Canadian Consortium on Human Security

David Black and Tim Shaw*

In the course of its advocacy of human security in the 1990s, Canada animated the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) and established itself as “the world’s leading proponent of the responsibility to protect (R2P).”[i] Although the R2P itself was momentarily displaced by declarations of an unwinable ‘war on terror’ in response to 9/11, the mid-decade UN Millennium Summit served to revive it and broader notions of human security in the retiring Secretary-General’s calls for comprehensive security. Yet despite lessons from Rwanda, Canada has yet to respond adequately or proportionately to the crisis in Darfur, ongoing since early 2003, where Canada’s commitments to both Africa and to the R2P have been simultaneously tested by the Sudanese government’s manifest failure to protect its own citizens.[ii] Indeed, regime change in Canada led to the disbanding of Paul Martin’s Darfur Special Advisory Team composed of Senators Romeo Dallaire and Mobina Jaffer and Ambassador Robert Fowler as Stephen Harper channeled government focus and resources towards Afghanistan.

Darfur as a Post-9/11 R2P Trigger?

More broadly, despite its G-8 commitments to the continent’s human development at Kananaskis and Gleneagles, Canadian follow-through has been sharply criticized by a widely-reported Senate Report on Africa and by global advocate Bono, who co-edited a special summer issue of Vanity Fair about the continent. What will the government’s reputation be in 2010 when Canada is due to host both the winter Olympics and the G-8?

To be sure, the Darfur crisis is wickedly complex, and there are many reasons why despite diplomatic and social mobilization the international response has remained so tragically ineffectual. It is precisely because of this complexity and challenge – typical of crises in which civilians are threatened on a massive scale – that would-be leaders such as Canada should be expected to sustain and deepen their engagement on several levels. Additionally, the policy demands of African diasporas in Canada and other G8 nations are likely to grow, as will the impact in their home countries of remittance flows, cultural linkages and continuing communication.

This essay suggests that Canada’s deficient response to Darfur can be partially explained - though certainly not fully excused - by reference to other bi- and multi-lateral demands and diversions. Despite the ongoing tragedy of Darfur, Canada has continued to demonstrate a welcome degree of dirigisme in regional and multilateral diplomacy that bears, at least indirectly, on prospects for sustainable peace in the complex of regional and human insecurity of which Darfur is the starkest instance. These ongoing engagements create a foundation for sustained and renewed commitment to the protracted process of building peace.

With regard to Darfur itself, Canada has not been an insignificant player in the uneven global response to the crisis. Yet the net effect of its involvement has been to help sustain a starkly inadequate effort, especially when measured against the emerging standard of R2P. The government’s humanitarian contributions through CIDA and various NGOs have been substantial though middle-of-the-road – smaller than those of the Dutch and Norwegians, for example. In relation to the critical security dimension of the crisis, Canada has been one of the four largest contributors to the African Union Mission in Sudan (AMIS) – the AU’s hard-pressed but precedent-setting effort to mobilize an “African (peacekeeping) solution to an African problem” – having now committed $238 million in support. The forms this support has taken have been varied and practical, including the leasing of helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft and the loan of 105 armored personnel carriers to give AMIS some much-needed mobility.

Diplomatically, Canadian representatives were active participants, albeit in a supporting role, in the negotiations leading to the signing of the Darfur Peace Agreement (DPA) in May 2006. In addition, when the Security Council agreed after protracted negotiations to refer the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court in March of 2005, the Canadian government was the first donor to aid its investigations with a $500,000 contribution. The government’s interdepartmental Sudan Task Force (an early “whole-of-government” experiment) was an active and constructive grouping.

Canada’s support for the 7700-member AMIS, however, has helped sustain a force that, despite its best efforts, has suffered from critical and predictable shortcomings of troop numbers, command and control, logistics, and sustainability. The humanitarian situation has deteriorated on its watch, as has its standing among Darfuris. This was acknowledged by all concerned when the UN Security Council mandated a new and much larger ‘hybrid’ UN-AU force in Resolution 1706 of August 2006. Yet the presence of AMIS and the protracted negotiations surrounding its replacement have been manipulated by the Government of Sudan to allow the continued pursuit of its own destructive partisan strategic agenda in the region. Moreover AMIS’ extraordinary demands on the nascent peace and security architecture of the African Union have undermined progress towards the planned African Standby Force and much needed early warning and conflict prevention capacities that would enable the AU to address emergent conflicts, and thus provide crucial civilian protection, elsewhere in Africa.

Similarly the Darfur Peace Agreement, signed by the Sudanese Government and one key rebel faction under intense time pressure from Western representatives, has in the words of Gareth Evans “comprehensively failed” to advance the peace process, having “left unresolved critical local grievances… won no effective local support, and has been followed by an intensification… of the fighting.”[iii] Like AMIS, the DPA has been manipulated by the Sudanese Government to advance its own objectives and delay effective action to end the emergency. And the investigation and now indictments by the ICC, while an important step in the long-term campaign to challenge impunity for war crimes and crimes against humanity, have further complicated the search for a political solution to the Darfur crisis in the short- to medium-term.

The Darfur imbroglio underscores the work to be done in terms of building a broad coalition of understanding and support for the normative aspirations embedded in The Responsibility to Protect; the need to redouble efforts to strengthen international capacities for prevention (“the responsibility to prevent”); and the need, more prosaically, to think in very concrete terms about the capabilities and conditions necessary for effective responses to real-world, real-time “supreme humanitarian emergencies.” In fairness, some of this kind of work continues to be done by Canadian government and non-governmental officials and organizations. In the run-up to the Olympics and G8 in 2010, it remains to be seen if this important work will enjoy the firm and sustained political support that Canadians and others expect given our previous advocacy on both Africa and the R2P.

Canadian Human Security and Development Initiatives in Africa

There is some reassurance to be found in related Canadian roles and initiatives on the continent. In terms of regional diplomacy, demands cannot be overlooked from both the interrelated Great Lakes Region (GLR) & Horn situations, which impact Darfur. Canada has been a co-chair with the Netherlands of the International Conference on the GLR. It has also been a major supporter of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development which has been a key participant in regional peace processes. The donors, Canada included, have sought to encourage the development of an autonomous & peaceful Southern Sudan along with hosting the Juba peace talks on northern Uganda. Such roles have implications for the degree and forms of ‘humanitarian intervention’ in Darfur. To contextualize and contrast, the unhappy fate of the ‘Harker report’ may be recalled: the report identified a range of delicate human development and human security issues in Sudan at the end 20th century, from ‘slavery’ and FGM in the North to land, water and oil conflicts in the South. Despite the imprimatur of Lloyd Axworthy as foreign minister, negotiations around the findings and proposals of the Harker group went nowhere. Canada’s vulnerable Talisman Oil eventually exited the country, leaving its energy sector to impregnable national oil companies from China, India, Malaysia and Sudan. Harker’s reflections and frustrations make for relevant reading today.[iv]

Multilaterally, in parallel to the ICISS process and R2P framework, Canada has been active in both the Kimberley Process (KP) and, more recently, in the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), two distinct but compatible global processes to contain some of the causes and consequences of conflict. After the Cold War, Canada through Lloyd Axworthy advanced the Ottawa Process on landmines following successful late-1992 to -1997 negotiations with the 1 400 member International Campaign to Ban Landmines. It subsequently engaged with the smaller but more heterogeneous coalition seeking to control the flow of conflict diamonds leading to an initial meeting in Kimberley in 2000. It proceeded, with a range of Canadian actors, to become a leading advocate of the regulation of informal sector artisanal diamonds. The Kimberley Process has now been underway for five years and is impacting supply chains of diamonds out of and arms into Africa, with offending regimes being suspended for non-compliance. Though it will never be completely watertight, the Kimberly Process still constitutes a novel form of global governance. Symptomatically, Kimberly Process enabled the global diamond sector to act preemptively towards the production and release of the movie Blood Diamond, starring Leonardo deCaprio, around the end of 2006: an interesting case of celebrity advocacy or diplomacy not unlike the continuing roles of Bono & Geldof. In turn, the imperative of containing and graduating the artisanal sector has led towards a multi-sectoral, multilateral program for Communities & Small-scale Mining and a specific Diamond Development Initiative. It has also spawned the agreement between the Association for Responsible Mining and the Fairtrade Labeling Organization.

In a less high-profile but no less salient process, Canada has become engaged in attempts to minimize conflict arising from corruption in the booming energy and mining sectors, announcing its support and donation in May 2007. The 300+ member coalition on Publish What You Pay called for transparency and accountability beyond formal payments to resource-rich regimes. In association with other networks like George Soros’ Open Society Initiative and the Revenue Watch Institute, this was initiated in 2003 at Lancaster House in London. It led, around the G8 nexus and especially the 2005 Gleneagles Summit, to donor discussions about the EITI. Canada encouraged this through a conference in Toronto in late-2006 and then signed as part of the run-up to the mid-2007 German G-8 summit. EITI was established in Oslo in mid-2007. The imperative to contain corruption around energy and minerals has increased with rising demand and prices driven by Brazil, Russia, India and especially China, who may be less willing to subject themselves to such constraints than Western countries and companies.

Conclusion: Africa at Canada’s G-8 in 2010?

Governments are both entitled and expected to chart their own foreign policy course. But some priorities require a level of sustained engagement that transcends the life of any Parliament or the partisan priorities of any Party. The challenges of advancing African security and development, and of advancing the international community’s capacity to forestall and if necessary respond to large-scale atrocity crimes, surely fall within this category. Despite frustrations and disappointments, there is much to build on. Will the Harper government renew this country’s engagement with these challenges, through and beyond the international response to the crisis in Darfur, as it begins to prepare for 2010, its year in the global spotlight?

** Some parts of this comment are appearing in revised form in David Black ‘The Responsibility to Engage’ Behind the Headlines (CIIA), mid-2007.

 

[i] Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon, “Canada’s Human Security Agenda: walking the talk?” International Journal, LX (4), 1069.

[ii] The scale of Darfur’s humanitarian emergency, and how precisely it should be defined, are still matters of international controversy. There is a robust consensus, however, that it has cost the lives of more than 200,000 people, has led to the displacement of well over two million, has forced the majority of Darfur’s 6 million people to depend on humanitarian relief, and has been marked by widespread rape and other humanitarian atrocities.

[iii] Gareth Evans, “Darfur: what next?” Keynote address to International Crisis Group/Save Darfur Coalition/European Policy Centre Conference, Towards a Comprehensive Settlement for Darfur, Brussels, 22 January 2007.

[iv] See H. John Harker, Human Security in Sudan: The Report of a Canadian Assessment Mission, Prepared for the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Ottawa, January 2000 (Halifax: Centre for Foreign Policy Studies, 2000).

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