China syndrome: the Conservatives are weeding out troublemakers in Foreign Affairs. Hope it's not too late for Huseyin Celil.

Chris MacLeod is pleased--not ecstatic, but things are looking just a little better. The Hamilton-based lawyer's client, Huseyin Celil, still sits somewhere in a Chinese jail. No one is sure where Celil is being kept or even what he's charged with, exactly. But at least MacLeod believes the Department of Foreign Affairs is trying to find him and trying to help. That's certainly a change.

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Celil is a 38-year-old Canadian of Uyghur origin, married and a father of four, who was studying to become an accountant. Last year, on March 27, while he and his family were visiting his in-laws in Uzbekistan, he was taken into custody. Some time later--in the following two months--he was deported to China as a suspected terrorist, and has been kept there, incommunicado, ever since. At the beginning of January, his family received word he would be going on trial in Urumqi, in Xinjiang Autonomous Region in western China (homeland of the Uyghurs, known as East Turkistan before the Chinese took it over), where Celil was born. On Feb. 2, he appeared before a court to face six hours of questions by a panel of judges. No charges were laid. A confession was produced, and Celil claimed it was obtained under torture, or at least threat of torture. He was not allowed to speak with his family members before he was then hauled away. No one has seen him since.

Until very recently, officials at Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade had offered little or no help, the Celil family claims. "The very first communication I had with DFAIT was an absolute rebuke," MacLeod says. This was in the first two weeks after Celil was detained. "I wanted a meeting with DFAIT to find out what was going on and what we can do, and I was told there was no need for a meeting." That was it. Then, about a week before the end of January this year, things started to change. "Since then we've had very effective communication with DFAIT," MacLeod says. He's not sure why.

When it was reported that no Canadian consular officials made it to Celil's trial, Prime Minister Stephen Harper was said to be livid, and on Feb. 5 issued a stern rebuke to DFAIT in Beijing. Immediately, two consular officials were dispatched to Urumqi to find out what was going on. In DFAIT's defence, the Chinese were monkeying about with the date of the trial. According to Celil's wife, Kamila Telendibaeva, members of Celil's family in China were informed at the beginning of January that a trial was coming up. So they travelled to Urumqi and started searching. "But in China they give no specific time. They were cancelling every day--every day," says Telendibaeva from her home in Burlington, Ont.

Many thought the prime minister's rebuke was the cause of DFAIT's newfound concern, but as MacLeod had noticed, things had actually started to change about a week before that. So what was going on at the end of January? As it happens, at that very time, two big obstacles to what has become known as the Harper government's "principled foreign policy"--giving human rights equal footing with trade issues--were removed. Those obstacles were top DFAIT officials, who appear to have been operating on the agenda of the previous Liberal administration and their friends in business, kowtowing to China's Communist regime in the hope they would continue to get favourable treatment in trade matters.

Sources inside the government claim that, on the political side, the government has been ready to act ever since Celil was first incarcerated in Uzbekistan. Meetings were held, plans were set, but for some reason or another, the bureaucrats in DFAIT continually failed to act.

On Jan. 24, Peter Harder, deputy minister of foreign affairs, announced his resignation in an internal memo addressed to all DFAIT officials around the globe. Two days later, the Prime Minister's Office went public with Harder's resignation, and at the same time announced that David Mulroney, foreign and defence policy adviser to the prime minister in the Privy Council Office, was being shuffled out of the PCO, and reassigned to DFAIT to look after the Afghanistan file. Almost immediately after Mulroney was moved off the China file, things started to happen on Celil.

Harder's favourable disposition toward Beijing is well known in government circles (he first joined Foreign Affairs in 1977). In June 2004, he gave a speech at the College of Beijing that was full of praise for the Communist regime. Appointed as deputy minister of Foreign Affairs in June 2003, his empathy toward those in Canada who want to maintain the old Liberal policy was blatantly obvious last summer, when he organized a round table on China at DFAIT's headquarters, to which only pro-China interests were invited. Attendees included Andre Desmarais from Power Corp. of Canada and Canadian Council of Chief Executives president Thomas d'Aquino. No human rights groups or other nongovernmental organizations involved with China were invited. At one point, while Harder was moderating a discussion, witnesses noticed a Power Corp. executive signalling Harder to speed things along, making it obvious whose spell he was under. Then, in December, Harder made a trip to China without informing the government, which, while not technically wrong, violated the understanding between government and bureaucracy that they keep each other in the loop.

David Mulroney's connections to the pro-China business lobby are even more obvious. In his only stint outside of the government since he began his civil service career in 1981, from 1995 to 1998 he was the executive director of the Canada-China Business Council, an organization founded by Power Corp. patriarch Paul Desmarais, Sr. What precisely Mulroney was doing isn't being spoken of, but it clearly positioned him for his subsequent assignment in the PCO, where he became a key liaison between politicians and bureaucrats with an interest in China.

The removal of these two from positions of power wasn't the first big change in the Foreign Affairs machinery. Last May 30, Ted Lipman, director-general of the East Asia Bureau of Canada's Foreign Affairs Department, hosted a private party at DFAIT headquarters in the Lester B. Pearson Building in Ottawa and invited Chinese Ambassador Lu Shumin. The pretext for the party was the 33rd anniversary of the Canada/China Scholars Exchange Program. Why celebrate a 33rd anniversary? No one is precisely sure, but it landed smack dab in the middle of lobbying efforts to get the Harper government to change its approach to China on human rights. Shumin was invited without the government's knowledge or permission. After this little love-in became known--reported on by The Globe and Mail's Jan Wong, who attended--Lipman was shipped out of Ottawa and is now serving what is officially called a "diplomatic residence," a year's sabbatical, in Vancouver.

If the Celil case is any indication, the turnover in the upper echelons of Foreign Affairs will go some way to bringing Canada's Foreign Affairs bureaucrats in line with the government's foreign policy. And it should make the world a safer place, at least for the more than one million Chinese-Canadians who might be worried that Beijing could reach out and grab them from anywhere, only to see Canada, their adopted homeland, do nothing about it.