By Scott Taylor
Last week the Iranian government announced that it has established a fund to compensate those families who lost a loved one in the Ukrainian International Airline’s Flight 752 tragedy.
It was on January 8, 2020 that Flight 752 was blown out of the sky shortly after it had taken off from the Tehran airport. All 167 passengers and 9 crew members aboard the Boeing 737 were killed and that grisly total included 57 Canadians. In the initial aftermath, the Iranian regime attempted to deny responsibility for the tragedy.
At that juncture tensions between Washington and Tehran were at the boiling point. Five days earlier President Donald Trump had ordered the assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani through a drone missile strike outside the airport in Baghdad, Iraq. In response to this killing, Iranian backed militia fired over two dozen rockets into bases in Iraq that contained US military personnel. Regional tensions were at the breaking point.
However, before the Iranians could conjure up enough fog-of-war to create some plausible doubt, amateur video footage was released depicting what clearly seemed to indicate that the Ukrainian airliner was hit by a ground-to-air missile. With this new evidence in the public domain, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shamefacedly admitted that they had inadvertently downed the aircraft. It was in their words a terrible tragedy based on “human error”.
Now, just prior to the one year anniversary of the incident the Iranians have tabled their final report in the inquiry into this tragic incident. Apparently there was actually two acts of human error that night as Flight 752 was actually struck twice. Following the first missile strike the aircraft engines were still functioning and the pilots retained control of the plane. However when a second missile hit 25 seconds later, the airliner was destroyed in mid-air.
The Canadian connection to this incident is both deep and challenging at the same time. In addition to the 57 Canadian citizens, there were also 29 Iranian-Canadian permanent residents on board that doomed flight. Over three quarters of the passengers on Flight 752 were booked through Kiev on a connecting flight to Toronto.
One of the biggest stumbling blocks out of the gate was the fact that Iran does not recognize the status of dual citizenship. Iranians are allowed to hold foreign passports, but inside Iran they are only deemed to be Iranians. Thus the initial media reports from Tehran only acknowledged that a handful of Canadians had been killed and that nearly all the victims were in fact Iranians.
Added to this equation is the fact that Canada severed all diplomatic ties with Iran back in 2012 and the fact that Canada has been one of the staunchest allies of the United States' ‘maximum pressure’ policy of trade sanctions against the Tehran regime.
However, in announcing the compensation payments wherein Iran will offer $150,000 (US) to each of the victims’ families, the Tehran regime made it clear that the citizenship status of the individuals will not be a factor. In an official statement from the Iranian President’s office, it was acknowledged that paying this compensation “will not eliminate all of the pain and suffering caused by this incident, [but] we hope it will remind [people] of [Iran’s] commitment to safeguarding the rights of all people and respecting humans.”
Canada’s Foreign Minister, Francois-Phillipe Champagne is not seemingly accepting of Iran’s attempts at contrition and appeasement. In a statement last December Champagne said he was not buying into the ‘human error’ excuse and, without offering any alternative theories, simply told the media “we’ll let the process unfold.”
Almost immediately the Iranians denounced Champagne’s comments as being “unacceptable…completely political and anti-judicial.”
For the record, I have yet to hear of any other plausible theory wherein Iranian troops blast a Ukrainian airliner, full of Iranian citizens, over their own capital, other than it was a massive blunder. So I must admit that I am not exactly sure where Champagne is going with his veiled claim that this was an intentional act of mass murder.
At the time of the incident, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered all of the Canadian victims’ families a $25,000 payment to help offset funeral costs. Whether or not Iran recognizes dual-citizenship, the important thing is that Canada does. This was very much a Canadian tragedy and must be commemorated as such.
