'He's come home and he's broken,' says Arar's wife

"I lost trust in humanity, I lost trust in the system and I lost trust in myself," says Monia Mazigh, the wife of Maher Arar and author of a new book called Hope and Despair, about her struggle to free her husband from a Syrian jail.

In an exclusive interview with CBC's The Current and The National, Mazigh said she wished she could better understand what her husband went through.

"I feel the ghost of that [episode] along our lives at home, and how do I react to this? Sometimes I try to ignore it. Sometimes I'm so mad, I just want to, you know, that I can't wait ... [to] put it behind me," she says speaking from Ottawa where she lives with her husband and two children.

Mazigh's book documents her ordeal after her husband was arrested and how she campaigned to clear his name.

Mazigh worked tirelessly to free her husband from a Syrian prison, where he was held for more than 10 months on suspicion of terrorist activity and tortured. Arar was released in October 2003.

She became the face and voice of a campaign that attracted international attention. With a PhD in economics but no political experience, Mazigh ran unsuccessfully as an Ottawa-area NDP candidate in the 2004 federal election.

Though her fight to have her husband freed was very public, privately she struggled to balance her commitments as a mother with the task of fighting for her husband.

Arar emerged from the saga a changed man. And Mazigh's ordeal left profound marks on her, too.

Horrifying end to vacation

On a stopover in New York City, as Arar was returning to work in Canada from a vacation in Tunisia in September 2002, U.S. officials detained him, claiming he had links to al-Qaeda.

They deported him to Syria, even though he was carrying a Canadian passport.

Mazigh was still on vacation in Tunisia with her two children, and when she returned to Canada later she was shocked to learn about her husband's deportation to Syria.

She was also horrified by the Canadian media's and public's willingness to assume that her husband was a terrorist, but began a campaign to bring public attention and demand government response to her husband's plight.

"I was very fearful when I came back. I was very fragile," she said. "I lost trust in humanity. I lost trust in the system and I lost trust in myself."

But she was not afraid to speak up. "I had lost my life. I didn't have more to lose."

When Arar was finally released and returned to Canada from Syria in 2004, Mazigh thought the ordeal would be behind her.

But after his release, Arar described how he had been tortured during his incarceration and accused U.S. officials of sending him to Syria knowing that he would be tortured there.

"I thought at the beginning it would take couple of months, maybe a year before we could go back to our normal lives, but we realized after some period that this was not going to happen," Mazigh said.

Arar received an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper in January 2007 and was offered $10.5 million in compensation, along with money for legal fees, for the "terrible ordeal" his family has suffered.

But for Mazigh, the emotional torture continues.

"He's come home and he's broken," she said.