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| NEWS > 23 December 2007 |
Other related articles:
Probe links top police to RDP
TOP Eastern Cape police officers are under investigation in an internal corruption probe involving the purchase and renting out of RDP houses.
The office of the provincial commissioner has confirmed that certain senior officers are being investigated, but warned that the investigation is at “a sensitive stage”.
Among those being investigated are officers working with top-secret crime intelligence information in the police’s provincial head office in Zwelitsha.
Director Marinda Mills, spokesman for the office of the provincial commissioner, said late yesterday that al... Read more
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 Article sourced from
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Toronto Star - Ontario, Canada
23 December 2007
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Making sure the good guys are
CAMP NATHAN SMITH, Afghanistan – Staff Sgt. David Bedard has been a Sudbury cop for almost his entire adult life. And at 51, he has an observation to make about the seemingly impossible task of weeding out the culture of corruption that permeates the Kandahar police force it is now his job to mentor.
Give it time, says Bedard. Lots of time. Lots of effort. Lots of training. And change, eventually, will come.
"I liken it to the culture of drinking and driving in Canada," he says. "It was a problem embedded in our culture. But we targeted the young with education, awareness, everything we could think of for 25 years – and the culture changed.
"I came here with my expectations firmly in check, because corruption, including police corruption, has been a way of life for these guys. You really need patience, perseverance. But with the degree of training underway now, the hope is I can come back here on vacation in 25 years and find people with freedom of movement enjoying a better life."
Working abroad in a Canadian police-mentoring mission is a first for Bedard. With two grown children well into adulthood, and having run out of challenges in the business of policing Sudbury, the time was right when he noticed a job posting for Kandahar last summer.
"It is everything the brochure says and more," says Bedard, who began his one-year deployment at Canada's fortified Provincial Reconstruction Team headquarters in Kandahar City on Halloween.
"I was one of those guys talking the talk: I thought we were doing great things over here. So now, this is walking the walk – the other half of the equation."
Direct contact with his Afghan counterparts is difficult, Bedard admits, given security considerations.
"We'll spend four hours in an armoured vehicle to have a half-hour meeting with a police chief. But it is necessary to insert ourselves at the higher levels.
"We go to the chiefs and say, `Why don't your men have uniforms or ammunition for their guns?'
"What we are trying to do is challenge the mindset that each detachment is on its own, feeling the need to be their own private army to survive. We are encouraging a chain of command and the creation of logistical systems of support down the line.
"The goal is to make sure that the good guys really are the good guys."
Bedard is mindful that it was corruption and warlordism that helped pave the way for the Taliban's arrival in Afghanistan in 1996 – and that a similar scenario must not be allowed to develop.
After the Soviets abandon their decade-long attempt to occupy Afghanistan in 1989, he says, "it was the Wild West – and it is a pretty good indication of what happens when you leave this country alone, in the state it is in.
"That period was so lawless, the Taliban was able to take control by providing a form of rule of law. It was not a very palatable form, but it was a form of rule of law."
Christmas, Bedard-style, is the "picture postcard" gathering of immediate family, usually at his mother's house in the Sudbury-area community of Garson. But with the children grown up, he feels okay about sitting out one in Kandahar.
"No little kids, no driving to soccer and the arena – I felt like this was a time when I could do this without drastically disrupting the family," he says.
"Besides, with today's technology, my wife sometimes says it's like I never left.
"We've got a webcam set up in the kitchen so I can actually get a glimpse of home any time we want."
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