Saving Darfur Should'nt be this Hard

National Post, May 26, 2005

Issues & Ideas, A22
by Noah Novogrodsky

In the space of a recent week, Canada announced a $170-million military and humanitarian assistance package for Darfur, Sudan's ambassador asserted that her country will not allow Canadian troops into the area and the federal government declared it would defer to the African Union on the question of whether our troops should actually stop the killing. David Kilgour, the Independent MP who has urged the Prime Minister's Office to take action, and whose budget vote the government so desperately coveted, rightly dismissed the government's action as inadequate.

Canada's feeble response is all the more inexcusable given that preventing and accounting for human rights abuses on the scale of Darfur has been Canada's signature foreign policy objective for the past decade. The "Responsibility to Protect" doctrine, first articulated by the Canadian-sponsored International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, recognizes the central importance of human security. The doctrine says that in the face of mass slaughter, ethnic cleansing or starvation, sovereign states must protect their own people from harm. If they are unable or unwilling to do so themselves, the onus falls on the larger international community to exercise that responsibility.

Darfur is fast becoming the litmus test for Responsibility to Protect (R2P). Sudanese government troops and janjaweed militia have systematically raped and murdered tens of thousands of people since the conflict began in the Darfur province in early 2003. Widespread human rights abuses have displaced nearly two million people. For a depiction of what the janjaweed look like when they sweep into a village, see the drawings that child refugees from Darfur produced for Human Rights Watch. (An example appears above.) The chilling image of two gunmen riding back-to-back on camel is a poster of the crimes R2P was designed to prevent.

R2P reflects a concerted legal and policy alternative to the international community's past failures in Rwanda and Bosnia. Well before the Commission report was published, Canada and respected Canadians -- Gen. Romeo Dallaire, Louise Arbour and Michael Ignatieff among them -- called for humanitarian intervention as a principled response to massive human rights abuses. Canada led the charge for an International Criminal Court (ICC) to try individual perpetrators of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity. Over the objection of "inviolable" sovereign powers, Canadian troops participated in military interventions in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Our diplomats have spent countless hours working toward UN reform in accordance with the Responsibility to Protect. Today, Canada chairs the Human Security Network, a collection of likeminded states committed to protecting and promoting our most basic human rights. With respect to Darfur, Canada recently used its diplomatic influence to urge the Security Council to refer the case to the ICC.

Against this backdrop, our federal government's deferral to the African Union as a complete solution to preventing violence in Darfur is a betrayal of R2P. This should be our moment, our chance to demonstrate that the lives of Africans matter and that "never again" means more than humanitarian relief. Instead, after months of doing nothing, Canada's efforts have helped produce a plan for international prosecution, but do little to prevent further crimes. On the question of interdiction, Ottawa appears to be yielding to Sudan's predictable assertion of sovereignty and to the workings of a frequently inept regional organization that is loath to sanction one of its own.

Sudan has forfeited its right to dictate who protects the people of Darfur. If R2P means anything, it means that the international community should react, prevent and rebuild where a state has turned on its own people. Even Sudan acknowledges that the solution to violence in Darfur will involve outside parties. Lately, however, Sudan has been saying that it isn't the idea of foreign forces that riles the regime, only the presence of non-African troops. In a statement issued on Tuesday, the leaders of Egypt, Libya, Chad, Nigeria, Sudan Gabon and Eritrea rejected any non-AU intervention in Darfur and promised to "try crimes suspects in Darfur according to the national judicial system" -- code for resistance to the very notion of international trials for international crimes.

Sudan is willing to accept African peacekeepers precisely because they have failed to stop the janjaweed. After more than a year of AU involvement, AMIS, as the African peacekeeping force is known, has just 2,400 poorly equipped men meant to protect an area the size of France.

Canada can and should support AMIS, but we should also be spearheading non-African solutions. An "AU plus" approach would join non-African peacekeepers to AMIS and signal that the prevention of crimes against humanity is a universal concern. What is needed is a Canadian strike force capable of protecting civilian populations, killing attackers without terrorizing communities they seek to serve, and arresting the worst culprits. In short, we should be modelling our armed forces on the example set in 2000 by British commando units who blasted their way into Sierra Leone, restored order by arresting the warlords who had committed well-documented atrocities, and paved the way for the war crimes tribunal now operating in Freetown.

This is the final piece of R2P -- the ability to provide the people of Darfur with exactly the kind of security they need. When David Kilgour says we should be sending 500 combat troops to Sudan, he means we need the capacity to deploy a disciplined fighting force that can change the grim reality on the ground and bolster the other pillars of our foreign policy, not a toothless, token force that can be vetoed by the likes of Gabon. Only by preventing future abuses will the international prosecution piece of R2P make sense.

In view of R2P's promise and distinctly Canadian character, the question isn't why is David Kilgour making a stand for the people of Darfur. The question is: Why aren't Canada's other 307 MPs?