Dec. 15, 1999

The Honourable Anne McLellan
Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada
Room 360, Justice Building
239 Wellington Street
Ottawa, Ontario
K1A 0H8

Dear Anne McLellan:

I read your press release of Dec. 10, 1999 concerning Bill C-19, the Crimes Against Humanity Act, with great interest.  By implementing the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) into our criminal code, you and Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy have certainly expended a great deal of effort to usher Canada into the New World Order.  Alger Hiss would be proud of you.  In addition to Canadian tax dollars, I trust that you both will be expending every effort (including economic sanctions) to ensure that the United States, Israel and the Russian Federation sign, ratify and implement the ICC statute.

I note that the proposed Act will replace the deficient "current war crimes provisions of the Criminal Code", which were written and implemented in bad faith in 1987 following the Deschenes Commission hearings and report.  The deficiencies in this legislation were first outlined in my letter of August 9, 1987 to Mssrs. Mulroney, Turner and Broadbent (deschene.006) and my subsequent letter of January 4, 1993 to Kim Campbell (deschene.001).

The bad faith within the Justice Department was compounded with the implementation of the policy of denaturalization and deportation (d/d) in 1995.  Since then, these political show trials, having nothing at all to do with justice, have dragged Canada’s justice system to the very depths of disrepute.  In a letter to you dated April 8, 1998, I protested strongly against this policy and against the hiring of Neal Sher (guilty of perpetrating fraud upon the court in the John Demjanjuk extradition to Israel in 1986) by the Canadian War Crimes Unit.  As an illustration of the level to which the Canadian War Crimes Unit and the d/d policy has sunk, I invite you to examine the sad case of Vladimir Katriuk, a summary and critique of which is archived at

http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/pakistan/83/katriuk/katriukverdict.html

Rather than concentrating on justice, the press release parrots your oft-repeated "pledge to Canadians and the international community that Canada is not, and will not be, a safe haven for war criminals".  If you are truly interested in war criminals, allow me to bring your attention to the following cases:

(1)  In the spring of 1999, during the Kosovo bombing campaign, Canadian forces were involved in bombing civilian targets and causing deaths of civilians in Yugoslavia proper, far from the area of conflict in Kosovo.  Although one can assign blame to individual pilots following orders from their military commanders, I believe the ultimate responsibility must rest with Jean Chretien, Art Eggleton and Lloyd Axworthy.  If Canada was legally at war with Yugoslavia, then this obviously constitutes a war crime.  If the bombing was illegal, then these atrocities must be placed in the even more heinous category of crimes against humanity.

I trust that Mssrs. Chretien, Eggleton and Axworthy will be the very first clients for your proposed Crimes Against Humanity Act.  (And I must insist that these individuals pay their own legal costs.  They are far more financially capable of doing so, than poor Mr. Katriuk and the other victims targeted by your minions in the Canadian War Crimes Unit.)

As a corollary, I hope that you are keeping files on the Russian genocide in Chechnya.  The circumstances of this war are almost identical to that in Kosovo.  I trust that anyone in the Russian military or political hierarchy associated with the Chechnya genocide will be arrested immediately should they ever set foot on Canadian soil.

(2)  War crimes and crimes against humanity were perpetrated by all sides during and after the WWII conflict.  The fire bombing of Dresden and other civilian targets comes to mind.  Take no prisoners was an accepted motto.  Rape, looting and black marketeering were the order of the day.  Canadian personnel were full participants in these atrocities.  By any reasonable calculation, the number of Canadian-born war criminals in Canada exceeds the Nazi variety by at least two orders of magnitude.

I trust that your War Crimes Unit will investigate and bring these Canadian war veterans to justice.

(3)  Immediately after WWII, there were many millions of Ostarbeiter, refugees and DPs in the Allied-controlled zones of Europe.  A large fraction of these were forcibly repatriated to certain incarceration and death behind the Iron Curtain.

I trust that the Canadian government will finally recognize this as a monstrous crime against humanity and bring appropriate charges against any people presently residing in Canada, who were associated with this crime.

(4)  At exactly the same time that forcible repatriation was occurring and the infamous Nurnberg War Crimes Trials were being staged by the Victors over the Vanquished, there was a mass exodus of Jews and others from Eastern Europe into the Allied-controlled zones of Europe, from where they were allowed to emigrate to Palestine or North America, often concealing their true background.  A good number of these immigrants had been involved in atrocities against German POWs and civilians.  Others collaborated with the Soviet NKVD in terrorizing local populations into submission.  Still others were NKVD-trained agents, sent to infiltrate Canadian institutions.

I trust that you will instruct the Canadian War Crimes Unit to investigate and prosecute these criminals.

Frankly, I firmly believe that the proposed Crimes Against Humanity Act has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with power politics.  In my opinion, it will lead to further politicization and deterioration of our justice system.  In the international arena, it is likely to be counterproductive to the positive evolution of human society.

With deep concern
Will Zuzak
Box 23030
Grande Prairie, AB
T8V 6X2