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Towards Coherent Policies on Taiwan
Remarks by the Hon. David Kilgour M.P.
Edmonton-Mill Woods- Beaumont
Jasper Place High School Model United Nations Conference
January 7, 2005
Edmonton, AB
Thank you for inviting me here to speak today. The issue that we
are discussing, human rights, is among the most important that must be
confronted this century. As Canadians, who have enjoyed persistent freedom and
democracy, we can clearly appreciate that the spread of these two conditions are
essential components of a global movement towards the broad extension of human
rights to all peoples. Unfortunately, 2004 has been an uneven year in terms of
progress towards these goals and with them a more just world. In the elections,
and surrounding events, which recently took place in Ukraine we witnessed a
triumph of democracy that was both powerful and inspiring, while just next-door
Russia has moved in the opposite direction and is now engaged in a dangerous
regression towards authoritarianism.
It’s worth starting our discussion with the positive example of
Ukraine because, frankly, much of what follows is incredibly bleak and while
considering the ugliness of human rights abuses it bears keeping in mind that
things can, have, and in many cases are getting better. Also, it is worth
thinking about the factors that allow a situation such as took place in Ukraine
to happen and how that might or might not be applicable in other parts of the
world.
The Ukrainian
election was among the most important anywhere in the world last year.
Initially, the western media tended to portray the election as a geopolitical
struggle with the result set to determine whether Ukraine continued to move
towards greater integration with Europe and the democratic world or whether it
pulled back from this engagement and was slowly reabsorbed into Russia’s sphere
of influence as part of the East. While that was certainly a major component of
the story, and one that went a long way to explain the inexcusable interference
of Russia in this election (By way of explanation – think about what it
would be like if U.S. television stations actively supported Paul Martin and
President George Bush came to Canada to campaign on his behalf – it would be a
violation of Canada’s sovereign right to choose its own leaders without outside
interference – This is essentially what Russia and President Putin did in the
Ukraine), the story grew to be one that was much more significant, it became a
contest pitting the entrenched interests of a small group of wealthy elites
against the aspirations of the people to have freedom, democracy and a better
life.
How did this
happen? The short answer is that when confronted with the prospect of losing
power, incumbent Prime Minister Viktor Yanucovych and a small group of powerful
supporters blatantly attempted to steal the election from the leading opposition
candidate Viktor Yushchenko. The November 21st runoff election
between the two candidates was marked by massive irregularities including
bribery, threats, multiple voting, and ballot stuffing. When preliminary
results of the election were announced they showed Yanucovych with a comfortable
3-point margin over Yushchenko, despite reliably conducted exit polls that had
put Yushchenko about 10% ahead.
What happened
next was remarkable; hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians took to the streets to
demand their democratic rights. In the ensuing days the protests in
Independence Square in Kiev continued to grow, reaching a height of 700,000
people on November 27th. With the support of the people the
opposition gained the strength to challenge the official result.
On December 3rd
Ukraine’s highest court struck down the official results of the election and
demanded a new vote on December 26th. This time challenger Viktor
Yushchenko won in a result that was upheld by the central election commission.
The process was an important step towards democracy for Ukraine and an even more
important display of self-determination for its people.
The role of the
international community in Ukraine cannot be ignored. While Russia played a
negative role, interfering in the election, the democratic world was quick to
condemn the fraudulent results, demand that the political crisis be solved
peacefully, and was generous in sending huge teams of elections observers to
monitor the re-run election. Without this critical support it is possible that
Ukrainians would have been unable to face down the corrupt former leaders and
demand fairness and democracy.
That’s the good
news, and happily it does fit into a general trend towards greater freedom in
the world. The non-governmental organization Freedom House reports that in 2004
more countries improved their degree of freedom than saw it regress, however,
the process of change is more often than not slow and unsteady – even in the
Ukraine there is still a long way to go before the people are fully free.
Turning to the
bad news: according to Freedom House 49 countries representing 37% of the
world’s population are not free, while another 54 countries representing 19% of
the world’s population are only partly free. The denial of basic political and
civic freedoms is in and of itself a substantial human rights violation, which
is part of the reason that Russia’s recent regression in this area is of such
dramatic concern, however, the additional importance of freedom stems from the
depredations visited upon people who live in countries that are not free. In
the next little while I’ll discuss some of the worst areas in the world today –
these are issues that have come before the Human Rights and International
Development sub-committee, which I chair.
There can be no
other place to start this discussion than the Darfur region of Western Sudan.
Following the Nazi holocaust of WWII the world pledged “never again”: genocide,
wherever it occurred would be stopped. This pledge was eventually enshrined as
the United Nations Convention on Genocide. Our words have not been matched by
actions. In 1994 the world stood idly by while more than 800,000 Rwandans were
slaughtered by their fellow countrymen in the fastest genocide (the killing
lasted only 100 days) of the 20th Century.
Following Rwanda
the international community covered with the guilt and shame of its inaction
made its apologies and claimed that they would never allow another Rwanda.
Today, we are allowing another Rwanda – this time in Darfur. While exact
estimates of the carnage are impossible, since February 2003 it is highly likely
that more than 300,000 people have died in Darfur. This is compounded by the
presence of 2 million internally displaced people and 2.2 million people in
critical need of relief aid.
In the Sudan
people are being killed by the government and by militias who are doing the
government’s bidding but all the while the world is treating this as a
humanitarian disaster because people are dying not from guns and bombs alone,
but also from starvation and disease. An earthquake is a humanitarian disaster,
this is not: it is genocide and the world must act accordingly. Action means
intervening, with force if necessary, to protect civilians from attack by
militias, it means disarming and disbanding the groups doing the killing on the
ground, it means forcing the government of Sudan to stop supporting the murder
of its own citizens, and it means finding a path to lasting peace in Darfur and
all of Sudan.
You’ll note that
in this discussion there was really very little said of what the citizens of
Sudan can do to improve their own situation. As opposed to the situation in
Ukraine, Sudan demonstrates the limits of people power. It is simply not
possible to gather in Sudan and say to the government “stop killing us”, there
is no freedom and there is no desire on the part of the government to serve its
people: international efforts are the last best hope to stop the bloodshed.
Hopefully the world will find the will to do this. Perhaps one of the things
that you could discuss here today is how we can really bring our own government
to meaningfully carryout the pledges that they have made time and time again to
prevent the slaughter of innocents by predatory governments such as the one in
Sudan.
Of course, even
if we are successful in that there remains the problem of what to do about
foreign governments who continue to do business with rogue states like Sudan.
China, for instance, has shown a disturbing willingness to deal with
authoritarian and corrupt regimes in order to secure access to natural
resources. Currently, China is Sudan’s largest trading partner and accounts for
25% of Sudan’s exports. To date, China has invested in excess of $3.9 billion in
Sudan of which most has been directed to the oil sector. While companies such as
Talisman have ceased operations in Sudan after being heavily criticized by human
rights groups around the world, China has continued to invest in Sudan. Having
now introduced the subject of China it is an opportune time to segue into the
question of religious freedom, an area where China is one of the world’s worst
offenders.
Religious
persecution in China is substantial and in many respects the situation has
worsened as the number of religious adherents has grown. This, no doubt, is
made worse because the seemingly ever-increasing pace of economic liberalization
has deprived the government of an important source of control over the general
population, leaving it to attack traditional enemies such as religion in order
to maintain its position of dominance over its citizens.
Since 1993 China’s constitution grants
citizens freedom of religious belief, assembly, association, speech, and
“normal” religious activities, however, in that same clause under Article 36 it
states, “no one may make use of religion to engage in activities that disrupt
public order, impair the health of citizens or interfere with the educational
system of the state.” So, while the constitution guarantees religious freedom,
the situation in China is better represented by President Jiang Zemin’s
statement at the 2001 National Religious Affairs Conference when he said,
“Religion must never be allowed when it opposes the direction of the party or
the socialist system or destroys national reunification or ethnic unity.”
People are most familiar with the persecution of Tibetan Buddhists and adherents
of the meditation practice Falun Gong, but China is no less aggressive in its
persecution of practitioners of all religious faiths, including Muslims and
Christians.
What can we do to confront the issue of
religious persecution in China? The answer to that question is complex. As
suggested already China’s repression of religious belief and practice is not
just a product of Communist ideology, but it is also something that allows the
government to maintain its power over the population. For this reason, simply
putting diplomatic pressure on the government of China won’t be enough to make
it allow full religious freedom. The reason for this is that as China becomes
more open the ruling Communist Party will become more vulnerable to losing
power, consequently the government will only be inclined to grant religious
freedom to the extent that not doing so makes its chances of being destabilized
even greater than if it permits religious freedom.
This doesn’t sound hopeful but there is a
positive. If the Chinese government persecuted religion simply because it hated
it there would be very little that could be done to stop them, we would really
have no choice but to wait for the government to be replaced, which appears
unlikely any time soon. If the government acts rationally with respect to
persecution of religion it is possible for free countries to exert meaningful
pressure on the Chinese government in such a way that it changes the political
calculations that are made when considering what type of policy to pursue. One
way that this might be done would be to seriously link trade with China to
progress on human rights and religious freedom.
I want to ensure that there will be plenty
of time for questions and discussion involving the whole group so I won’t go
further with discussion of some of the trouble spots in the world today.
Instead I want to discuss briefly an emerging human rights issue: environmental
rights. When discussing human rights in the abstract the difficulty becomes
establishing what is and what is not a human right. The recent tsunamis that
devastated Southeast Asia present just such a problem. Intuitively, weather
phenomena don’t invoke thoughts of human rights, however, climate change and the
environment will be an increasingly important component of this discussion in
the future.
As global warming alters the planet’s
climate, experts predict more frequent and more severe extreme weather events.
While few if any will have the impact of the recent tsunamis they will,
none-the-less, have substantial individual and cumulative effects. This becomes
a human rights issue because weather does not affect everyone the same, it has a
disproportionately high impact on the poorest people living in the poorest
countries. The risk that weather poses is measured as a combination of two
factors, exposure to extreme weather conditions and the ability to adapt to
weather phenomena.
Exposure to weather is something that does
not discriminate, South Florida is just as vulnerable as Equatorial Africa,
however, in the developed world the ability to adapt to weather events and
recover from disasters is far greater. In the developing world major weather
events can and frequently do disrupt the food supply, leading to starvation, and
prevent access to clean water and sanitation, leading to disease. If we agree
that access to the necessities of life is a basic human right then we must
address the fact that poverty and a changing climate, factors that will deprive
some people of these necessities are significant human rights issues.
If we think about climate and poverty in
this way, then it is essential for us to try and find ways of providing people
with the adaptive capacity to respond properly to weather events. In this
regard when we think about the recovery that is now taking place in South East
Asia we need to consider not just the immediate problems but we need to take a
long-term view about how we can establish a situation where people can be
prepared to deal with future weather events. It should be noted that while the
impact of weather tends to be felt most strongly in developing countries it
isn’t limited to them. In Canada’s North, global warming is threatening to
disrupt the traditional lifestyles of our Inuit peoples.
As you can see, human rights is a complex
and multi-faceted issue. I greatly admire you for what you are doing here today
– having this type of discussion is critically important for our future and the
future of people around the world. Thank you again for inviting me to
participate in this and I invite your questions.
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