Multicultural Meanderings

Over nearly a decade, a group of researchers who organized the Taliban Sources Project have painstakingly collected and translated into English more than a thousand newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts, military and administrative documents, as well as handwritten poetry by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.

The group’s aim is to digitize the primary material, shedding light on the Taliban’s organization and the insurgency in Afghanistan. The British Library has one of the world’s biggest digital collections, including manuscripts that date back centuries. The researchers took the project to the library in 2012, received advice from a prominent scholar and appointed members of the library to its advisory board. But a month ago, the library declined to take on the project, saying it had been legally advised not to publish the collection because it contains material that could be in breach of Britain’s antiterrorism laws.

The library said that it recognized the archive’s research value. But “it was judged that it contained some material which could contravene the Terrorism Act,” it said in a statement, “which would present restrictions on the library’s ability to provide access to the archive for researchers.”

The Terrorism Act “places specific responsibilities on anyone in Britain who might provide access to terrorist publications,” the statement added, “and the legal advice received jointly by the British Library and other similar institutions advises against making this type of material accessible.”

The Taliban Sources Project mostly focuses on material from 1994 to 2001 that “gives a unique window into the Taliban’s world views, their negotiations with foreign governments, how they viewed history,” said Felix Kuehn, an organizer of the project, adding that the material could help provide a more complete picture about the organization in the run-up to the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan.

“Our knowledge of the Taliban in the 1990s is dominated by Western media coverage that was highly politicized, in part because information was not easily accessible,” Mr. Kuehn said.

The project’s 10-member team has translated more than two million words of material. The group had hoped that the British Library would “provide a big institutional home for the material for the long run,” Mr. Kuehn said, calling the decision disappointing. “We can put it up on the web, too, but it wouldn’t last forever.”

Donald Savoie, the Canada Research Chair in public administration and governance at the University of Moncton, disagrees.

“In my view, regardless of what the Supreme Court might say, public servants should not become political actors, especially in the middle of campaigns,” he said. “They are not political actors. We have political actors; they are politicians.”

He said you can’t be politically active and non-partisan at the same time.  “If you start handing out flyers and you appear in videos, you become a part of that — you become partisan. You can’t be half-pregnant,” he said.

…. But [Robert] Shepherd says the responsibility to speak truth to power does not give public servants permission to engage in political activism.

“The expression or the vehicle for doing that is to use internal avenues, not to be activists outside of the established mechanisms within the public service,” he said.

A public servant concerned about government policy who exhausts all other avenues and chooses to go public, he says, must be willing to accept the consequences.

He spent about forty-five minutes in the Can-India office as we quizzed him on important issues—national security, immigration (he was previously immigration minister) and of course jobs and multiculturalism which are my pet peeves. The minister was well-prepared and easily navigated the tough questions we had.

No, he said foreign students will not reduce the job opportunities available to our kids. Nor will attaining PR status be easy for them. I was both surprised and happy to hear Mr. Kenney acknowledge that some institutions have made education a business and want to increase enrolment of foreign students but it didn’t assuage my fears that it would happen anyway. The government knows, I thought to myself, now when will they do something about it. It’s a huge concern that many parents with college and university-going kids like me, have today.

He brought up the subject of many new Canadians not even being aware that a federal election would soon take place because they were not engaged. Naturally I asked how the Conservative Party had planned to address that. Mr. Kenney’s answer was neat though evasive and a bit contradictory. He said today immigrants were more aware and that jobs and economic progress was the best way to engage them. I agree with his philosophy a successful person will integrate better and naturally be more engaged. While it is largely a game of chance, it is my observation that it takes newcomers at least five years to find their groove (if they are lucky that is). What happens to political and community engagement in the meanwhile? What about the hundreds who have been here for years and are still disillusioned, will they ever be brought into the fold?

He dwelt on how communities create ghettoes that prevent new Canadians from fully integrating and assimilating. It’s what I have gone about at length… how ethnic ties are stronger and far outweigh loyalty to Canada. I support his staking a stand on the matter. Why is it a party ideology and not a national strategy? Current trends indicate that many politicians seem to have adopted the approach of businesses towards their multicultural clients—that of trying to cater to communal needs and sentiments in order to ‘hook’ them.