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The Current Transcript for May 2, 2016

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

I do however want to make one thing perfectly, crystal clear. Canada does not and will not pay ransom to terrorists.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Beyond that seemingly steely government resolve are worried families whose loved ones are held for ransom. And through great trauma, feel they must try somehow to get them released.

It is that behind-the-scenes-effort that we are examining today, through the prism of one particular case that saw an Alberta mother thrust into a world she had never imagined. Lorinda Stewart's nightmare began when a man from Somalia contacted her to demand ransom for her daughter, Amanda Lindhout. Every call that the kidnappers made was recorded, and she knew everything she said, they were taking in.

SOUNDCLIP

Amanda, Amanda we love you. We will not stop until you come home, we have sold everything that we have, we are trying so hard Amanda.

AMT: In a moment, Lorinda Stewart and Amanda Lindhout join me to talk about the demand for ransom, the government's refusal to pay, RCMP involvement, and how it all affected their own 15 month long ordeal. You will hear what they now consider the worst call, the one that haunts them. But also one which they say illustrates how they feel today about ransom, about government help, and about the emotional toll a kidnapping takes on those back home. On a totally different topic today, Yanis Varoufakis been called a narcissist, belligerent, and brilliant.

SOUNDCLIP

This is Greece. Formerly associated with carefree fun in the sun. But more recently, the skies have darkened, and we're now being told that this place is threatening to bring down with it the whole of the European continent.

AMT: When he was the Greek finance minister, everyone from the IMF to the EU to pundits and politicians wanted to blame Greece for its financial crisis. He is still looking to set the record straight; hear him in an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

Amanda Lindhout and mom share painful phone call from captivity

Guests: Amanda Lindhout, Lorinda Stewart

SOUNDCLIP

LORINDA STEWART: Amanda, we've been selling everything. We've been begging people every day, Amanda. I write letters and I make phone calls to beg people to help us. It is illegal in Canada to raise a ransom, Amanda, I could go to jail. So I'm trying to do it so that the government doesn't know, because if I go to jail, I can't help you. I'm trying.

[Amanda sobbing in the background]

LORINDA STEWART: We're trying, Amanda. We have offered everything that we have.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: We need one million. We need it now.

AMT: An anguished call from a daughter being held captive, and a nightmare for the mother on the other end of the line. By the time this conversation happened, Amanda Lindhout had already been held in captivity for more than 10 months in Somalia. She was begging her mother Lorinda Stewart for the million-dollar ransom her kidnappers demanded. It is an unimaginably difficult situation, but one we were reminded of last week when another Canadian's hostage-taking and ransom demand ended in death. John Ridsdel was killed by his captors in the Philippines. Another Canadian, Robert Hall, who was kidnapped with Mr. Ridsdel in September, remains in captivity. Canada does not pay ransom to terrorists. It's a position that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau firmly reiterated last week but one that, at times such as these, demands discussion. Amanda Lindhout and her mother, Lorinda Stewart, are in our Calgary studio. Hello.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Hello.

LORINDA STEWART: Hello.

AMT: Lorinda, we can hear the anguish in your voice. How hard is it to listen to that now?

LORINDA STEWART: Oh, it's extremely, extremely hard. It brings me right back to that desperate moment, talking to Amanda.

AMT: And we heard last week, Lorinda, at how this kind of conversation ended very differently for the family of John Ridsdel. What did you think when you heard that news?

LORINDA STEWART: Oh, I just felt so devastated for his family. I have to think that the militant group knew that the amount they were asking for is far beyond what any family could pay.

AMT: Amanda, how do you react listening to your mom in that little clip now?

AMANDA LINDHOUT: I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes, it's very hard to hear that. That's a call that I’ve only heard very few times, and it's difficult to hear every time. I guess I also feel guilt. I mean, I hear myself pleading and begging my mother for an amount of money that was really even impossible for her at the time, which was a million dollars. And it's funny that that's what comes up when I hear that, is I actually feel some guilt that I was in that situation where there was this enormous pressure on my family to save my life. And it was, it seemed at the time like such an impossible ask.

AMT: And so when you learned of the fate of John Ridsdel, what did you think?

AMANDA LINDHOUT: It was really hard to hear that news. I have thought so much this week about his family and the people who love him, and I can't help to, but think about what I went through and how lucky I am to be alive. And it's not to make this about me, because it's not, it's about what he just suffered, but there was a time in captivity where I, too, was taken to a desert and my captors held a knife to my throat and I thought that that's how I was going to die, too. And I’m so lucky I lived, I survived through the efforts of my mother and so many people, but it could have turned out a much different way. And I guess that news makes me, I mean, so sad for his family, and on another level, it's like an unbelievable amount of gratitude for my life, and for the extraordinary efforts of so many people who gave a different ending to my story.

AMT: And of course, there were many conversations with the hostage takers and your mother, Amanda. The audio that we heard, and we're going to hear a little more, now, is audio that will be made public eventually, is it not?

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Yeah, it is, Anna Maria, and it's something that I’ve been uncomfortable with, the fact that it was going to be public, and I really had no control over that, as part of the trial of one of my kidnappers that is coming up next year. I have decided to release this audio on my own. There's nothing legally stopping me from doing so, and it's going to be public next year, anyway, and I just feel like at this moment right now, there are conversations that are being had and maybe these calls between my mother and I can illustrate how desperate families are in this situation, and the reality of what it's like on both sides. Being a hostage and the anguish for the family members on the other side, and to be able to release that with this kind of context, with you, on your show, is how my mother and I decided that we wanted to do this.

AMT: Well, we're about to play more of the tape from that specific call. But before I do, Amanda, tell us what was happening in the days and hours leading up to this call.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: This was a call that my mother and I always referred to as the worst call. Now, I had been in captivity at this point for over a year. Things were very grim. My kidnappers were very frustrated that it was taking so long for my family, for the government, for somebody to pay this money for me. And so they, my young, teenaged kidnappers came into this dark room that I was being held in, and they assaulted and tortured me for three days straight. They tied up my body, they tied my arms behind my back to my legs. They blindfolded me, they gagged me, and they assaulted me, and almost murdered me. At the end of those three days, they brought a phone, and they held it out to me and my mother was on the other end. And they had told me that what I needed to convey to my mother in that call was that they were going to keep doing this to me, that they were going to keep torturing me every day until the money was paid. So I was in a very desperate state on the phone call, and just trying to get this frantic message, that she had to come up with the money, because at that point after three days, I felt like I couldn't stand another minute. So I am pleading with my mother for the money.

AMT: Okay, well, we are going to listen to part of the phone call. The sound quality is not, it's a bit compromised at times because it this is a phone line from Somalia, and I should warn our listeners that it is quite specific. It refers to torture; it may be disturbing to some people. Here is that tape.

SOUNDCLIP

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Mommy?

LORINDA STEWART: Amanda. Amanda.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: [sobbing] Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy, mommy.

LORINDA STEWART: Amanda

[Sound: Amanda crying, speaking unintelligibly]

LORINDA STEWART: Amanda.

[Sound: Amanda crying]

LORINDA STEWART: Amanda.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: [sobbing] Okay, things have changed here, mom. You need to pay the money now. You need to pay the million dollars now because they've started to torture me. [Amanda crying, unintelligible]

LORINDA STEWART: Amanda, Amanda, listen.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: They're going to do it every day."

[Sound: Lorinda saying "Amanda" repeatedly over Amanda's crying]

LORINDA STEWART: Amanda, listen to me. Amanda, listen to me. We are doing everything we can. We will not stop until you come home. I am so sorry that it has taken so long Amanda. Adam promised us that they would take care of you.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: No!

LORINDA STEWART: Amanda, Amanda, we love you. We have offered half a million dollars. We have sold everything that we have. We are trying so hard Amanda. We are trying so hard. Adam will not believe this, but we are poor families. The government will not help us. We are selling everything we can. We are trying so hard.

AMT: Amanda Lindhout and her mother, Lorinda Stewart, speaking, Amanda is in Somalia. Her captors have put her on the phone, her mom is in Alberta. I have to ask what the two of you are thinking, sitting there. I can't see you, you're in the Calgary studio.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: [emotional] Anna Maria, it's very hard to listen to that call. [sobs] I mean for me to listen to that call, all of the memories of that day, of that time, just come flooding back. I can't help it, they're just, they're in my mind right now. It's like I feel it in my body.

AMT: Amanda, we spoke about this before coming to air, too, but I want to make sure that we do not trigger anything for you in this conversation.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Thank you for that, and I appreciate that, and actually, this is something my mom and I have thought about a lot and have talked about a lot. And I know there's ways we could have done this without us even having to listen to the audio, but the audio is going to be public, whether we like that or not. And you know, at this time where there are these, as I’ve said, important conversations being had about topics of ransom and what families go through. If we can shed some light on the severity of the situation that that families are going through by releasing these, by showing the real human side of this, then let us do that and let us do it now, before it comes out, you know, without any control over it in the future, as part of the trial. And my mom and I are sitting here together in Calgary, in the studio, and we're emotional about listening to that call, but... I don't know mom, I mean, are you okay? I mean, I think we're okay, right?

AMT: What are you thinking, Lorinda?

LORINDA STEWART: That's kind of what I told Amanda before we started this conversation, that we are okay. Of course, this brings back horrific memories and feelings of complete desperation on both sides. I think for me, the importance of playing an audio like this is that when people hear news, they're disconnected from it, most people .but this, hearing a phone call like this brings the reality of desperation of the families and the victims. And I think that's an important connection.

AMT: Lorinda, as we listen to you in that tape and I listen to you now, your voice is different. Your voice actually underwent stress because of all of those calls, and the stress of having Amanda kidnapped for that long time, did it not?

LORINDA STEWART: Yes, actually, it's become a long-term medical condition, actually. And I actually can speak now, but I went through a time where I barely had a voice, and it is a result of long term extreme stress.

AMT: But when you needed to take those calls, you were there. You took many, many calls from the kidnappers, and they would put her on. What, tell us what was happening when those calls would come through? What was going on around you?

LORINDA STEWART: At the time of that particular call, we were fundraising. I had worked closely with the government for ten and a half months, and they had assured me every single day that they had strategies running, and that we were very close to Amanda's release. So I worked with them and I trusted them, and the time came when they came to me and said that due to lack of progress in the case, we are backing out. And it's basically up to you now. So at that point, we had hired a private security company with Nigel's family.

AMT: Nigel Brennan was the Australian who was taken with Amanda that day.

LORINDA STEWART: Yeah, and I continued as the lead negotiator for both Amanda and Nigel. And I will say preceding that call, the three days before, I had spoken to Adam many times. But it was the one and only call where I actually yelled at him.

AMT: This is Adam, the man who is now charged, actually?

LORINDA STEWART: Yes.

AMT: Okay.

LORINDA STEWART: Yes, it is. And he said to me, you're playing games, and I yelled at him and I said, we're not playing games, you are. And he said you shall see our games. And that was the result of the one and only time I ever yelled at him.

AMT: And then this call happened after that.

LORINDA STEWART: Yes.

AMT: And the news that she had been tortured.

LORINDA STEWART: Yeah.

AMT: So you are saying very specific things in that call. That is, you're trying to send him a message. Am I right?

LORINDA STEWART: Yes, yes I am. I had two objectives in that call, and so that's why I’m talking over Amanda, because I needed her to hear what I was trying to say. And I also needed Adam to hear that, because I wanted Adam to know that if I went to jail, he wouldn't get any money. And creating that fear in him, it was my hope that he would agree to the amount that we had offered.

AMT: Now you make the point that by this time, you were not, the RCMP had pulled away. In the time leading up to that, they had been around. Were they coaching you on how to speak, what like, would they help you on what to say?

LORINDA STEWART: Yes. For the first ten and a half months that I worked closely with the RCMP, I was trained by Canada's top RCMP negotiators on how to negotiate. And they also tried to prepare me for what they termed a bad call that could come, and I had quite a few bad calls, and they weren't all from Amanda. Sometimes, they were very specific, very cruel calls and threats from the kidnappers.

AMT: You must have felt so helpless.

LORINDA STEWART: I actually can't say I felt helpless, because I was doing something. And I was so determined. I mean, absolutely laser focused and determined that I was never going to accept that I would not bring her home.

AMT: And Amanda, you were on the other end of these calls, telling her that they were asking for money. How realistic did you think it was for your mom to raise that kind of money?

AMANDA LINDHOUT: I knew that it wasn't realistic. And I mean, that was what I had tried to reiterate again and again and again with my kidnappers. Like, my reality was I was a young woman, a freelance journalist, I didn't have a big news organization behind me willing to pay the ransom. And you know, the Canadian government doesn't pay ransom. So then it falls on the family, and I was from day one telling those guys who had kidnapped me, I come from a poor family. So like, you know, some background details are that my mother was working, at the time that I was kidnapped, at a bakery making minimum wage. My dad lives on long term disability. Like, coming up with, the initial ask was 1.5 million US dollars for my life, that's like asking a family like mine for the moon. It's just not going to happen. So I remember that call, and the sort of desperation, you know, thinking, here I am, like, begging my poor mother for a million dollars and like knowing that was an impossible ask. But also just the desperation that I was feeling knowing that the pain and the torture was going to continue without that money. I mean, it was such a very painful position for me to be in, and for my mom, too.

AMT: We have to break for the news, but I want to continue this conversation on the other side, so if you just stay with us for a few minutes, we'll come back. I’m speaking with Amanda Lindhout and her mother Lorinda Stewart. Amanda Lindhout is the Canadian journalist who was kidnapped in Somalia in 2008. While she was held captive for 15 months, her mother Lorinda Stewart was desperate to bring her home. Let us know what you think as you listen to this: should Canada, like Germany, Italy, Spain, and France, pay ransom when a Canadian is taken abroad; or like the U.S. and U.K., continue to refuse? You can find us on Twitter, we are @thecurrentcbc. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti, this is The Current.

[Music: Sting]

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. If you are just joining us, I've been speaking with Amanda Lindhout and her mother, Lorinda Stewart. Amanda Lindhout is the Canadian journalist who was kidnapped in Somalia in 2008, and held captive for 15 months. Before the news, we heard a recording from a specific phone call between Amanda and her mother, ten months into Amanda’s ordeal, as her mother was desperately working to bring her home. The man they knew as Adam, a Somali citizen, who was on the calls to Canada, will go on trial in Canada next year. He is charged in relation to Amanda Lindhout's kidnapping. Lorinda Stewart is part of a small group of people who can shed light on what the families of kidnapped Canadians go through to free their loved ones. She eventually raised a ransom to bring her daughter home. Last week, Islamic militants in the Phillipines killed a Canadian hostage, John Ridsdel, after their ransom demands were unmet. Another Canadian kidnapped with Mr. Ridsdel, Robert Hall, remains captive. Amanda Lindhout and Lorinda Stewart join me again from our Calgary studio. Lorinda Stewart, what did the Canadian government tell you about raising a ransom?

LORINDA STEWART: The government actually let me know that it was illegal in Canada to pay a ransom with a prison sentence up to ten years. But they also told me that no one had ever been charged and convicted of that. I was also told by a member of the RCMP that it would look really bad for the Canadian government to charge me when they had not been able to secure Amanda’s release. So, I really didn't feel like it was a real threat over me, but I wanted Adam to think that it was.

AMT: So, in that moment when you are talking to Adam and saying you have sold everything, you were actually trying to raise the money at that point in any way that you could.

LORINDA STEWART: Yes, yes. I would talk to anybody who would listen to me and I started networking and all of Amanda’s friends started networking so it was everybody just networking and small fundraisers going on all over Alberta and in one location in BC, and what really saved us in the end was a couple donors who came forward and donated large amounts of money because, as hard as we were trying, we were only able to raise very small amounts of money.

AMT: And at the time, of course, you didn't want any of this to be in the media.

LORINDA STEWART: No, we were able, and it's quite miraculous actually, that we were able to do it all without the media catching on to what we were doing and a lot of people don't realize the significance of that. I didn't either, but the kidnappers watch the media to know what's going on, so if they know that you are fundraising, they're going to hold out even longer.

AMT: Amanda, there were times when the kidnappers tried to call the media to keep your name out there, were there not?

AMANDA LINDOUT: Yes, there were a couple of calls to different radio stations, I think CTV at one point was contacted in Canada, and they were very deliberate with calls like that. They would literally put a script in front of me of what I was supposed to say, and they would be very short calls, you know 30 seconds, 45 seconds, in which I was to read about how terrible my conditions were and you know, please somebody pay the money for me, all of which was true, but then there were specific things that I also was not supposed to mention that they would go over with me before the phone calls. I was not supposed to mention that, for example, that I was being sexually assaulted because they kidnappers didn't-- I suppose didn't want to look bad and based on their justification of how they were justifying us being abducted, there were certain things that I wasn't allowed to say, but for the most part I stuck to these scripts. And yeah, they understood the value of the media, but as my mom says, anytime there would be any headline about Amanda Lindhout being in captivity, and you know, advocacy groups pressuring the Canadian government to help get me out of there, the kidnappers who were cruising the internet every day would read that as, wow there are a lot of efforts and pressure being placed on the government to bring Amanda home, yeah there's a lot of money that's going to come out of this, she's important. Which really wasn't the case at all but because I wasn't perceived to be a bonafide journalist, maybe that played into--I was a freelancer that played into how the media covered the story and covered it quite relentlessly the whole time that I was in captivity.

AMT: The Canadian government reiterated last week that it does not pay ransom to terrorists. Is that the right policy?

AMANDA LINDHOUT: You know, it's so complicated and people come to me expecting in a way that I would have a really clear answer about that and I mean, the answer is probably not what most people expect given what I've been through but I understand Trudeau’s position. I actually understand and agree with how a policy like that serves to protect Canadians who are traveling around the world; it really does and I'm somebody, I travel a lot and I can appreciate that now that I've been the victim of-- I have been kidnapped and you know, because the government doesn't pay ransoms, that whole burden fell on my family and that was terribly devastating for us. And yet, if I really have to say one way or the other, then yes, I support Trudeau’s position and I think it is unfortunate for the families and there are certain things which could be changed like should it be illegal for a family to fundraise for ransom, of course not. Should somebody, a family member who is fundraising and then pays a ransom for a loved one be threatened with ten years in jail? Of course not. Family should be allowed to negotiate as they need to like in the United States that was recently changed and families are now able to negotiate without the threat of jail time.

AMT: Lorinda, what do you think?

LORINDA STEWART: I actually agree with the government's stance on not paying ransoms. I think that families should be told that they have the freedom to do whatever they feel they need to do. While I worked with the RCMP, I always worked under the threat that if I were to do anything outside of what they gave me permission to do, that they would drop our case. And so that kept me afraid so I worked closely with them believing what they were telling me, that they were very close to securing her release.

AMT: If they had not told her they were close to securing her release, what would you have done differently?

LORINDA STEWART: I absolutely would have been looking at fundraising much sooner.

AMT: And you did eventually, as you explained, managed to get the money together. How much did you pay?

LORINDA STEWART: $600,000. That was for the ransom but we owe just as much to the private security company, so in total, between the Brennan family and our family, we raised $1.2 million dollars.

AMT: What impact did that have on your personal finances?

LORINDA STEWART: Well, we, I’m really hesitant to say that I lost everything because I felt like, because [voice breaking] I gained everything when Amanda came home. But, yes, financially it definitely took its toll. Her father took a loan against his house and everything I had in my savings, of course went towards bringing her home.

AMT: And then of course, you went and fundraised and had help from some individuals. You talk about guilt. You felt a lot of guilt when Amanda came home. Why?

LORINDA STEWART: I felt so much guilt because I had yelled at Adam, which I felt caused them to torture her. And I felt so much guilt that I had believed the government telling me, almost every single day, how close they were to securing Amanda’s release. Had I stepped out of that realm and started fundraising sooner, she could have been home sooner.

AMT: And when she came home, what happened?

LORINDA STEWART: Well, when Amanda came home, I will say that what I had dreamed and expected the whole time, that there would be parties and we all would be just celebrating and happy but, for myself personally, all this stress had caught up with my body. I became very, very sick. I became extremely depressed, wracked with guilt and it's been a long healing process. To realize that I did what I could with the knowledge that I had and that it wasn’t my fault.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Oh my goodness. I have to jump in to say it's so hard to hear my mom talking like this because of course, nothing was your fault, Mom and you did everything you could and you're such a super hero. You saved my life and please don't say that.

AMT: Amanda, when you came home you had so much to go through as well.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Yeah, my readjustment period was really hard and long. I came home, I was really physically not well, I was really malnourished, I had, and I have, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, but at that time it was something quite new that I was learning how to deal with. I was bombarded by symptoms all the time, symptoms that over the years I've come to understand at that time were really new and scary. I found it hard to connect and relate with old friends and even family members and everybody had an opinion of what I was doing in Somalia to begin with. It was a lot to deal with when I came home but, over the years I have found some good people. I have a great psychologist that I work with on an almost daily basis, I check in with her out of New York, Dr. Katherine Porterfield, and she's really helped me rebuild my life. You know, my mom talks a lot about guilt or the guilt she feels, which is so unfounded I feel but, guilt is something that's been really hard for me to carry, too. The fact that the my decision as a young woman to go into Somalia, of course not wanting to hurt anybody, you know wanting to pursue my ambitions as a young journalist, I mean it had really serious consequences for so many people and the most importantly to me and my family. The reality of that really hit me hard when I came home and I saw how much my family had sacrificed and then you know, I watched my mom's health crumble. It's not been easy, but it's something that I try to work on every day. I have talked a lot about forgiveness of my captor over the years and many people have heard me talk about how that has helped me move forward, but I also extend that forgiveness towards myself, my younger self that made these decisions which have caused a lot of grief to so many people.

AMT: And I am guessing that forgiveness to your captors does not include wanting to see justice served. One of your captors is now, alleged captors, in custody in Canada awaiting trial.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Yes and I mean for me, forgiveness and justice, they're not two separate things at all. I do a sort of forgiveness practice for myself so that I can move forward in my own life and not be held back by all the hate and anger and all that. But, I am glad that the RCMP’s efforts to get this guy came to fruition and he is awaiting trial. I mean, there are consequences for his actions, too and he's living what is his destiny and I am okay with that while not necessarily attached to the outcome of it because my healing, my well being isn't contingent on that.

AMT: And Lorinda, Amanda talks about forgiveness, how do you process that?

LORINDA STEWART: Forgiveness has been a huge part of my own healing. Forgiveness, whether it's founded or not, for myself and forgiveness for her captors, my feelings toward the government and it felt like they let in a lot of ways, they helped me up in a lot of ways, they let me down in a lot of ways. So, forgiveness has been extremely important in my own process of healing, also.

AMT: It's important to hear all of the things that you had to go through, Lorinda, because we rarely are able to talk to or can understand what the family of a hostage is going through and what those phone calls do and even if someone comes home, how it's not over. It's still a rare thing, but it's not so rare that you're not the only ones who are going through this in this country.

LORINDA STEWART: Exactly and I see it as an opportunity for me to use that experience to do something good and to help other people that find themselves in that extremely horrific situation.

AMT: You make the point that the RCMP was working with you for a good part of this and then they were not, and you had to hire private security consultants. Even if a government will not pay ransom, should the government actually continue to help behind the scenes with a family, as opposed to your case where you ended up having to hire someone to help behind the scenes?

AMANDA LINDHOUT: One thing that is important to say I think, in our story that maybe hasn't come out clearly, is that at a certain point the government told my mother she was on her own, but they didn't abandon the Amanda Lindhout case. They continued unbeknownst to us and we really only discovered how much they were working on my file after the fact, but the government had all times, like whole teams of people working on my case on the ground in Somalia when after they appeared to have withdrawn. We now know that went on even long after I was released to the full effect of eventually arresting one of them. So, when I look at the whole story, do I feel abandoned by the government? I actually don't, I think the government did what they could for me within the confines of Canadian law and I think there were some really remarkable individuals within the Canadian government who really became champions of bringing me home and they never stopped, and for that I'm really grateful.

AMT: And you mentioned that they were still working on the ground in Somalia and that the Somali citizen named Ali Omar Ader is the man who you refer to as Adam there. How did he get into Canada to be charged?

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Well, that is an [laughs] almost unbelievable story in itself. I don't have access to all of the details, what I know though and it's public, is that the RCMP had this covert operation going on for years whereby they had misled this man that I knew as Adam, to believe that that he was working with a Somali businessman and this businessman had different opportunities for him including connecting him to a Canadian book publisher. So, this was all a big ruse and it seems unbelievable because Adam, this man who maybe had some education, but you know, wasn't a scholar, had decided that he wanted to write a book on Somali history. So, he traveled from Somalia to Canada to meet this business contact believing that he would have a book deal, and once he arrived in Ottawa, he settled into a hotel and I think it was on day two or three, he went to a business meeting, what he thought was going to be a business meeting, and then he was arrested there.

AMT: And you will face him at his trial. Are you ready for that?

AMANDA LINDHOUT: No, I'm not ready yet, but I have time to prepare for it. I think it's going to be really hard on me. Even the arrest which happened June 13^th of 2015, it's pretty recent, I feel like I'm still processing that. His arrest, while it was welcome news in many ways, it opens up a lot of things for me. For example, this audio recording, the very one that we're choosing today to share with all of you, whether I like it or not, that always would have been public; that would have come out you know as part of this trial and there will be other pieces of really personal information and material that will likely come out as a result of this trial and for me, that makes me nervous, that doesn't really feel good, but I also just have to sit back and let the process happen. He will go to trial and they have lots of evidence against him and nobody is out to hurt me and though some of these pieces of evidence coming out will be hard for me, I just have get to a place where I can accept it. When I finally do see him, I think it will be very powerful for me to have the experience of having him see me now as a strong, unbroken woman who survived everything that he helped put me through. I imagine that that will feel really good.

AMT: Lorinda, are you prepared for this?

LORINDA STEWART: At this moment, no and I don't know that I will be when I am actually sitting and facing him. But, I know in those moments when you have to do something, you find it in yourself to do it. I believe when that time comes and I am facing him, I’ll be ready.

AMT: When you first began making those phone calls and the RCMP was there and recording them and helping you talk to people, and as you continued on, where did you find the strength? How did you keep moving forward?

LORINDA STEWART: Well, I surrounded myself with pictures of Amanda and Nigel, and I put up big posters that today is one day closer to Amanda and Nigel coming home, and I just found the resolve that I would not ever accept that she was not coming home. After bad calls, particularly that one, I was so upset I was throwing up and I was lying on the floor and I was crying, but there came a point where I said to myself, I can’t do this. I have to get up. I have to continue doing what I’m doing to bring Amanda home. That’s what I had to do and I just did it.

AMT: How has your relationship with each other evolved because of all of this?

LORINDA STEWART: Well, Amanda and I are extremely close and we’ve just recently taken quite a few trips together [laughs, most recently to India, which was a dream of ours. When Amanda was in her early 20s, she always told me how much she loved India, so we took a month together and toured around India and life is absolutely beautiful today.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: To add to that, I feel like you have a new appreciation for things once you've lost them and I lost a lot of things for 460 days. I lost my freedom and I lost the sunshine and I lost laughter in my life and I lost my family and I lost my mom and to be able to come back into the world and have it all back again, there's a sort of gratitude that I feel every day for even the little things like just being able to pick up the phone and call my mom. I live in Toronto now and she's here in Alberta and we talk on the phone every day, a couple of times a day, like we're so connected and I don't know what our relationship would be had all of that not happened. Of course we’d love each other and be close but I don't think we would have the sort of intense love that we have for each other now in the way that we've been able to help support each other on our respective healing journeys. You know, we're both very spiritual people and when I'm having a tough day with trying to come to terms with forgiveness or if my mom's having a bad day or we get bad news like the news out of the Philippines last week, we can call each other. We can lean on each other, we can process it that like that and that is a really great gift to come out of something so terrible.

AMT: Amanda and Lorinda, thank you. Thank you for speaking with me.

AMANDA LINDHOUT: Thank you, Anna Maria, so much for having us on. Thank you for having us.

AMT: Amanda Lindhout and her mother Lorinda Stewart spoke to me from our studio in Calgary. If you missed part of that conversation you can find it on our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. You can also go there to download the podcast and tell us what you think of what they had to say. Neither one believes government should pay ransom despite the ordeal they've been through. Tweet us we're @thecurrentcbc or find us on facebook or go to the site. We did ask the RCMP to comment, it responded that since the matter is before the courts it would be inappropriate for the RCMP to comment at this time.

[Music: Theme]

Former Greek finance minister says Greece was fiscally waterboarded by creditors

Guests: Yanis Varoufakis

AMT: Hello. I’m Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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VOICE 1: I’m in favour of yes. The opinions are divided, almost in half. And, in any case, the Greek people should remain with one mind against the problems that this country is facing.

VOICE 2: People are suffering so much that I’m sure that we would all vote no. But because there is so much blackmail they have closed the banks. Many people are afraid and yet I believe that it will be no.

AMT: Worry and defiance in Athens last July, as recorded by Britain's Channel Four. That was the day that Greece was on the brink. The country's left-wing Syriza alliance had asked Greeks for a mandate --To refuse the austerity measures being demanded, once again, from the so-called "Troika" of the European Commission, the International Monetary Fund - the IMF - and the European Central Bank. Years of harsh austerity had already gutted Greek government services, and left the country's social safety net in tatters. And by the end of that night, 60 percent of Greek voters had rejected the austerity demands. Yanis Varoufakis was the finance minister during that tense time. And for the Troika, he became public enemy number one. His new book is entitled, And the Weak Suffer What They Must: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future. Yanis Varoufakis joins me from New York. Hello.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Good morning.

AMT: What was it like to be leader of the no side the night your party won that referendum?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: It was an exhilarating moment in our nation’s history and certainly in mine personal history. I didn’t expect us to win. You have to realize that a whole long week had preceded during which banks were closed down by the Central Bank of Europe. Pensioners, who in Greece were resisting up until then the use of debit cards and web banking and all that, had effectively been locked out of the small bundle of cash that they had, even their own pensions. And we had a wall-to-wall media campaign against us, against the government, and definitely against our recommendation that the Greek people should vote no. To the extent that it was almost hilarious – there were pictures of burning forests with my picture on it and subtitled, these politicians that you have elected are going to leave nothing standing in this country. It was worse than even Soviet propaganda. And yet the Greek people voted 62 percent in every constituency of the land against that ultimatum by the Troika.

AMT: And you're talking about what the campaign-- just leading up to the referendum. Remind us how the rest of Europe responded to the result of the referendum.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, I think that most Europeans, or the majority of Europeans, we're particularly impressed and extremely supportive of us. The governments were not. We must not conflate the people in the street with government. And even some of the governments, or at least the finance ministers that I was speaking to in private, were expressing completely different view to what they were expressing in public. But that I suspect simply speaks to the deep anti- democratic nature of the European Union.

AMT: And you basically call it a moment when a small European nation rose up against debt bondage.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Indeed, because this is precisely what it was. Our Canadian audience must understand that the Greeks were not voting against the bitter medicine administered by a tough but efficient doctor. Our people have had enough of being pointed out as corrupt, as lazy, as people who didn't want to reform, to modernize, to shape up. They were perfectly prepared to go through painful reform, to take the bitter medicine and all that. But what has been happening over the last six, seven years is not that bitter medicine has been administered, poison has been administered. And the Greek economy is just dying. And we are in the clasp of a great depression without the prospects of a new deal or any kind of recovery. And these austerity measures, they’re simply perpetuating debt inflationary spiral through nothing good can come out. That is what the whole issue was.

AMT: You resigned just hours after the referendum that you and your party won. Why did you decide to quit?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: I had absolutely no choice. Well, I did. I had to choose between maintaining a degree of dignity and honesty and addressing my voters in a manner that was consistent with the kind of relationship I had with them, and that meant resigning or staying on in office and going against every principle that I had ever advocated. Because what happened on the night of the referendum, despite of the magnificent 62 percent outcome in favour of our recommendation for a no, my prime minister in a discussion we had told me that he's ready to surrender. And we had a two, three-hour hour discussion in the middle of the night. It was a very painful discussion to have for both of us. These were difficult moments. And my attempt to dissuade him from effectively setting aside the 62 percent no and accepting the ultimatum of the Troika-- once I failed to dissuade him, there was only one option left to me and that is to go back to my apartment and try to write the script, to offer the hardest piece of text of ever written, the purpose of which was at the same time to signal my sharp acute disagreement with the prime minister, while at the same time bot turning against a friend and a comrade.

AMT: Of course, the Syriza-led government did ask for another bailout and did implement very harsh austerity measures to get that money. So what was the use of the referendum?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, let me correct on something. We didn't ask for another bailout. It was a forced upon us. What you've got to realize that these are predatory loans and they are not loans for Greece. When you hear 85 billion, do you know how much of that ended up in the Greek state? Well, this is a rhetorical question, I’ll answer it myself. Precisely zero. It’s a very radical number, isn’t it? It's all extend and pretend loans. The creditors are taking 85 billion from one pocket and putting it in another pocket - their own pockets - while pretending that Greece remains solvent and Greece is meeting its repayments to the Troika. And the conditions for doing that is such harsh austerity and just complete silliness. Now, let me just give an example. You don't have to be left wing to agree with me on this. They pushed up corporate tax rate in an economy where corporations and small firms simply cannot pay tax anymore because they're broke. They increase sales taxes. They did all the things that nearly both supposedly don't want to do. So that was the deal that was imposed upon the Greek government. The Greek government surrendered to these loans, didn't ask for it, and we now have a government since back then, July, which is a ruling by email. It’s simply being told what to do. And the great disagreement now is not between the Greek government and the Troika of lenders, it is a disagreement between the different members of the Troika lenders. The reason why you may be hearing now in the news and reading newspapers that there is a stalemate and the Greek loan agreement is up in the air and hasn't been finalized, it’s not because the Greek government is resisting. It’s because the creditors are fighting amongst themselves.

AMT: The troika. Well, what was the attitude of the troika to you as the Greek finance minister?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Don’t believe what you read. On the personal level it was fine. I had a splendid relationship at the personal level with almost all of them. But then I would come out of the room-- Of course, the disagreement was palatable and it was a disagreement by design. I was elected to disagree with them, that was my job. But at the level of personal human relationships, even with [indecipherable], it didn't start off well, our relationship, but it ended quite well, you know, at the level of him and me as persons, it was actually quite the warm human relationship. But let me just answer this question of yours in a manner that I thing enlightens our audience in the best possible way. After one of the first meetings with the people from the International Monetary Fund-- These were meetings that lasted for hours and hours and hours, of disagreement, of my showing them our analysis of the Greek debt trajectory, of our fiscal policy and so on and them showing me theirs and they were very different and we were having a discussion, which was actually quite challenging intellectually as well, as to whose analysis was better. Towards the end of the day, I had an informal meeting with one of the top notch people in the IMF, whose was named [indecipherable], doesn’t matter who it was, somebody really high up in the IMF. And during that informal end of the day, middle of the night drink that we had together this person said to me something quite astonishing: Your analysis, Yanis, is right. The program that we've been imposing upon Greece cannot work. But you must understand that we have put so much political capital in this that we cannot take it back. And your credibility, that's my credibility, depends on accepting it. Now, that explains to you the disconnect between the personal relations, the intellectual exchange, which, actually, from an academic point of view even led to convergence, we agreed. And on the other hand the international press is replete with reports that I was a time waster, that I was rude, that I was going to these meetings without analysis, without numbers, a character assassination attempt.

AMT: And you when you were told that, how did you react? In that moment, what did you do?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: If I remember correctly, there were quite a few of those moments of, you know, moments of truth, as I remember them. What I said was that, look, I understand you have this political commitment, but at the same time, you have to understand that our children in schools in Greece, they actually faint during class because of malnutrition. And your political capital is to be respected, but you know that other imperatives here too. And let's find a way to a face-saving formula for you too. This is what I tried to do. I tried to be as understanding of their circumstances without betraying the humanitarian demands coming from my country.

AMT: In describing the narrative around the Greek economic crisis you use the Aesop fable of the grasshoppers and the ants. Why?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Because it's been used extensively, except that it is used in a rather vulgar way. It is as if-- If you read the stories in the media about the Italy, Greece, Portugal in juxtaposition to Germany and Holland, the northern Protestant countries it is as if all the ants live in the North and the grasshoppers have congregated in the Mediterranean, and some of them have moved to Ireland. And this is the reason why the periphery is sinking is because of the grasshoppers that want to laze around in the sun and not work hard enough and the ants have to bail them out. That is the dominant paradigm, the dominant narrative in Europe and it's completely false. It leads to the wrong conclusions. The reality is that there are ants and grasshoppers everywhere. There are ants and grasshoppers in Germany, there are ants and grasshoppers in Greece. And unfortunately it is the grasshoppers of the north of the south that are ruling the roost during the good times about the times and the ants of the north and the ants of the south have to bear the consequences.

AMT: But your critics would say Greek society also bears some of the responsibility for this disaster, that Greeks spent a huge amount on pensions, had very early retirement, billions of euros were never collected because of tax evasion.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, you’re talking to somebody who you know, as a left winger, I spend my life protesting against Greek regime and the Greek state of doing things for decades, in demonstrations. I’m the last person who will defend the malignancies of the Greek social economy. But having said that, while it is correct that we have a national sport called tax evasion in Greece and there’s quite a bit of corruption and we have oligarchs that resemble non-European countries in terms of their capacity to usurp everything. Nevertheless, imagine just for a fleeting moment that the in 1999, the then Greek prime minister, whoever he was, Costas Simitis, had an epiphany in the middle of the night and decided to keep Greece out of the Eurozone, you and I would not be discussing Greece now, because Greece, after 2000 when the euro was created would not have been part of it. The tsunami of loans that came from the French and the German banks would not have come because the French and German bankers would not trust the Greeks with their money, as a result of not having the euro, of having a currency, the drachma, the soft currency that divide us. So, Greek wealth would have been very, very subtle in between 2000 and 2008. In 2008, like the rest of the world, we would go through a little spasm, we would have a devaluation, we would have a small recession for nine, 12, 18 months at most. And Greece would be recovering ever since despite its malignancies. The reason why we're talking about the Great Depression at the moment is because we are part of a flimsily and terribly designed monetary union.

AMT: And so your sovereignty in the ability to deal with it has been compromised?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Yes and all the shock absorbers have gone. Because the moment you bind together monetarily different economies like Germany and Greece for instance, Germany was is always going to have a trade surplus towards this. German cars will always be more competitive than Greek cars simply because there are no Greek cars. And the moment you bind them together what happens is there's a tsunami of money that automatically and without that any government intervention flows from Germany to Greece. The reason is that when one country has a trade surplus with another, at the same time it absorbs the capital from the deficit country. So every BMW or Volkswagen that are sold to Greece is accompanied by a sum of money going from Greece to Germany, to the German bank, so there's a glut of money in Germany, in the German banking system. That glut pushes the interest rate, the effective interest rate in Germany to very low levels. The scarcity of money in Greece pushes the interest rate high and that gives any me did incentive to German bankers to take part of that glut of money in Germany, in Frankfurt, and lend it to the Greeks - Greek governments, Greek corporations, municipalities, households. Why? Because of the interest rate differential. And if they believe that the Greeks have the deutschmark in their pockets - called the euro - they will give a lot more of it. Now, this tsunami of capital builds up huge bubbles in Greece. The Greeks get the impression, because house prices are going up, economic activity is going up—Indeed, we had five percent growth in Greece when Germany had only one. It was a miracle economy. That's how it was being portrayed. And there are all these bubbles, this Ponzi growth, and at some point of course the bubbles burst. And then the burden of adjustment falls on the weakest of shoulders. And then you have a great depression.

AMT: Well, let's just stay with some of your analogy here because you were quoted as saying, it's time to stop Greece's fiscal waterboarding by an incompetent misanthropic troika. How is Greece being waterboarded?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, let's remind ourselves of this unpleasant practice. What is waterboarding? You bring a subject to the verge of asphyxiation and then you give the subject a little bit more oxygen and then you start again. Let's say that a bond, a Greek bond, or a part of a repayment by the Greek state the European Central Bank is coming up next week or in two weeks from now, the troika is were saying, we will we will pay this on your behalf to the ECB if you cut pensions by another ten percent more. Greek government is resisting. The troika is waiting until the moment when the payment to the ECB has to be made, the government doesn't have the money. So it will be declared to be in default. The banks will be closed. And all hell will break loose, metaphorically and literally. And then right at the very last moment, some liquidity is given to the Greek government on condition that it cuts the pensions. So, that’s exactly what I understand as fiscal waterboarding, except that instead of oxygen, what is deprived is liquidity and this cycle continues and continues until in the end Greece is turned into a desert and declared to be peaceful.

AMT: How much of what Greece has gone through was a warning to other economically stressed European countries, that if they don't bring in austerity, they could suffer the same fate?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Well, Greece was a laboratory in which the policies of the state it were tried out and the instruments of fiscal waterboarding were tried out. Very soon after Greece, it was Ireland, it was Portugal, it was Spain, it was Italy. And in my conversations with the powers that be in the German government, it became abundantly clear to me, only because they told me so, that even though they understood, behind closed doors, confidentially, that this program was crippling the Greek economy and it was never going to allow us to recover. It was something that they had to do because they wanted the troika in Paris to control the French national budget. So a whole nation was subjected to an unnecessary great depression, seen as collateral damage in the process of tussling between Berlin and Paris.

AMT: Well, and Greece has been ground zero for the Syrian refugee crisis. How is the pressure of that crisis affecting the country?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: This should be no connection, should there, between the refugee crisis and the economic crisis. The refugee crisis is a humanitarian crisis, and external crisis to Greece and to the European Union. People who have been shot at, who are hungry, who have had beloved ones drown at sea, they knock on your door in the middle of the night. At that point, you have a moral humanitarian responsibility to open your door and let them in and not to perform any cost benefit analysis or to start worrying about the effects that your humanity will have and philoxenia, the opposite of xenophobia, on your bottom line. But because for 10 years now Europe has been mishandling its economic crisis and centrifugal forces have been pushing our nations apart and pushing our European Union to the brink of disintegration. You have these unfortunate people coming from Syria, from Afghanistan, from Pakistan and the scapegoating and they are being treated like fodder. They're being treated like a bad that has to be unloaded onto somebody else's backyard. So we have a failure of ethics, of European ethics as a result of the 10-year long inability of our elites to handle the crumbling economic edifice of the European Union.

AMT: So how would you describe the future of the European Union?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: There won’t be one. The way we're moving the European Union is becoming a thing of the past. And unless we reverse this process very, very quickly, unless we democratize, unless we regain our integrity in our soul as Europe there will be nothing left of the European Union soon.

AMT: So what will be the legacy for Greece in the years to come because of the austerity programs that were imposed by the troika Because of what has gone on?

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: A lost generation. Greece has gone through awful periods in its history. We’ve survived 400 years of occupation by the Ottomans. We survived the terrible Nazi occupation, civil wars. We've been through the wringer, there's no doubt about that and I'm optimistic that Greece will survive because Greece has a tendency to survive through the millennia. But we have lost one generation, maybe two. We've had hundreds of thousands of extremely well trained and educated and protected and innovative youngsters, some of them with PhDs and masters from the best in North America and European universities. We’ve lost them. We've lost them to emigration. And they will never come back. Maybe some of them will when Greece turns a corner, but the longer we are engaged, embroiled in this debt inflationary spiral the greater this loss.

AMT: Mr. Varoufakis, we have to leave it there, but thank you for your perspective.

YANIS VAROUFAKIS: Thank you.

AMT: Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece. His book is And the Weak Suffer What They Must: Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future. He joined me from New York City. Now we have another note here. Coming up in The Current tomorrow, Diane Schoemperlen is a Governor General's award-winning novelist who is used to tapping into her imagination for her work. Even she could not have dreamed up what would happen in real life after she met a man behind bars serving a life sentence for second degree murder. What followed was a love story. The tumultuous relationship is captured in her new book, This Is Not My Life: A Memoir of Love, Prison, and Other Complications. Here is Diane Schoemperlen talking about some of the mental gymnastics she had to do to come to terms with loving a convicted criminal.

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Falling in love with a murderer, as I said, is not something that anybody sort of intends to do or expects to do. And I knew that it was a risky thing to do. And I did an awful lot of hard thinking about whether I wanted to try to have this relationship and I asked myself a lot of questions. I kind of drew lines around what I would and wouldn't have been able to accept and one of them was the fact that his crime was what they call ‘historical’. So, if he had murdered someone three years before instead of thirty years before, would I get involved with him? No. If he had murdered a woman? No. If he was a child molester or rapist? No. So, it's like I think I had to arrange it all in my mind to see if I could deal with the fact that, yes, he was a convicted killer.

AMT: Well, you can hear my complete interview with the writer Diane Schoemperlen tomorrow on The Current. That is our program for today. Now, after speaking with the former Greek finance minister who famously took a stand against austerity we're going to leave you with a bit of a song that anti-austerity protesters across Europe took up as their anthem. As anti-austerity protests broke out in every corner of Europe last summer, a Portuguese song became the common soundtrack. The song, Grândola, Vila Morena, became emblematic of Portugal's revolution in the seventies and it found new currency in Europe now. This is a bit of the classic recording of that. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

[Music: Grândola, Vila Morena by Zeca Afonso]

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May 2, 2016 full episode transcript

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