OTTAWA CITIZEN/Published 24 September 2009
Shutting Down the Killing Fields
by Kate Heartfield
A United Nations commander said last month that the war in Darfur is over. That doesn't mean that the crisis is over, of course: there are still three million refugees stuck in unimaginable conditions along one of the most dangerous borders on the planet.
But the time of widescale massacre does seem to be at an end. The failure to prevent or stop that massacre, the deaths of 300,000 people, belongs to history now.
All this despite at least five years of newspaper editorials and earnest efforts by many advocacy groups. Yes, it took a while for journalists to catch on, but by about 2004, they had. It's not that Canadians didn't care. They did care, and they were vocal about it.
Darfur was a relatively slow disaster -- unlike, say, Rwanda a decade before -- so there was still time, in 2004, to prevent many deaths. But governments responded to the pressure from their own constituents by doing as little about Darfur as they could. If there's one lesson we can take from the Darfur failure, it's that "awareness" isn't enough. That's a tough lesson for activists, and even for journalists, to learn.
As it turns out, it is next to useless for citizens to organize and make YouTube videos and hand out plastic bracelets and scream at their government to "do something about Darfur" -- or about any one conflict. By the time Darfur became a household word in Ottawa, the Canadian military had been diminished by years of neglect, and besides, there was Afghanistan to worry about. On the diplomacy and development side, Canada was equally weakened. And on the political side, of course, we've had dishrags for leaders of late.
When the next genocide begins, Canada won't be willing or able to do anything about it, and it won't matter how many newspaper editorials I write about it.
Unless, that is, Canada strengthens its capacity to act, and does it now, so that we'll be prepared when the next genocide does begin.
That's the conclusion of the Will to Intervene Project, developed in part by Senator Roméo Dallaire. The project got my attention because of the breadth of experience and ideology on its research steering committee: Anything that brought, among others, Tom Flanagan, Ed Broadbent, Allan Thompson, Maurice Baril, Hugh Segal, Robert Fowler and Bill Graham together had to result in something interesting, I figured.
The project released its report this week, and indeed it is interesting. The moral and even legal obligations to act against genocide, the report acknowledges, "have not carried sufficient weight to overwhelm the cold statecraft calculations that traditionally informed the national interest."
But governments have struggled to come to terms with one of the undeniable truths of our age: it is in every state's interest to stop massive movements of refugees, and piracy in shipping lanes, and terrorism. Tom Flanagan, one of the people who helped Stephen Harper become prime minister, pointed out in a recent op-ed in The Globe and Mail that both the left and the right recognize this, although they talk about it in different ways.
The Will to Intervene report makes the very practical point that it's a lot cheaper and easier to prevent genocide than to stop it: even something as small as funding independent radio stations, in a country like pre-1994 Rwanda (or Somalia or Afghanistan today) can change history.
It would be a lot easier to see genocides coming if Canada had more and better intelligence from the ground, and if its departments and agencies were better at sharing it. In 1992, Ed Broadbent visited Rwanda and returned with a warning about war crimes and genocide. He gave the information to External Affairs, but it seems not to have been shared with the Department of National Defence -- in any event, when Dallaire deployed to Rwanda in 1993, he didn't know the contents of the Broadbent report, and he had very little information about Rwanda in general.
Getting government departments to communicate better is a Sisyphean task. The Will to Intervene Project suggests a Minister of International Security, with responsibilities for defence, diplomacy and development, the idea being that a "whole of government" approach will ensure co-ordination and communication.
I remain to be convinced; there's reason to believe that the "whole of government" approach to Afghanistan has just slowed things down and made government less transparent. Much would depend on the person assigned to that cabinet position. As we've seen with officers of Parliament, a strong advocate can work wonders, but a weak one is worse than nothing.
The report also notes that we're still paying the price for the reduction of the Canadian Forces in the early 1990s.
Smart people on both sides of the political spectrum recognize that "soft power" and "hard power" aren't opposed; we need a lot more of both.
Kate Heartfield is a member of the Citizen's editorial board.
