B.C. Community Helping Arar Family To Build A New Life

His family's house was at the base of mountains like these, and he had loved climbing them as a boy the way he and his wife, Monia Mazigh, now take their energetic four-year-old son Houd and their enchantingly precocious daughter, Baraa, 9, on the walking trails around Kamloops. Maybe life isn't so bad, he thought. After more than a year of imprisonment and torture in a Syrian military prison, followed by a three-year legal struggle back in Ottawa to clear his name of allegations he was an al-Qaeda terrorist, Mr. Arar, 35, is building a new life for himself and his family here under the sunny skies of the British Columbia Interior in a community that is opening its heart to them. “I'm prepared for the idea that the terrorist label might stick and I may have to live with it all my life. But it will be important for my kids, at a certain point, as they grow up, to know their father is not a terrorist,” he said. He's hoping that a federal judicial commission of inquiry into his case will clear his name when it issues its report in Ottawa on Monday. An expert fact finder appointed by the commission, Stephen Toope, reported last October there is no doubt Mr. Arar was subjected to torture in Syria and that he still suffers psychologically. The Arar case is deeply troubling for many Canadians. How did a Canadian software engineer, travelling on a Canadian passport, end up being arrested by U.S. authorities at New York's Kennedy Airport and then sent in shackles to the Middle East, where he was tortured during interrogation by Syrian soldiers? Who in the Canadian government gave the Americans the idea Mr. Arar might be a terrorist? Who in Ottawa was complicit? Who failed to protect this Canadian citizen from the excesses of what now seems evident was a botched U.S. anti-terrorist investigation? Many of Mr. Arar's new neighbours in Kamloops are asking themselves these same questions, says Denis Walsh, a local political activist who also owns a video store that specializes in political films and foreign documentaries. “We really hope this report next week gives him some closure,” Mr. Walsh said. “We have a lot of respect for him and what his family has gone through.” Mr. Walsh said there is a strong group of progressive political activists in town who see the Arar family as something like celebrities... Full article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060915.wxararst16/BNStory/National/home

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