Not enough for Darfur

David Kilgour, MP Edmonton Mill Woods - Beaumont

National Post, May 16, 2005

Opinion

Members of Parliament from every political party have been urging Prime Minister Paul Martin to demonstrate real leadership on the ongoing catastrophe in Darfur since he took office in December 2003.  His announcement this week of an aid package of $170 million, a cross-disciplinary team, and up to 100 peacekeepers was thus helpful.  Unfortunately, it largely missed the key point, which is to put an immediate end to the ongoing violence across Darfur.

Justin Laku, a Sudanese Canadian and founder of Canadian Friends of Sudan, recently spent four days in Darfur in three settlement camps for internally displaced persons, including one which holds about 230,000 women and children.  As he wrote earlier this week in Embassy, a foreign policy newsweekly, these camps are nightmares.  Consider only three of his observations:

·   The camps, ostensibly run by the Sudanese Red Crescent/Red Cross, are in reality run by Sudanese security, who work hand in hand with janjaweed militias , which have “ethnically cleansed” Darfur chiefly through mass murders.

·   The janjaweed control all entrances to these camps and also control the flow of humanitarian aid sent to the camps.  Nightly, they “search the camps, round up women and commit mass rapes.”

·    The few African Union soldiers presently have no mandate from the Khartoum regime to do more than observe; they can neither stop crimes nor investigate them.  Ominously, they leave their observation posts at night. Also, AU soldiers have no power to arrest or detain janjaweed militiamen

Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo

Rape as an instrument of “ethnic cleansing” was also used extensively in Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo.  The estimates of the number of Tutsi women who were often raped before being murdered go as high as 500,000.  In tiny Bosnia-Herzegovina, following a brutal three-year war in which as many as 50,000 Muslim women were raped, fully 60,000 peacekeepers from thirty countries were finally committed by 1995, with Canada providing approximately 1450 military personnel.  In Kosovo, in a grotesquely similar ethnic cleansing situation, Canada’s peacekeeping community went as high as 1470 military personnel.

In that context, and given what continues to go on in Darfur, Mr. Martin’s commitment of only up to 100 for Darfur is anything but leadership, especially given that the Darfur about the size of France.

Only recently, Senator Romeo Dallaire said that about 40,000 peacekeepers are required.  In his book, Shake Hands With the Devil, he notes that the Foreign Affairs department vetoed the sending of any Canadian troops with him to Rwanda in 1993. When the UN Force Commander could not persuade his own government to send a significant number of Canadian peacekeepers with him, it was no surprise that other governments could not be persuaded either. One has to ask if history is possibly repeating itself.

I understand that the AU is asking NATO for assistance, knowing full well that China and Russia will likely block any initiatives at the UN.  Canada should be appealing to NATO in support the AU.  There is no reason why NATO cannot partner with the AU so that the catastrophe can be brought to an end soon.

Last week as I attended the holocaust memorial on Parliament Hill and reflected on the Nazi genocide of sixty years ago, I asked myself if we have really learned from the tragedies of the past. Must another six million die? Will it take another Rwanda before we can agree that human life must always be held sacred? Unless we can recognize genocide for the crime against humanity that it is wherever and whenever it takes place then “never again” will always be again and again.

- 30 -