Lost in the eulogies for Nelson Mandela is one inconvenient fact.

Under current Canadian law, this iconic hero of South Africa’s liberation would be considered a terrorist.

To remember this is not to diminish Mandela. He peacefully transformed a desperately divided apartheid state into a more-or-less united country.

The extravagant eulogies that followed his death are well-deserved.

But Mandela’s complicated history also underscores how crudely the post-9/11 world approaches what it calls terrorism.

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton once likened Mandela to India’s Mahatma Gandhi. Both were visionaries. But unlike Gandhi, Mandela was not averse to using violence.

In 1961, he established an armed wing of the anti-apartheid African National Congress to wage war on the South African state.

Modelled on Fidel Castro’s guerrilla forces in Cuba, MK, as it was known, sabotaged power stations, attacked military bases and engaged in the occasional car bombing.

People died.

Mandela was in jail for most of these operations. But he never renounced his decision to authorize violent resistance. Indeed, a few months before being elected South Africa’s first black president he formally lauded his old MK comrades for embodying the “fighting spirit of our people.”

Armed resistance, he said in that 1993 speech, had once played a useful role in South Africa’s political dialectic. But the time had come to move from this “period of armed propaganda” into a new phase of peaceful negotiation.

At the time, Canada’s government seemed to understand that the border between terrorism and freedom fighting was fuzzy, that sometimes armed struggle could act as a way station on the road to peace.

Mandela was welcomed to Canada, three times. On his last trip, in November 2001, he was awarded honorary citizenship.

Yet had he come two months later, after Canada’s stiff new anti-terrorism laws were proclaimed, he could have been arrested for the crime of having once been involved in activities that harmed property or people and that were aimed at effecting political change.

In the world of real politics, Mandela would never have faced such charges. By 2001, he was too famous. But other, less famous people have run afoul of the Canadian government’s overly broad use of terms such as terrorism or war crimes.

Omar Khadr is one. Wounded at the age of 15 in a 2002 Afghanistan firefight, the Canadian citizen has spent his life since then in prison.

Canada’s Conservative government calls Khadr a terrorist and murderer. The U.S. claims that his role in the death of an American soldier during battle was a war crime.

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But these labels rest on the U.S. insistence that any one who militarily opposed its 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was by definition, a war criminal, terrorist or both.

George Galloway is another example. The British MP was denied entry to Canada in 2009 as a terror supporter because he had once delivered relief supplies to Hamas-controlled Gaza.

There are other less well-known cases. My colleague, Nicholas Keung, reported on one this week when Ottawa’s privacy commissioner chided the government for tarring some failed refugee claimant as war criminals — without evidence.

That followed a July ruling by the Supreme Court that overturned Ottawa’s decision to label a former Congolese diplomat as a war criminal and thus deny his refugee claim.

War crimes have taken place in the Congo, the court said, but there was no evidence that the former diplomat had any role in them.

Mandela would understand why such broad-brush definitions are inherently unfair. He himself was hard to pigeon-hole.

Western leaders praised him lavishly. But he continued to support people and causes with which these leaders did not always agree — including Castro, former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi and the Palestinians.

At home, he was seen as a man of the people. Yet, as Carleton University political scientist and South African specialist Linda Freeman noted to me in an email, his economic policy “leaned toward the powerful rather than the poor.”

And he knew that, while peace is always preferable, sometimes the downtrodden must make war to get there.