Bureaucrat blamed for his evil master

 A case currently going through the courts in Canada has wide-ranging implications for Government employees and their status globally.

Former Iraqi public servant Zaghlol Kassab had his application for permanent residence in Canada rejected by an immigration official. He appealed and a judge ordered his case be reviewed. That is where the matter rests at the moment, but further appeals against Kassab cannot be ruled out.

The reason for the initial refusal was that Kassab had once worked for the former Government of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and therefore was tainted by that regime’s human rights abuses.

Canadian refugee law states that foreign nationals cannot be admitted if they were senior officials in a government engaged in terrorism, human rights violations, genocide or war crimes. The visa officer handling the case obviously considered this applied to Kassab.

However, Kassab (72) was an engineer who worked in the Iraqi Public Service between 1988 and 2000. Most of his duties had to do with maintaining the country’s electricity grid.

Moreover, he claimed that he and his family, devout Catholics, suffered persecution during and after the fall of the Saddam regime, leading to them moving their base to Jordan in 2004 and quitting Iraq altogether 10 years later after what he described as direct threats by armed men.

The judge accepted his explanation and ruled that as an engineer, concerned in the nuts and bolts of running the country, Kassab was never “a senior official” of the Iraqi administration, meriting rejection of his visa application.

This brings the judge into direct opposition to immigration officials who concluded that although Kassab may not have reached the upper echelons of the Iraqi Public Service “one can reasonably conclude that his roles are indicative of a senior official in the top 50 per cent of Iraqi Government Public Service hierarchy during a designated regime period”.

It is now likely the Government will appeal the case which could end up in Canada’s Supreme Court.

At stake here is the essential role public servants play in the administration of countries worldwide and whether their positions should be automatically considered as translating into support and agreement of the actions of the governments they work for.

In most Western democracies it is usually assumed that these officials leave their political opinions at the door of their offices and serve successive governments impartially with ‘frank, free and fearless advice’.  

Obviously this is not the case in many authoritarian and corrupt regimes around the world where slavish support for the government is the only way to gain favours and promotion.

However, even here there are workers needed to keep the power on, the water flowing and the streets safe. In most cases they work away quietly, do their jobs as best they can and keep their heads down.

The US-appointed Governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer, made a terrible mistake when he decided to dismiss 400,000 military and civilian officers in the wake of the 2003 war simply because they had worked for the Saddam regime.

This has been largely blamed for the chaos into which the country was plunged and which continues to this day. It has been argued that Iran would be a more settled, less lawless place today if that decision had not been made.  

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that Kassab was caught up in any of the atrocities connected with Saddam’s tyrannical rule. In fact it appears he suffered from that persecution.

It is not his supposed ‘seniority’, but the type of work he did that should be the basis for deciding his visa application.