By Bob Weber
Canadian Press
May 19, 2011
http://www.google.com/hostednews/canadianpress/article/ALeqM5gkmNhp5xR307rzMH9-pJawVso4NQ?docId=6893355
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| Catholic priest Eric Dejaeger is escorted by police outside an Iqaluit, Nunavut courtroom Jan. 20, 2011 after his first appearance for six child sexual abuse charges in Igloolik dating back to the 1970s. |
He must have thought he was through with Canadian prisons.
Father Eric Dejaeger probably figured as recently as last spring that he'd never have to answer to accusations he'd betrayed the faith and innocence of Inuit children from the tiny Nunavut community of Igloolik.
And he almost never did.
The fact he now sits in an Arctic jail, awaiting trial on a score of sex charges, has as much to do with luck, dogged journalism, modern communications and two determined women on opposite sides of the Atlantic as it does with international law enforcement.
One of his pursuers, a retired nurse and homemaker from Ottawa, was motivated by sex scandals she saw tearing her church apart. The other, a Belgian, was outraged that an accused pedophile could live and work in her country unchallenged over allegations he faced thousands of kilometres away in Canada.
Together, in front of their computers, they supplied both the push and sometimes the information that finally drove authorities to ensure the matter would be addressed in a Canadian court.
"Thanks to the Internet, the day is going to come when these fellows have no place to hide," says Sylvia McEachern from her home in the capital.
Dejaeger, now 64, wasn't born in Canada, but he adopted it as home in the early 1970s. He came from Belgium and took out citizenship here in 1977.
He found a calling studying at Edmonton's Newman Theological College and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1978. His first posting took him to the remote northern community of Igloolik.
The Oblate missionary there at the time was Father Robert Lechat, a much-loved, Inuktitut-speaking veteran of the North.
One woman who was there as a child remembers spending a lot of time at Lechat's home with other youngsters, drawing pictures and reading Bible stories as the avuncular Lechat rode herd on the sometimes-unruly kids.
"Out of nowhere, Eric came and (Lechat) introduced him to the community," she recalls.
To an Inuit child, the new priest from the south seemed exotic.
"He had weird dark glasses. Lots of hair. He smelled like something rotting."
Dejaeger — who never learned Inuktitut — also welcomed children into the church.
"He was nice at first but then things started getting weird. I didn't like being too close to him. He was different than Father Lechat.
"He would use food to bring us there because he knew that we had hardly any food in our house. He would say he had candy to share."
Others saw nothing wrong.
Lucasi Ivvalu, now Igloolik's mayor, remembers seeing Dejaeger frequently walking his dog around town.
"When he was here, he acted as though he was a really decent man. We thought he was someone who was a friend."
Lechat, who was out of town on church business for much of the time the two priests shared in Igloolik, says much the same.
Dejaeger "was OK," Lechat recalls. "He was even liked."
Lechat says he had no idea anything was amiss until he later heard about Dejaeger's stint in Baker Lake, Nunavut, between 1982 and 1989. Eight charges of sexual assault and one of indecent assault were laid stemming from that time. The victims were boys and girls nine through 18 years old.
Dejaeger pleaded guilty in 1990 to all nine counts. He served part of his five-year sentence and was released in September 1991.
By then RCMP were looking into the time he spent in Igloolik.
Correspondence from the Oblate order's lawyers in 1993 suggest they didn't expect fresh charges. But something changed, and in June 1995 police charged Dejaeger with three new counts of indecent assault and another three of buggery — a crime no longer in the Criminal Code.
He didn't show up for his court date.
"It was determined later that Dejaeger had fled to Belgium," says Sgt. Jimmy Akavak of Iqaluit RCMP.
Before he left, Dejaeger discussed the matter with his supervisor, Oblate Father Jean-Paul Isabelle.
"I didn't agree with him leaving," Isabelle says.
But he didn't try to make Dejaeger stay.
"I didn't think it was my business.
"I told him, 'Well, I don't want to know anything about this. But when you get to wherever you're going, here's a code that we're going to use to let me know where you are ... When you get to wherever you're going, just send me a note ...' When I received this code I knew what country he was in."
Isabelle never told police about the code. He says they never asked about it.
Isabelle says he did not know where Dejaeger went in Belgium, but he was able to get a letter through to him with the co-operation of Belgian church officials after Dejaeger's no-show in court.
The letter warned: "A mandate for your arrest is out for you, which means should you come to Canada you would be apprehended at the entry point."
Canada then asked Belgium to send Dejaeger back, says Belgian journalist Saskia van Nieuwenhove, who has reported on the case.
"The Canadians told Brussels that he had Canadian nationality and had to (renounce) his Belgian nationality," says van Nieuwenhove. "That fact exists in his file. The Canadian embassy told Belgium he's a Canadian."
But Belgium failed to act on the information, so Dejaeger stayed put.
Three years later, in 1998, Interpol issued an arrest warrant. The RCMP also issued a new warrant in 2002.
Still, no one troubled the priest who was living quietly in an Oblate community. Although the Oblates have said he was no longer allowed to say mass, he did spend time in Lourdes, where he welcomed Flemish pilgrims to the holy site where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a little girl.
It took another nine years — until last May — before the Belgian newspaper De Morgen published a story by reporter Douglas DeConinck pointing out that Dejaeger was living and working freely, despite the Interpol warrant.
Lieve Halsberghe, a Belgian who works with the international support group Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests, recalls reading the story and being outraged.
"There was an Interpol warrant out for his arrest that was printed in the newspaper here and nobody did anything about it," she says.
Halsberghe was particularly well placed to change that. A relative of hers had been the head of an investigative commission looking into sex abuse by priests and had passed along to her information collected on Dejaeger.
"My aunt told me these stories and I can't stand hypocrites and injustice," she says. "So somebody had to do it."
Halsberghe hit the Internet. There she found McEachern's website.
In the early '90s, McEachern — then, as now, a regular churchgoer — had been writing for a publication by lay Catholics on subjects such as church liturgy and doctrine. She heard whispers about clerical sexual abuse but admits,"I didn't want to go there, I really didn't."
Eventually, though, a local priest faced charges. McEachern felt she could no longer ignore the issue and went to the trial. When a scandal surrounding allegations of a pedophile ring in Cornwall, Ont., broke, she found herself blogging about it and collecting data on priests who had abused children.
As the Cornwall legal cases grew into a public inquiry, she began posting those documents on the web. That eventually grew into an online database on priest sex abuse.
"People really should be able to look," McEachern says. "If there's somebody who's been charged, sued or accused, at least (complainants) can have the comfort of a source of information on that."
That database came to include two old news stories by The Canadian Press on Dejaeger's Baker Lake convictions. In April 2010, Halsberghe found those stories and she and McEachern began exchanging information.
"We were Skyping every day," says McEachern.
Halsberghe wanted to see Dejaeger face the courts in Canada. But before she began pushing for that, she needed to know that Canada still wanted him.
By last June, McEachern was able to confirm that the Canadian warrant was still active and she helped Halsberghe get in touch with Dejaeger's accusers. They were eager for a trial.
"I knew then for 100 per cent sure that they wanted him back," Halsberghe says.
On June 25, 2010, Interpol issued a fresh warrant. But the Belgian government still considered Dejaeger a citizen, and that country has a 10-year statute of limitations. Belgium wouldn't extradite a citizen for crimes for which he couldn't be convicted in its courts.
McEachern and Halsberghe spent last summer on the phone with police and government officials in both countries, trying to understand why a man wanted for such serious crimes wasn't being prosecuted.
"It was so terribly, terribly, terribly frustrating," McEachern says. "I was hard-pressed to find out anything."
Information about extradition requests and ongoing investigations was confidential, she was told. She began to despair of ever seeing Dejaeger back in Canada.
Finally, Halsberghe took matters into her own hands. Through a friend of a friend, she set up a meeting with a church official on Sept. 10, a Friday.
"I threw the whole file of Dejaeger on the table," she recalls. "I said, 'If you want to change your church, you're going to have to turn in that criminal. There's no denying about it. I have all the proof in this file.' "
That Sunday, the Oblates issued a news release saying Dejaeger would turn himself in the next day.
And so he did, although he wasn't detained. Belgian police had no reason to hold him or any justification to extradite him. Belgium's statute of limitations kept him safe.
But the assumption that protected him — that he was Belgian as well as Canadian — was about to crumble.
Almost coincidentally with Dejaeger reporting to police, van Nieuwenhove discovered that Belgian law in 1977 didn't recognize dual citizenship. At that time, if you became Canadian, you were no longer Belgian. Van Nieuwenhove checked with Canadian officials to make sure Dejaeger hadn't changed his citizenship back. He hadn't.
Van Nieuwenhove immediately took the discovery to her contact in Belgium's justice ministry.
"I called him at 5 o'clock to say, 'I think we have a problem. I found out (Dejaeger) is Canadian.' He said, 'Saskia, I will call you back.' "
By 7:30 that evening, the Belgian government put out a news release echoing van Nieuwenhove's finding.
Still there was no extradition order from Canada, even though RCMP told Halsberghe an investigation was "ongoing" and Belgian police had been questioning him regularly.
Halsberghe met again with church officials in December.
"They said, 'He won't go back and he doesn't want to. I can't force him.' "
Eventually, a Belgian police officer who had been questioning Dejaeger realized that he had long overstayed the three-year limit for Canadians without a visa. He was arrested on Jan. 3 and returned to Canada on Jan. 19.
After all the investigation and concern about Dejaeger's alleged sexual assaults, it was that immigration violation that finally sent him back to face charges.
Canadian officials have never explained why they didn't press for his extradition. Such investigations, they say, are confidential.
Now, Dejaeger sits in an Iqaluit jail charged with 28 offences alleged to have occurred between 1978 and 1982 in Igloolik. He is facing one count of failing to appear, two charges of common assault, one of using violence to prevent reporting a suspicious activity and 24 sexual offences, include one count of bestiality.
Several attempts by The Canadian Press to contact Dejaeger's lawyer have been unsuccessful.
Two bail hearings have been postponed and his trial is likely to be months away.
Lawyer Steven Cooper confirms that the Catholic church has reached at least 30 out-of-court settlements with those who came in contact with Dejaeger in Igloolik. The settlements involve allegations not tested in court. Cooper, who represented the complainants, expects that once the trial starts, more alleged victims will come forward in Baker Lake to seek redress.
It's a difficult wait for those whose complaints led to the latest charges.
"All of the memories are coming back," one of them told The Canadian Press. "I'm numb all over and I can't think. I'm trying not to drink."
McEachern downplays her role in bringing Dejaeger back to face the courts.
"I don't know," she says. "I think the (website) was able to keep people abreast."
But Halsberghe says once a few committed people devote themselves to a cause, anything is possible.
"Maybe if I hadn't done anything, nothing would have happened. It's like a wind or a tornado — when you start something, people pitch in."
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