Darfur: A chance for us to act
By MARK FREEMAN AND ANNAMIE PAUL, The Toronto Star
April 26, 2005 — The centrepiece of the Liberal government’s long-awaited Foreign Policy Review is Ottawa’s affirmation of a “Made in Canada” principle: The “Responsibility to Protect.”
Under this principle, Canada affirms that all states are required to react “when civil conflict and repression are so violent that civilians are threatened with massacre, genocide or ethnic cleansing on a large scale.”
The principle would, on an exceptional basis, permit the community of nations to intervene in sovereign states to protect innocent civilians from slaughter even without a Security Council mandate. Intervention does not always require the use of Canadian forces. It simply requires Canada to respond to “situations of compelling human need with appropriate measures.”
These might range from imposing sanctions to providing technical and logistical support to assist other bodies involved in an armed intervention. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently urged member states to adopt the “Responsibility to Protect” as a guiding principle of the organization.
Canada has an urgent opportunity to prove its commitment to the Responsibility to Protect principle.
A genocide is underway in Sudan. While there is some debate about the extent of the killing, we do know that hundreds of thousands of Africans have been systematically targeted for extermination by the Sudanese government and its sponsored militias in the Darfur region.
We also know that African Union forces on the ground have been unable to stop the genocide. Should events continue unabated, we can expect up to 10,000 more innocent civilian deaths per week. It will be the largest genocide since Rwanda.
The Canadian-led commission that pioneered the Responsibility to Protect principle properly asserted that the Security Council should ideally authorize any intervention in a sovereign state. However, in the case of Sudan, the council has shown itself to be shamefully unable or unwilling to authorize any meaningful action to stop the genocide.
Given this failure, what are we in Canada going to do about it?
Our obligation under the Responsibility to Protect principle is clear. The doctrine states that if the Security Council fails to discharge its responsibility, that other states can take matters into their own hands. Canada must act.
In 1999 we faced a similar situation in Kosovo. At that time, Canada and other NATO members decided to intervene militarily in an unprecedented action that the Independent International Commission on Kosovo properly characterized as “illegal but legimitate.” The result was thousands of people were saved who otherwise would have perished .
Is Canada prepared to lead a charge to act on the side of legitimacy again? We should be.
Canada should exercise its moral authority – yes, we still have some – to build a coalition of states that will immediately provide to the African Union forces in Darfur the equipment and technical and logistical support that they need to effectively stop the slaughter.
By all accounts, the requirements of the AU are quite modest, consisting primarily of a need for more vehicles so that they can arrive at villages before and not after a massacre occurs, and other equipment that would allow them to increase their ground troop presence. While it seems like very little, remember that in Rwanda, Roméo Dallaire believed that as few as 5,000 troops would have been enough to have prevented the genocide.
Even if Canada is unable to mobilize a coalition, we have the capacity to respond to this need on our own. With or without help, we should act on principle: the Responsibility to Protect.
Canadians stand ready to support action by our Prime Minister in an historic attempt to implement this important principle. All that is required is the moral courage to lead.
– Mark Freeman is co-author of International Human Rights Law and author of the forthcoming Truth Commissions and Procedural Fairness. Annamie Paul is executive director of the Toronto-based Canadian Centre for Political Leadership.