

He told me how the thing he hated the most was dealing with the guards. They would throw him on the ground, shackle him and handcuff him and then make him crawl all the way to his cell. For the first two days they had no water, no toilet paper, just a cold cell room with a concrete bench and no pillows or blanket. The windows were covered so that they couldn’t see outside the door or window.

He was kept in solitary confinement for almost three months until he was released on bail under strict conditions. When I was preparing this article, I had asked my brother to write about how he felt when he was released on bail and what would he want people to know.

He wrote: “When I was released I was so happy to be back with my family but the house arrest conditions that were put on me didn’t make it any different. That went on for a year and in that time I had given my family a very hard time. I couldn’t go to sleep at night without taking my anti-depressants. I couldn’t talk to someone for more than half an hour without losing my temper over something small. I couldn’t have more than three people around me because it’d get hard for me to breathe. I’d get angry at something I wouldn’t even remember but then I’d just black out and 20 minutes later there would be broken furniture around me.

“Yes I have seen the psychiatrist many times and I was told that I have post-traumatic stress syndrome and I was prescribed anti-depressants. I didn’t go through any treatment simply because I was told that whatever I am going through will stop as soon as I was out on bail. Now I’m released from bail and I barely have any conditions but nothing much has changed. I’m still not even close to being the same person as I was before the arrest. I’m a completely different man, someone who keeps asking himself if he’s really gone crazy … I suffer from memory loss sometimes.

“After I came out from jail a lot of my old friends came up to me and I barely remembered any of them. And that was something that really scared me because I had been to school with these people. A lot of things have changed in me and I still get nightmares about the times I was inside. I still have my anger problems and sleeping disorder. People don’t look at me as they’d look at a normal person. Either they are really scared of me, or they feel really sorry for me that they end up looking at me like I’m just a crazy person.”

My other relative continues to suffer in solitary confinement along with two of the other accused. According to a study by the Correctional Services of Canada, those who went through enforced segregation for 60 days suffered from “poorer mental health and psychological functioning.”

The three detainees at the Don Jail have now spent more than 600 days in solitary confinement.

I don’t understand why they were treated like that and why the young men at Maplehurst and the Don Jail continue to be treated as though they’ve already been convicted. Why are they deprived of basic rights that are given to every other inmate? I wonder if it’s because of their faith.

The accused, my relatives included, have suffered through obvious forms of degradation, humiliation, discrimination, oppression and exploitation by the media and law enforcement. And eventually, in the case of my brother, he was let go with all his charges stayed.

You and I live in a country that is supposed to be the fortress of education, freedom, justice, democracy and all those other pretty-sounding words. And yet the authorities ruined my brother’s future, his reputation and abused him physically and psychologically - all for, according to them, absolutely no reason.

They say it’s for no reason, but those of us close to the situation know very well what the reason was. My brother was a pawn used in the game of exploiting the public’s fear and beating the drums of Islamophobia.

My other relative’s solitary confinement does not affect only him but is also taking a toll on his wife and children. A couple of weeks ago, a 3-year old relative had come home from visiting her father, and said to her grandmother: “I think I’ve lost my daddy.” When her grandmother asked her why she’d think such a thing, she replied: “Because he can’t touch me.” It broke my heart when I heard that. This is injustice not only against my relative but his kids. It’s unfair to deprive a child of her father’s touch. They’re only allowed to meet with a Plexiglass screen between them, and she cries during every visit when it’s time for her father to leave.

These men deserve the same rights as every other inmate. They deserve the right to be presumed innocent.

NOTES TO READER:

The names of the writer and people mentioned in this story have been withheld. Publishing any of these names might reveal the identity of someone who was under the age of 18 at the time he was charged in connection with the alleged terrorism plot. Under Canadian law, people charged as young offenders cannot be named or otherwise identified.

Related: Toronto 18

April 7th, 2008 News, Opinions | no comments | Email it! |  Print This Post | 172 views