Interview with Michael Kovrig, three years after his return to Canada | Alongside the horror, love

The arrival of his baby girl should have been one of the happiest days of Michael Kovrig’s life. But in March 2019, when his partner gave birth to her, the former Canadian diplomat was languishing in solitary confinement in a Chinese detention center.

Far, far from his loves. Caught in the middle of a power struggle between Canada, the United States and China.

“You want to know what the hardest moment was for me? That was it,” he told me last week in the café of the Saint-Thomas Hotel in downtown Montreal, in one of the first interviews he gave about his detention in China. Three years after his headline-making release.

On September 24, 2021, after 1,059 days of detention, Michael Kovrig and another Canadian citizen, Michael Spavor, left China for Canada. A few hours earlier, Chinese businesswoman Meng Wanzhou, daughter of the founder of the giant Huawei, announced that she had reached an agreement with the American justice system. This agreement ended her detention in Canada as part of an extradition procedure.

The story of the “two Michaels” – the hostages of this legal-political joust – shocked all of Canada and plunged diplomatic relations with the Xi Jinping regime into ice. However, until now, the main parties involved had not spoken publicly about what they experienced.

Michael Kovrig’s nightmare began one December evening in 2018 in Beijing, as he was returning from a party. At the time, he was working for the International Crisis Group, an organization that specializes in analyzing and resolving global conflicts. “It was shocking to be grabbed by a group of men dressed in black, thrown into a car and kidnapped in the middle of the night without knowing why. But it’s been much worse. For nearly six months at the beginning of my detention, I was in solitary confinement and interrogated relentlessly. And Chinese interrogations are not like those of the police here, where the goal is to obtain facts. It’s an exercise in coercion, intimidation and terror,” he says, sipping a double espresso. A little nervous, the slender man in his early fifties often checks his notes so as not to forget anything.

He describes being subjected to “a form of brainwashing.” “They try to make you believe that you – the victim – are the ones who have done something wrong and that the oppressor is the victim. In this case, they paint a picture where China is a great and noble country and you are the one at fault,” he says, comparing the techniques used to those in the novel. 1984 of George Orwell or even those ofA Clockwork Orangethe cult film by Stanley Kubrick.

In this alternate reality, this former diplomat and regional expert analyst was a threat to Chinese national security.

If Michael Kovrig refused to cooperate and comply with his captors’ demands, they could cut off his food rations, force him to sit in awkward positions for hours on end, “until [son] back [le] “It hurts terribly,” he said. Add to that the long months of solitary confinement in a cell with padded walls, lit day and night. Torture, pure and simple, but without leaving any physical marks.

“The psychological pressure of coercive interrogation and solitary confinement has as its main goal not only to force you to confess, but also to make you apologize, repent and express shame,” says Michael Kovrig, who says it took all his strength to resist these techniques, but without losing his skin. He took up meditation. He imposed a routine on himself. “I became the perfect prisoner,” he says.

After being released from solitary confinement, he was mixed with the prison population for two and a half more years. An eternity.

Today, Michael Kovrig might be an angry man. After all, he and his family paid dearly for a quarrel between three countries in which he was a bargaining chip. His daughter was two and a half years old when he was finally able to hold her for the first time.

He may have a grudge against Michael Spavor, the other Michael, who, in confidential negotiations with the government, accused Michael Kovrig of being behind his arrest because Kovrig allegedly passed on comments they had exchanged in written reports to Global Affairs Canada’s Global Security Information Program. “Everything we do as diplomats is done in the open. There’s nothing clandestine about it. It’s 100 per cent part of the Vienna Convention.” [sur les relations diplomatiques] “, he defends himself, saying he was “disappointed” after the leaks to the media, but all the while claiming to feel empathy for Michael Spavor. “He was subjected to the same treatment as me,” he emphasizes.

Now that he is out of the darkness, it is the light that interests him.

He is convinced that without the intervention of a multitude of people, starting with his ex-wife and best friend, Vina Nadjibullah, he would “perhaps still be within the walls of the padded cell.”

His long list of thanks includes his sister, Ambassadors Dominic Barton and Kirsten Hillman, his colleagues at the International Crisis Group and Foreign Affairs who took to the streets to demand his release. And then there are all the people who worked behind the scenes, whose identities he is now discovering. He takes advantage of his travels to thank them in person. “All of these people saved my life and pulled Canada out of a bad situation,” he firmly believes.

Today, he has resumed his professional life and settled in Europe. He tries to use his voice to denounce arbitrary detentions, the taking of hostages for political purposes. Like Canada, he calls on the international community to act together to counter this practice widespread in China, Iran, Russia and other authoritarian regimes.

He also got to see his daughter, now 5, start school. “My current partner helped campaign for me to be released while she was pregnant, but her priority was to protect our daughter, to create a cocoon of security and love around her,” he says gratefully. A cocoon in which he, in turn, is rebuilding himself today.