Tag Archives: R2P

The Rohingya

On Wednesday, Bob Rae released his final report on the Myanmar and the Rohingya entitled, “‘Tell them we’re human:’ What Canada and the world can do about the Rohingya crisis.” The report can be read in full on the internet.

http://international.gc.ca/world-monde/issues_development-enjeux_developpement/response_conflict-reponse_conflits/crisis-crises/rep_sem-rap_esm.aspx?lang=eng

Though Bob is a good friend, a great ambassador of good will for Canada, a man of both wisdom and great integrity with a fine moral compass, I recommend reading the report both because the plight of the Rohingya refugees and internally displaced is so terrible and the situation forces any Canadian to focus on what principles they hold and how they ought to be put into practice.

As you read or even skim the report, I suggest a number of questions. But first a number of basic facts, most included in the report.

  1. The Rohingya lived for years overwhelmingly in Rakhine State in Western Myanmar.
  2. Rakhine is the poorest state in Myanmar.
  3. The population of Rakhine State in 2014 was 3,188,807 and included many minorities, but in small numbers.
  4. About two-thirds of the population of Rakhine, about 2,100,000, at the time of the above census, was Buddhist, overwhelmingly Rakhine who speak a Sittwe dialect.
  5. Rohingya then made up just over one-third of the population or about 1,050,000 and speak a Rang-bre dialect; that census is somewhat disputed since Rohingya were denied the right to register in the census unless they did so as Bengali and many refused.
  6. The Rohingya are Sufi Muslims.
  7. Thus, the majority population of Rakhine and the minority population of Rohingya differ in ethnicity, religion and language.
  8. The two groups have been at odds for decades and have a history of violent conflict dating back to at least WWII when the Rohingya sided with the West and the Rakhine sided with Japan.
  9. Many Rohingya fled to Bangladesh before the 2014 census and most were hosted in refugee camps.
  10. In 1982, the Rohingya were stripped of their citizenship and dubbed illegal immigrants from Bangladesh even though their roots in Myanmar go back centuries; for a while, they were issued white identity cards giving them limited rights, but explicitly stating that they were not citizens.
  11. Many Rohingya fled because of employment, education and access to health were limited, a limit of two was placed on the number of children a couple could have, and rights to religious practice, marriage and even freedom of movement were also limited.
  12. Thousands fled in 2012.
  13. In February 2015, the temporary white identity cards were cancelled.
  14. In October 2016, tens of thousands of Rohingya fled as militant Rohingya attacked military and police posts and the latter responded with violence burning villages and raping Rohingya women.
  15. In August 2017, again in response to a raid by militant Rohingya, riots broke out and, facilitated by border police and the military, in a widespread ethnic cleansing involving the burning of hundreds of villages over the following month, an estimated additional 670,000 Rohingya fled Myanmar.
  16. There are now an estimated 950,000 Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh and another 50,000 or so distributed among Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.
  17. Of the remaining 450,000 Rohingya in Myanmar, 120,000 live in abject poverty in internally displaced camps.
  18. Most of the remaining 330,000 are little better off and are subject to curfews, severe restrictions on movement and frequent violent attacks.

Bob’s report includes references to the political situation in Myanmar, the political initiatives in the United Nations and a long analysis of the situation followed by 17 recommendations. In his report, Bob states, “I was permitted access to Sittwe, the capital of Rakhine State, the week of February 4, 2018. What became immediately apparent was the deep resentment of the very presence of the Rohingya population in Rakhine by some (my italics) ethnic Rakhine and the extent to which international and other efforts to establish a humanitarian dialogue are, in fact, deeply resented. It is this hatred that in my view poses the greatest threat to any possibility of a safe and dignified return for the Rohingya who are currently living in Bangladesh and indeed threatens the lives of those Rohingya who are still in central and northern Rakhine.”

Question 1: Why does Bob in his first recommendation insist on listening to the voices of the Rohingya but does not include the voices of the majority of Bamar in Rakhine, Myanmar, or of the Bengali population in Bangladesh, particularly those living in the region of Cox’s Bazaar where the largest number of refugee camps are located?

Question 2: Why does Bob recommend that Canada take a leading role in dealing with the crisis when we are such a small donor and would remain so even if we tripled our annual contribution as recommended, when our foreign capital investment in Myanmar is .01 of China’s and Singapore’s, .02 of Thailand’s and .03 of Hong Kong’s, when as an exporter to and an importer from Myanmar, we do not even make it on the comparative charts, and when no basis is provided in the report for choosing among many competing crises in areas where we have much greater interests and a significant degree of political and academic expertise? When we do not count on virtually any scale of economic involvement, when we lack in-depth political capacity or academic expertise, when we advise Canadians to travel to Myanmar with caution because of “the unsettled political situation and the possibility of civic unrest,” when our ambassador, Karen MacArthur, on her trip with other diplomats to Rakhine state, was “protected” by a phalanx of border guards and police who have been accused of perpetrating the atrocities on the Rohingya, why would the Rohingya population, let alone that of Myanmar, be open to Canadian leadership?

Question 3: Why the great stress on humanitarian assistance to camps when the report itself suggests that camps usually lead to the long-term warehousing of refugees as recently documented in the recent book by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World; that book trashes camps as a solution to refugees and emphasizing them appears to undermine economic development in dealing with the problem, a direction which Bob seems to favour?

Question 4: Why not be really radical and take the almost US$1B planned to be spent annually on the crisis and give those funds – say $1,000 to each refugee family with a line of credit of an additional $4,000 spread over 4 years (total approximately 200,000 families = $200M annually) – not only the refugees, but an equivalent amount to the polity hosting the displaced and double that amount as an investment in the local population so that it is in everyone’s economic interest to allow the refugees to settle?

Question 5: Why propose a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) among the various stakeholders when even in states with a much smaller degree of ethnic and religious conflict, such MoUs in Kenya and Nigeria where the historical, structural, institutional, legal, and cultural dimensions of the conflict have very much smaller depth, and when MoUs have had limited success in other regions only because the local insurgency was overwhelmed by force by the state as in Aceh, Sri Lanka or the Myanmar Keren in Thailand (the minority uprising was effectively defeated)? Only in a polity like Northern Ireland has there been significant success, but the conflict was between two groups divided by religion only, without nearly the extent of violence and in a context of strong social and political institutions. The governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh over the years have signed many agreements, three recent ones concerning the repatriation of the refugees, but the situation simply gets worse and the words have little substantive meaning.

Question 6: Why does recommendation 5 require, “reassuring both the Rohingya population and the international community of the sincerity and credibility of the commitment of both the civilian and military wings of the Government of Myanmar to an effective plan for the return of the Rohingya population,” when the desire for return may be sincere, but has never been shown to be credible where ethnic and religious groups have been involved in violent conflict, unless the ethnic groups returns after its army has inflicted defeat as in Rwanda in 1994? Otherwise, refugees never return in a context of groups with deep ethnic and religious divides and a long history of violence. (See Howard Adelman and Elazar Barkan, No Return, No Refuge – Rites and Rights in Minority Repatriation.) Further, Bob himself writes that although, “The government has also said it will allow for the return of the Rohingya to their home villages…evidence suggests that many of these villages have been destroyed, and there is a prevailing sentiment within the local ethnic Rakhine population against the Rohingya’s return.” In addition, “United Nations (UN) agencies have stated that they do not believe conditions are present for the ‘safe, voluntary, dignified, and sustainable’ return of the Rohingya to their homes in Rakhine State.” Saying that return has to be conditional in this way just means that there will be no return.

Question 7: Why support Track II initiatives – I have been involved in several – when in such contexts, like refugee return, they have such an unlikely payoff and sometimes lead to extending a violent conflict and the suffering of refugees in the belief that peace (and refugee return) are right around the corner?

Question 8: Why make reference to the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) when it has not been operative and if it is, it is because the responsibilities of the international community to protect the oppressed within a polity have been suborned to sovereign rights; even the report recognizes that implementation is subject to the government of Myanmar’s consent?

Question 9: Why was the proposal for Canadian resettlement places for the Rohingya not included in the final list of recommendations?

Question 10: Is there a possibility that the 450,000 Rohingya still in Myanmar might be better off and their situation more likely to improve if the emphasis on the issue of repatriation of the refugees was removed?

Those are enough questions. I leave aside the proposed conditions suggested for the governments of Myanmar and Bangladesh, the recommendations for dealing with accountability and preventing impunity for those guilty of ethnic cleansing and even possibly genocide, or the recommendations on inter-state cooperation in handling the crisis and the formation of a multi-ministry task force in Canada to deal with policy and its implementation.

Anyone is invited to answer these questions.

 

With the help of Alex Zisman

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Sovereignty in 2017: It’s Meaning for Canada and the World

Sovereignty in 2017: It’s Meaning for Canada and the World

by

 

Howard Adelman

Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sissi is visiting the White House today. Donald Trump has consistently expressed admiration for Sissi. In return, Sissi was the first foreign leader to congratulate Trump on his election victory. The mutual admiration society is understandable. Both leaders have rejected the position that any country or any international group of countries has the right to intervene in the domestic affairs of another country unless it is in the country’s interest to do so.

Trump has championed “America First” and, with it, the irrelevance of any moral responsibilities towards the population of another state. The doctrine, that Canada was in the forefront of developing, “The Responsibility to Protect” or R2P, has been thrust aside, not because it was not working as intended – there is a consensus on that conclusion – not because it was unworkable, a conclusion still in dispute but with weakened support, but because R2P did not fit in with the traditional doctrine of sovereignty – that each state was responsible for its own territory and the population in it and that a state should enjoy a monopoly of force to ensure the interests of the state were protected and advanced.

Hence, Trump has been in the process of dismantling the international liberal order and the role of the U.S. as the leader of that order. Sissi has abandoned the conception of Egypt as the leading power in the Arab world with a primary responsibility for the region and not just its own interests. At the same time, domestically, each state has moved to free itself from the constraints of an international human rights regime and able to define human rights through its own particular lens where some may have many more rights than others.

The path to the resurrection of the old and well-established doctrine of sovereignty has been turbulent. Egypt went through a pro-democracy uprising, the victory of a theocratic party in a democratic election, and a military counter-coup that suppressed the Islamic regime. America is going through its own version of democratic turbulence in which its leader blatantly rejects the doctrine of universal transparency and accountability, and admires “tough” approaches while openly disparaging human rights.

The conception of sovereignty is in play. Therefore, it was timely that Massey College this past Friday held a roundtable on the doctrine of sovereignty. True to the spirit of the new world disorder, the examination had a distinctly Canadian slant, but one in which R2P was rarely mentioned.

The highlight, at least for me, was a presentation by Dr. Elizabeth Riddell-Dixon, author of Breaking the Ice: Canada, Sovereignty and the Arctic Extended Shelf (Dundurn Press, April 2017, but not yet available). She is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History at the University of Toronto, a former professor of international relations at Western and a senior fellow at Massey College. She has written other books on women, on the role of NGOs internationally, on external constraints and domestic determinants in international policy, on the Canadian mosaic, and on the UN. She has been a prolific scholar with a very evident interest in issues dear to the liberal approach to international relations.

Her publisher’s blurb for her latest book begins with the following: “The Arctic seabed, with its vast quantities of undiscovered resources, is the twenty-first century’s frontier.” But that was NOT the thrust of her talk and, I suspect, not of the book. She made clear that the exploitation of natural resources in the Arctic was a long way off because of huge distances from settled society, the tough and unpredictable climate and terrain, and alternative sources of fossil fuels with far easier and more economic means of accessibility. Instead, she made clear that rather than being a frontier for material competition, the responsibility for the Arctic, rather than any benefit from it, was proceeding apace based on agreed international norms embodied in the authoritative international law of the sea and scientific studies undertaken cooperatively by the five countries surrounding the Arctic basin – Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the U.S.

Riddell-Dixon’s approach did not start from any liberal conception of sovereignty and a doctrine that it was urgent to develop an international order to govern areas of mutual interest. Rather, her approach was distinctly functional. Here is what is happening with one major disruption to the process of systematically establishing spheres of responsibility – the misguided effort of Prime Minister Harper of Canada to claim Canadian sovereignty over the North Pole. That was much to the chagrin of the Danes, for there was a general consensus that the North Pole fell clearly within Danish territory. The Danes then responded to the outlandish and aggressive Canadian leader’s claim with their own even more aggressive counter claims.

However, with the exception of this temporary digression, the process has been an example of the responsibility to protect, of R2P, not of human populations, for there are no human settlements there and the areas in dispute lie 800 nautical miles beyond the northernmost Canadian outpost of Alert which itself is another equivalent distance from our northernmost Inuit settlement. Instead of competition, what has taken place has been based on an authoritative international regime already in place, the international law of the sea, which defines spheres of territorial ownership (10 nautical miles into the sea) then spheres of economic interest (200 nautical miles into the sea), and, finally, extensions if the continental shelf extends beyond that distance, the extant of the continental shelf being determined by scientists from all five countries.

This is a doctrine of sovereignty that begins with a marriage of responsibility with interests rather than placing the two conceptions at odds, with the emphasis that, on the basis of these international norms and empirical science to determine the application, it is not the UN but each nation that has the responsibility for determining its sphere of international interests and responsibilities.  This is realism at work, not idealism, but realism rooted in internationally agreed legal norms and applied through the use of detached scientific evidence. Thus, rather than the monopoly over force and the expression of material interest as the forefront for determining the boundaries of the sovereign state, the key ingredients are international law and internationally accepted principles and practices of science to establish facts on the ground, or, more literally, in the sea.

This constructivist conception was haunted by three other views of sovereignty, one of idealism’s R2P lurking in the background, the traditional hard-headed (a description chosen deliberately to convey both toughness and resistance to being shaped by experience) realism and, finally, a romantic view that would displace the concept of state sovereignty with populist sovereignty, this time rooted in the sensibilities and conceptions of the peoples of the north of each country, including Canada’s Inuit.

The latter was presented at the roundtable clearly and articulately by Sara French-Rooke, a public policy leader and advocate with expertise on northern and indigenous issues who has had a career building collaborative strategic networks among northern communities of the Arctic. While Riddell-Nixon had been unequivocal in stating that pan-Arctic people’s power had virtually no role in determining state borders and responsibilities in the Arctic Basin, French-Rooke has had a leading role in bringing attention to the clean-water crises of remote northern communities, mercury contamination, housing and health issues, including the pandemic of suicides among youth.

I have dubbed this a “romantic” view of sovereignty, not to be dismissive, or to link it with escapism and fantasy, unrealizable idealism and aspirational politics, but to root the ideas embedded in the expression of economic realities and injustices, social concerns and political debates, in patterns and priorities that can be traced back to the origins of the modern nation-state and that have had very prominent expressions in the history of modern political theory. Whereas R2P stressed an idealistic view of a common humanity which, of necessity, has remained the leading edge of the climate change debate well articulated by John Godfrey at the roundtable, the romantic version of sovereignty stresses detailed contextual accounts of lives actually lived. In this view, politics and public morality have to begin with the concerns of peoples, and, primarily, peoples suffering, for, at root, sovereignty is about an ability to govern oneself, to determine one’s own destiny and, in this case, to do so collectively on behalf of suffering nations in the north.

In addition to the universalist and idealist approach of R2P that has been most relevant to the climate change debate, and the populist romantic view of sovereignty as the duty of a state to take care of its most vulnerable populations, both opposed to Riddell-Dixon, there is another realist portrait of sovereignty that was introduce in the morning by Tom Axworthy, ironically the brother of Lloyd Axworthy, so instrumental in forging the doctrine of R2P applied to international affairs.

In that realist view, sovereignty is the supreme power of a state to determine its own destiny. Its key ingredients are control over a defined territorial expanse and the monopoly of coercive force to achieve that goal.  The key elements are a defined physical territory, coercive power, the formal legal authority to determine the laws of a country and the mode of defending its interests.

With the help of Alex Zisman

By the Skin of our Teeth

By the Skin of our Teeth rather than the Skin of our Flesh
Tazria-Metzora: Leviticus 12:1 – 15:33

by

Howard Adelman

2. When a man shall have in the skin of his flesh a rising, or a scab, or a bright spot, and it become in the skin of his flesh the plague of leprosy, then he shall be brought unto Aaron the priest, or unto one of his sons the priests.
3. And the priest shall look upon the plague in the skin of the flesh; and if the hair in the plague be turned white, and the appearance of the plague be deeper than the skin of his flesh, it is the plague of leprosy; and the priest shall look on him, and pronounce him unclean.

The skin of our flesh refers to the horrors we suffer from natural disasters, like the disease of leprosy, or man-made disasters, such as the war in Syria where the Assad regime (or Russia) yesterday bombed a children’s hospital, Al Quds, supported by Doctors Without Borders in Aleppo. Dozens of children, their visiting relatives and the hospital medical staff, including the only pediatrician left in that tragic city, Dr. Muhammad Waseem Maaz, were killed. Yesterday evening on “As It Happens” on CBC, we listened to the most moving interview that I have ever heard Carol Off conduct on the program. Dr, Abdul Aziz, a surgeon who had just returned from abroad to help in the recovery program that the cease-fire was supposed to anticipate (he had helped found the hospital) bewailed the death of his close friend as well as other associates and medical staff in addition to the patients and family killed in the inhumane attack. ‘Where is the humanitarian intervention?” he seemed to cry out. “We lost one of the best hearts in this world. He always smiled. We asked him, ‘Please just take a rest.’ He said no. He’s now 36. He’s unmarried. He said, ‘How can I marry? I would be too busy for my family. I would not be able to work for those babies who are crying every day.” In the bombing, that brave and dedicated pediatrician was killed.

Where are we? Where indeed! Where is the Responsibility for Intervention? Donald Trump is not the first in the U.S. or the West to base foreign policy on America or One’s Own Country first. After George Bush made such a mess of the American intervention in Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and after too few souls spoke out against the war including both Barack Obama and Donald Trump. But whereas Donald Trump did so based on my country first, Obama did so out of realistic caution about the potential consequences of presuming to be the policeman of the world. Justin Trudeau too has retreated from a vigorous interpretation of the Responsibility to Protect.

But, in this partial or, as in Trump’s case, total retreat from our humanitarian responsibilities, in part because the Responsibility to Protect expressed both naïve idealism and a totally unrealistic appreciation of the difficulties of engaging in a humanitarian foreign policy, we allow tyrants to destroy innocent civilians at will.

It is a disgrace! What did Dr. Aziz’s pediatrician colleague do, what did the innocent children in that Aleppo hospital do, to deserve such a horrendous fate?
We have not retreated altogether. Some of us do our bit in helping the casualties, the refugees, who have escaped that horrid war. Last evening, we listened to a replay of an interview by Mary Hynes on CBC’s “Tapestry” with Rabbi Tina Greenberg who was herself a refugee from the USSR thirty years earlier. Her congregation, Darchei Noam in Toronto, led in good part by Naomi Alboim, was inspired by their own commitments and the significance of their rabbi’s own story to ‘pay it back.’ The congregation had just welcomed the Syrian family they had sponsored.

But many, indeed most, are not so lucky. On CBC’s “As It Happens,” we listened to an interview with another Aziz, not the Syrian surgeon, Dr. Abdul Aziz, but another Abdul Aziz, a Sudanese “refugee” who has been held for three years as a virtual prisoner inside a Manus Island detention camp financed (along with bribes to government officials) by the Australian government that has turned its back completely on the plight of refugees and transported Aziz and others like him from Christmas Island to Manus. Other refugee claimants had been sent to the tiny island country of Nauru. However, the Papua Supreme Court had ruled that detention in this case was illegal. Australia refused to take the refugees. The IMO offered to transport them back to the country from which they originally fled. Papua New Guinea will be left with most of them as they apply for refugee status. The detention camp will be closed, not so much because of the ruling of the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court, but because Australia declared victory, for the arrival of more irregular arrivals had successfully been deterred by the harsh Australian policy.

But I do not want to write about the afflictions of the flesh produced by man-made disasters, and certainly not those brought about by nature, but rather about the escape from such disasters by the “skin of our teeth” rather than at the cost of our flesh. Job 19:20 reads: “My bone cleaves to my skin, and I escaped by the skin of my teeth.” (my italics) But our teeth do not have skin. What is the real meaning of the expression? It stands in such strong opposition to the horrific depictions of
“the skin of our flesh.”

Thornton Wilder wrote a play that used that expression as its title. Starring such names as Tallulah Bankhead, Montgomery Clift, Frederic March and Florence Eldridge, it won a Pulitzer Prize. Directed by the famous Elia Kazan, it was produced on Broadway in the year America entered WWII, and reproduced on the stage by many an amateur group ever since (the way I first saw it). The play is a satire of human folly and the inability of humans to escape one catastrophe after another. We never seem to learn.

In the drama, Henry Antrobus (originally called Cain) is the son of George. The hilarious musical begins with George (Adam) sending his wife Maggie, whom he refers to as Eve, a singing telegram, “Happy w’dding ann’vers’ry dear Eva.” Maggie (Eve) responds, “The earth’s getting so silly no wonder the sun turns cold.” And when the earth grows cold, when the human heart freezes up, we escape to the silly side of it all. For the tragic repetitive course of the cycle of human agony is just too hard to take. So instead of writing about and thinking about the horrors suffered by the skin of our flesh, we can read and write about the series of escapes we make by “the skin of our teeth.”

An old friend from the Operation Lifeline days in the eighties (he was a leader in the Operation Lifeline efforts in Vancouver dedicated to helping the Indochinese refugees), wrote and just published a hilarious account of the scrapes and narrow escapes he and his wife Sally experienced. They had retreated from the hurly burly of life in Vancouver. In Off the Grid (just nominated for a Stephen Leacock Award for Humour with the full title, Our Life Off the Grid: An Urban Couple Goes Feral), David describes one hilarious (and harrowing) story after another about his and Sally’s efforts to build a homestead from scratch with their own labour on the remote (and largely inhospitable) Read Island. So comedy as well as suffering can also take place on islands, even when the experiences seem to be horrific and the “heroes” of the story escape “by the skin of their teeth.”

I am not a comic writer. Horror, “the skin of our flesh,” tends to mesmerize me. But this trip has not been without its tragic-comic moments. Assuming we encounter no new ones, like Thornton Wilder’s play, our near-catastrophes also had three acts. It began when we left Vancouver Island by ferry. We departed from Nanaimo rather than the ferry from Sydney on the Saanich peninsula just north of Victoria. Our primary reason was that Nanaimo was far more accessible from Cowichan Bay than the long u-shaped trip we would have to make to catch the ferry in Sydney.

There should have been a second reason we realized after we completed the crossing. When you leave from Sydney, you land at the ugly port of Tsawwassen and then have to travel through the even uglier Vancouver suburbs of Delta and Surrey to get to the Trans-Canada Highway. When you leave from Nanaimo, the trip is ten minutes shorter and you arrive in Horseshoe Bay with direct access to the Trans-Canada Highway which ends its mainland continental crossing there. Even more importantly, you travel without a single traffic light through the beautifully exquisite North Vancouver. You thus begin your trip across Canada back home to Toronto inspired and invigorated by the beauty of British Columbia.

But it almost did not start that way. When we drive – or when I rest and sleep while my wife drives – it is much safer that way; I am responsible for navigating and making all the logistic arrangements. We arrived in plenty of time to get on the ferry. I am a very good planner if I say so myself. We parked the car tightly behind the car in front and went up on the elevator to the passenger deck to enjoy the views and the trip across to the mainland. When the announcement came over the loudspeaker to go to our cars to prepare to disembark, I suddenly recalled that I did not take note of the deck on which we had parked as we prepared to leave the passenger deck. And I wondered if there was more than one deck. Suddenly in the aisle, headed towards the stairs down to the car decks, appeared the three boys who boarded (or were they already on?) the elevator when we came up to the passenger deck.

In a panic, I asked them what deck we parked the car on. One replied with a bit of hesitation – I thought because he had been taken by surprise by my interruption, but he may just have been embarrassed by the stupidity of an elder who was so foolish as to not take note of the deck on which he had parked. “Deck Two,” he said in a sure voice. Relieved, we gathered our things and headed down to Deck Two.

What did we find? RVs. trucks. Even a bus. No cars. We ran to the other of the deck, though we were sure we had parked on that side. No luck. We raced up to Deck Three. There were lots of cars as they began to drive off. We clicked our key uselessly. There were no lights flashing that we could see. We asked a worker on the ship whom we finally found and asked where our car could be. I remember striped poles that we parked next to on the deck where we stopped. The deckhand said with bemusement, “Deck Four.” We raced up another deck looking for our car. To our relief, there sat our car – alone, well not quite alone since there was a frustrated driver sitting in a car behind ours. With huge embarrassment as my nightmarish imaginings dissipated about cars boarding the ferry to go the other way trapped us, and with my “tail between my legs,” too ashamed to look the other driver in the eye, we drove off the ferry and escaped “by the skin of our teeth.”

If it had not been the only escape! When we arrived in Osoyoos and, after we had looked at the map outside the Information Centre (it was already past the time when they were open), we opted to drive the 12 or so km up to The Burrowing Owl Estate Winery where they had both accommodation and a very well-reviewed restaurant. When we arrived and finally found the clerk in the restaurant rather than at the desk. She apologized and said that they were all full. This was late April, the off-off season for wineries. And they were full! So we asked if she knew of another spot nearby. She kindly phoned over to another guest house of a winery nearby and, seemingly luckily, they had one room from a no-show. So we went back to the car to drive over.

My wife had been wearing sun glasses. She looked for her regular glasses as sun glasses were no longer appropriate as the sun was going down. I searched the floor of the passenger side. We could not find them. She searched her side of the car, through all her purses. No glasses. They were an expensive pair and her only non-sun long distance glasses. We thought she might have left them when we were looking over the menu. We went back to the restaurant. No glasses. We phoned the other winery to cancel our tentative booking. We hypothesized two possibilities. She had put them on her lap and the glasses had fallen to the ground when she got out to look at the map at the Information Centre. The other time was about 75 km back when we had stopped to fill the car with gas and she had left the car to take advantage of the washroom.

We drove back to Osoyoos. We returned to the Information Centre and drove up to the map. There was scruffy man there with a dog. We looked all around. No glasses. We asked the man. He had not seen anything. Resigned, we decided we would have to drive back the 75 km. But I have an intelligent wife. She asked for my gas receipt. We got the name of the place where we had stopped for gas and she looked up the telephone number on her phone and called the gas station. The clerk was asked to check the washroom under the suspicion that they had been set down and inadvertently forgotten. The clerk kindly agreed to check and even more kindly came back on the phone and, with even greater compassion, expressed her regret that the glasses had not been found.

She was thanked and we hung up in despair. But with N’s usual persistence, she phoned back. Would the clerk mind going out to look around the gas pumps and check if the glasses had fallen to the ground. She was very obliging. She went out to search. She returned after a few minutes and even more regretfully and with even more empathy in her voice expressed her deep sorrow that the glasses had not been found.

In despair, we began to search in the car again. There at my feet, behind my briefcase where I has presumably already looked several times and so thoroughly earlier, there were the glasses. They had slipped down from the centre console. N was too relieved to bother pointing out my repeated practice of often never being able to see something that was right in front of my eyes. My problem is that I spend my life with my eyes peering inward at my thoughts. And I often miss the world as it passes by. But this time we escaped by the skin of our teeth.

The third experience yesterday and the day before was far more harrowing. On this trip we had not made reservations in advance at hotels or motels because we were not sure how much time we would spend on byways and tasting wines and exploring the environment. On Tuesday, we had stayed over at Regina rather than Moose Jaw and were proud we had covered such a distance. Wednesday morning, we headed for Winnipeg with hopes of getting all the way to Kenora. Proud of ourselves, we got two hours past Winnipeg to Kenora. I had a list of hotels prioritized in accordance with our set order of concerns. We arrived at the first, only to be told that the motel was full. We tried a second on the list. At the third attempt, we were told every single space in Kenora was taken. There was not a single room available in the whole city. No one could explain why, at the end of April, all motel rooms would be full. We were advised to drive on to Dryden.

We arrived in Dryden and again went to the first hotel on our preference list. Full! Not only full, but the clerk told us in deep sorrow that she had to turn away drivers with little children. She offered to let us stay in the lounge where there was plenty of coffee and drinks. It was after ten in the evening. The clerk explained that 700 workers were booked into hotels and motels and B&Bs from Kenora to Ignace as the mill was being refitted within a two week shut down. There was no chance of finding a room. We would have to go on to Thunder Bay about 4-5 hours away.

Again, with my tail between my legs, I returned to the car with the terrible news and the explanation for why there were no rooms. N asked if we should fill up the gas tank. It was down one-eighth. I assured her that it would be unnecessary as in that long distance we would be sure to find at least one gas station open. With stoical reserve, my wife set out to drive through to half – more than half the night – to Thunder Bay. By Ignace, we began to really worry. We had not seen a single gas station open. We saw two police cars parked side by side at a gas station. We asked if there was any way could use our credit card to get gas from a closed gas station. They said no, but told us there was a gas station 1.5 kilometers further. It was the only gas station open until we reached Thunder Bay and we did not have enough gas to reach Thunder Bay.

To our enormous relief, the gas station was indeed open as promised. The French-Canadian proprietor even agreed to see if she could phone around and find a room. She was unsuccessful;. We filled up and drove on, following an excellent driver who minimized the trying experience of driving in the dark on a two-lane highway with trucks with very bright lights approaching the other way. She kept her eyes on the rear red lights and followed.

At one point, the driver in front turned into a rare but darkened motel parking lot. There was no flashing sign stating, “No Vacancy.” However, it was obvious that there was no one around and the number of cars parked indicated that that the motel was full. It was about 1:30 in the morning. It turned out that the driver was heading back to southern Ontario as well. He had picked his daughter up in Victoria and was driving her home to Hanover. He too had left Saskatchewan that very morning. We resumed driving and followed him all the way to Thunder Bay right into the lot of a Best Western.

He went through the door and I followed. It was 4:00 a.m. No vacancies. There was likely no vacancy in the whole of Thunder Bay. The miner’s meeting was in town. So was a sports event and a large First Nations meeting. And the Premier of our province was in town. This pessimistic information was reaffirmed at the second motel. At the third where we both stopped, the lady behind the desk said that she had one room left (a no-show), but our lead driver could not have it because he needed a room that would take the ten pound dog of his daughter. The room remaining was a no-pet room. I was offered the remaining room.

I said that he had priority and suggested that he leave the dog in the car. He replied that his daughter would rather sleep in the car than let her pet sleep there alone. He was resigned to just driving all the way to Sault Ste Marie, another seven hours. I asked the desk clerk whether an exception could be made. Kindly, she decided to make an exception. Not only that, but she had found a business room which she could offer to me at the lower rate where we could stay. There was no other choice in any case. At 4:30 in the morning we literally crawled into bed.
Sometimes departures can be tragic. At other times, tragically comic. In a second act, we are sometimes Eyeless in Gaza. At other times we just misplace glasses and cannot see what is in front of our eyes. In the third act, there can be no room in a motel, or, really tragically, no space where we can feel and be secure in the whole world.

By the skin of our teeth! But far better than by the skin of our flesh. We are leaving Sault Ste. Marie and will be home before shabat.

Corporeality III: Trudeau and ISIS

Corporeality III: Trudeau and ISIS

by

Howard Adelman

Inspired by the failure of the international community to intervene in the Rwanda genocide in 1994, in the beginning of the twenty-first century, Canada was the major initiator of the doctrine: “The Responsibility to Protect” (R2P). The Liberal Party of Canada when Lloyd Axworthy was Foreign Minister under Prime Minister Jean Chretien had given birth to that doctrine that endorsed military intervention when a state failed to fulfil its responsibilities and war crimes, crimes against humanity, religious cleansing and even genocide were all rampant. We do not hear much about R2P anymore since it was endorsed by the United Nations unanimously just over ten years ago because R2P proved to be both hypocritical in its passage and inapplicable in practice. The doctrine presumed that sovereignty was not absolute but rather a delegated authority by the international community and could be breached by that same international community if a state failed in the primary duty if it was either unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and ethnic cleansing.

The passage was hypocritical because countries like China voted for R2P as long as it observed the principle of the absolute sovereignty of a state and military intervention was permissible only with the permission of that state. R2P was inapplicable because, when military intervention was most needed in failing states, powerful states suspected one another of practicing power politics and interfering in the domestic affairs of another state for their own political interests.

In the case of Iraq, was this not a perfect instance for the applicability of humanitarian intervention, especially since the government of Iraq had itself invited that intervention? In Syria and Iraq, minorities were under constant attack – the Yazidis and Chaldeans ae a few examples.  Further, the United Nations itself had endorsed such intervention in the fight against terrorism. On 19 September 2014, the UN Security Council, as it welcomed the newly-elected Iraqi government, did not simply endorse but urged international support for the Iraqi government’s fight against ISIS (S/PRST/2014/20). This was followed up on 19 November 2014 with a statement of the President of the Security Council, endorsed with the full authority of the SC, that called for international cooperation in combating terrorism and the threats posed by foreign terrorist fighters, violent extremism, Al-Quaida and the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). One year later on 20 November, the UNSC called on its member states “to take all necessary measures on the territory under the control of ISIS to prevent terrorist acts committed by ISIS and other Al-Quaida affiliates.”

The Liberal Party under Justin Trudeau had assumed office in Canada at the time that the last UN resolution was passed. Given its past and current policies of renewing Canada’s traditional record of engagement in the international sphere and with the United Nations, one might have expected that the Justin Trudeau government would step up its involvement in Iraq in the fight against Al-Quaida and ISIS. But that did not seem to be the case.

It was not as if Canada had been totally immune from attacks by Islamicist terrorists on Canadian soil or had not been used as a transit stop for terrorists heading for the U.S. On 14 December 1999, Ahmed Ressam had been arrested as a result of a very alert American customs guard when Ressam tried to enter the U.S. on the car ferry between Victoria and the U.S., a car that was packed with explosives intended for use in a plot to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve as part of the planned 2000 millennium attacks. In 2006, in Ontario, Canadian counter-terrorism forces rounded up 18 al-Quaida-inspired terrorists to attack and set off bombs at the CBC in Toronto and the parliament buildings in Ottawa with the intention of capturing and beheading the Canadian Prime Minister and other political leaders. In August 2010, Misbahuddin Ahmed was arrested and subsequently convicted for his involvement in facilitating terrorism. In 2013, Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser were arrested for their involvement in a plot to derail a Toronto-New York train. In July 2013 in British Columbia, John Stewart Nuttall and Amanda Korody were arrested for planning to plant pressure cooker bombs in the provincial legislature.

Canadians were not always lucky in avoiding actual terrorist acts. In a ramming attack, not uncommon in Israel but rare here, Martin Couture-Rouleau, a recent Muslim convert, struck two members of the Canadian Armed Forces and killed warrant officer Patrice Vincent. On 22 October 2014, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau, another recent convert to Islam, gunned down 24-year-old Corporal Nathan Cirillo standing guard at the War Memorial in front of the Parliament buildings in Ottawa and might have done considerably more damage if he had not been killed within the building by the head of the Parliamentary Security Services.

These plans and actual attacks, for the most part, may just have been inspired by Al-Quaida and ISIS, but they alone provided sufficient motive for Canada to join the war against Daesh (ISIS) – which Canada did under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Just over a year ago, the Harper government agreed to participate actively in the war against Daesh and in March of 2015 reconfirmed that commitment for another year. The new Liberal government under Justin Trudeau had different plans. In his very first press conference, Trudeau announced the government’s intention of keeping its pledge to withdraw Canadian fighter jets from the battle against Al-Quaida and ISIS in Iraq. But he also pledged to stay in the battle, no longer directly, but by using Canadian forces to train Iraqi forces to do battle with Al-Quaida and ISIS.

But how does this square with the historical tradition of the Liberal Party in support of R2P, with Canada’s liberal tradition of involvement with UN sanctioned missions, with Canada’s own self- interest in defeating Al-Quaida and ISIS, and with a fourth source of legitimating Canadian direct military involvement, the call by President Hollande of France following the coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015 to participate in the war against Al-Quaida and ISIS? Under both the EU and NATO’s doctrine of mutual defence invoked when President Hollande declared war on ISIS. Canada under its treaty obligations was called upon to actively join the direct war effort against Daesh. Instead, Canada seemed to be opting out of the direct combat against Al-Quaida and ISIS.

“What we’re doing right now is working with our allies and coalition partners looking at how best Canada can continue to help militarily in substantive ways that offer real help in a way that is specifically lined up with our capacities as Canadians.” This, in various iterations, has been Trudeau’s explanation for plans to withdraw six Canadian fighter jets from the battle. In what sense has this been working with partners when it has been clear that Canada’s military partners do not endorse the withdrawal? Canada’s allies have not responded well to the Canadian government decision to withdraw the six fighter aircraft. When U.S. Defence Secretary Ash Carter in an effort to enhance member contributions summoned American allies – including Australia, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK – Canada was conspicuously excluded. America responded in diplomatic-speak to queries about Canada’s non-invitation. “The United States and Canada are great friends and allies, and together with coalition partners, we will continue to work to degrade and destroy ISIL.” Three Republican congressmen initiated an investigation of Trudeau for supporting ISIL.

In what sense is the involvement of Canadian fighter jets out of line with Canadian capacities? Is active involvement in such a legitimate war not the best way for Canadian fighter pilots to gain experience in actual combat? Trudeau offered a threefold explanation. Canada should do what it does best. Other alternatives of involvement were better options in the war. Third, Trudeau had pledged to withdraw the fighters in the election campaign and was beholden to the Canadian electorate to carry out what he promised to do. “We do some things better than just about anyone else in the world and looking at our capacity to do that in smarter ways is exactly what Canadians asked me to do in the last election campaign.” It is part of a division of responsibilities and Canada should serve in a role in which it has a competitive advantage. It was an explanation he repeated many times, including statements made to a G20 summit in Turkey just after the Paris November massacres.

The third explanation of fulfilling promises made in an election is certainly valid, but did not the 13 November massacres in Paris change the equation? Did not President Hollande’s call for directly joining the war against ISIS demand an alteration in promises made? Why was it an either/or proposition – training Iraqi soldiers versus the use of fighter jets? Both might be appropriate. Finally, to declare that what Canada does better than anyone else is training foreign military forces seemed the height of conceit as well as blatantly false. Though Canada has Canadian soldiers offering tactical training on the ground – for example 250 in Ukraine – as well as offering financial support and training for strengthening democratic institutions, this hardly seems to be the main priority in Iraq and Syria. Even if the boast about Canadian unique capacities happened to be true, it is not as if Canadians can avoid involvement in combat. In December, Canadians training Kurdish Peshmerga forces were subject to a three-pronged attack by Daesh forces and the Canadian forces became actively involved in the two-day battle supported in the air by two Canadian hornets in addition to other allied aircraft. A ground involvement would not obviate participating in the air war, especially since the Canadian armed forces boast of the successes of its 13 missions in November and its 8 in December. Further, in the light of the casualties taken in the seemingly fruitless 8-year involvement in Afghanistan in the fight against the Taliban, Canadians seem more wary of having troops on the ground than in the air.

What about the other parts of Canada’s Operation IMPACT and the Canadian air contribution to the Middle East Stabilization Force (MESF) to halt and degrade Daesh in both Iraq and Syria? Canada boasts that as part of its participation, Daesh has lost the ability to operate freely in 20-25% of the populated areas in Iraq under its control. Daesh has lost a great deal of infrastructure and equipment. In addition to the six CF-18 Hornet fighters, Canada contributes a CC-150T Polaris refueller and two CP-140M Aurora surveillance aircraft.  Nothing has been said that I know of about withdrawing them. But how important would retaining them in the field be if the six Hornets are withdrawn?

It is not as if the Canadian air forces have been underused having, by the end of January, conducted over 2,000 sorties, about two-thirds by its fighter jets, one-sixth by the refueller and one-sixth by its surveillance aircraft. In addition to the air crews, what about the crews on the ground required to support the fliers – the liaison and planning personnel, the logistics people, those officers working in command and control, and the ground crews? The reality is that all Canadian troops overseas in the war against Daesh are combat troops in some sense.

One argument not used at all is the ineffectiveness of the campaign against Daesh and al-Quaida. That is for three reasons. Since Trudeau contends that Canada will continue to be involved in the train-and-assist mission, a revised policy on these lines would be incoherent. Secondly, such a rationale would prompt close examination of the mission and reveal how critical air support has been to the success of the train-and-assist mission. Third, the examination would reveal how successful the air mission has been in degrading and setting back ISIS. The last has a corollary harking back to R2P. The sooner the mission is completely successful, the sooner the people of Mosul and Fallujah will be free of the tyranny of ISIS and the practice of hoarding food for their fighters while the local population is left to starve.

U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Sean MacFarland has stated:

  • The mission has forced the enemy in Iraq to give up terrain, ejecting Daesh from Beiji and its nearby oil refinery and from Ramadi where defense forces were deeply entrenched;
  • The train-and-assist mission has already succeeded in training 17,500 Iraqi troops, 2,000 police with another 3,000 soldiers and police in process;
  • The mission has trained the Iraqis in how to integrate infantry, armor, artillery, air power (my italics), engineers, etc. in coordinated attacks;
  • The Syrian Democratic Forces, including Syrian Kurds, Syrian Arabs and others “have made dramatic gains against the enemy in northern and eastern Syria, while the vetted Syrian opposition and other groups are holding the enemy back along what we call the Mara line in northwest Syria;”
  • None of the above would have been possible “without coalition air support.”

Discount some of these claims as embroidered. Nevertheless the mission has been and continues to be successful. Essentially, Justin Trudeau seems to believe that, motivated by fear, a response to terror with force only succeeds in inducing greater radicalization among Islam’s adherents. The angry extremists and terrorists are out there because of what we Westerners have done in the past. Trudeau has evidently not read, or, if he has, he disagrees with Joby Warrick’s description of the rise of ISIS in his book Black Flags. Daesh did not arise in response to George W. Bush’s terribly mistaken invasion of Iraq, but with the help of the Bush administration that enormously raised the profile of an obscure Jordanian street tough, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He learned that terror, the bloodier the better, was the best means of getting America to sell his message. Zarqawi offered the militant match to Donald Trump’s belief that the greater the quantity of insults shot off with a scatter gun, the more publicity, the higher your profile and the greater your chances of becoming President of the U.S. The jihadists just wanted to create a caliphate over the whole Middle East.

If the argument were left there, we would be stranded, for the arguments on the basis of tactics and strategies leave us bereft of any understanding. Trudeau appears to be left standing on quicksand. But that is fundamentally a decision not to comprehend his position. For in the end he is not arguing about the best tactics and strategies to combat and defeat ISIS, but about identity, Canada’s identity in a world of realpolitik. Canada is a peaceable kingdom with a very successful multicultural policy. What we do in foreign affairs and the defence of Canadian citizens must be carried out with this as the first premise. The use of military force must be a last resort and used only when diplomacy and working to improve government have crashed against a cement wall. Even then the use of military force will be very small.

That approach apparently would not even change as a result of an increase in homegrown terrorism. A successful attack would not change Canadian policy. Responding with a declaration of war is wrong for Trudeau. That is NOT how attacks at home or abroad should affect us – by stirring up our militancy and our paranoia and fear. In the case of the latter, reinforcing Canadian intelligence services would only mean reinforcing the surveillance of those intelligence services to ensure they do not abrogate our freedoms. This is the claim of the son of Pierre Trudeau who introduced the draconian War Measures Act against what was relatively a pinprick by the FLQ.

So how do we assess Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party’s position when placing military and strategic considerations within the context of identity politics? By examining some other miscues of the government unrelated to Daesh, Iraq or Syria we might gain some further insight.

With the help of Alex Zisman

Tomorrow: Trudeau, the domestic body politic and defining the body politic of Canada

VII: Samantha Power: R2P Applied

VII: Samantha Power: R2P Applied

by

Howard Adelman

When Samantha was appointed to chair President Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board set up to actually prevent mass atrocities and genocide as a core U.S. national security interest and foreign affairs responsibility, the cheerleaders for R2P jumped with joy, “At last,” they screamed, “Something will be done about preventing, or, at the very least, mitigating mass atrocities.” Indeed, Samantha Power credited the administration with “an unprecedented record of actions taken to protect civilians and hold perpetrators of atrocities accountable.” In reality, the false claim of credit and the inability to mitigate let alone prevent atrocities are two sides of the same coin.

What were these claimed unprecedented actions and accomplishments? And did they have anything to do with the doctrine of Responsibility to Protect (R2P)?

In the next series of blogs, I will take up a number of specific issues on which Samantha Power at one time or another claimed credit was due to the administration for “an unprecedented record of accomplishment”. I will see what if any connection there is to R2P and briefly deal with the claims made and whether any credit is warranted in a number of specific cases. Of necessity, I will have to be very brief and succinct on each crisis. Before undertaking the specific case study analysis, including Darfur, South Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Myanmar, I want to raise a number of general faults with R2P and then offer two individual cases – of accountability rather than prevention or intervention as illustrations.

As I will try to show in the case studies, when R2P is actually applied to protect populations in peril, such as the Yazidis in Iraq, the motivation has little to do with protecting that very endangered population. And when protecting an actual population as the real aim, as in Libya, the course of events set in motion by the intervention seems to make the situation go awry leading seemingly to many more deaths and atrocities than might otherwise have been the case. When protection or mitigation actually seem possible and could be effective, as in repressing and even eliminating Boko Haram in Nigeria, the conditions for its application are undermined. All of this will emerge in the case study analysis. In this blog, I offer some theoretical reasons why R2P is inherently bankrupt and why this will always be the case. R2P was not only stillborn when the UN endorsed the doctrine universally by effectively gutting its core premise of making sovereignty conditional instead of absolute, but was sterile at its conceptual birth. The genetics of the doctrine doomed it to crashing.

If the dialectics of the analysis of the theory bothers or deters you, wait until you can read the case study analysis. Alternatively, you can skip this blog and go to a second I will write this morning, a brief review of the movie, The Foxcatcher, a movie that presents, but does not go into the mind of a sociopath who could commit mass atrocities.

Part of the problem with R2P is the difficulty of application – the greater the challenges in figuring how to apply the doctrine, the more worthless it appears to become. For its credit depends upon use, but without a proper line of credit, it turns out to be useless, hence contributing to its increasing loss of credibility. And the more it is not used, the more worthless it appears to be. However, these are but the manifestations of the root conceptual flaws in the doctrine. Let’s start with the central premise of the relationship between the sovereign state and its citizens.

In liberal democratic theory, the governors of a state are responsible for its citizenry and accountable to that citizenry for carrying out a state’s responsibilities. ‘Responsibility for’ and ‘accountability to’ are the two intertwined dialectical links between a population and its government. But in R2P, if a state fails in its prime responsibility of protecting its citizens, that responsibility function shifts to the international community which substitutes its own authority for that of the state. State authority is no longer absolute but conditional upon its exercise and removable with failure. The state is reduced to a trustee of the international community. And that international authority that takes over the responsibility for the citizenry is not responsible to that citizenry. So R2P only works if it undermines the principle of democracy. More importantly, when it does not work – which as I will show is the norm – then responsibility itself becomes emptied of any meaning, thereby even more fundamentally undermining the doctrine of responsibility for and to the people.

If we approach the conceptual issue, not from the nature of a democratic state, that is, the collectivity, but from the other pole of the equation in R2P, the rights of a citizen to protection, we get into another dilemma. Citizens not only have rights of free speech, rights of assembly and the other traditional rights necessary for the preservation and enhancement of a democratic polity, but they have a right not to be subject to mass atrocities. This is not just a right not to be tortured or a right to a fair trial or a right to legal representation. The latter are all rights that belong to the individual in a democratic polity. What we have in this case is a collective right, that is, a right of a community within a polity to continue its existence as a community; if the state denies that right by either trying to evict the community to which an individual belongs (ethnic cleansing) or goes even further and tries assiduously to exterminate that group in whole or in part (genocide), then the only way prevention or mitigation can be effected is by granting a group rights. Inherently, however, this puts limitations on individual rights rather than enhancing them.

If an individual has all of the liberal rights, why does he need to be recognized as a member of a group with collective rights? Where is the added value of the collective right to the individual qua individual? Further, one of the paradoxes at the root of the conception of the nation-state is that when a collection of individuals contract among themselves as individuals to transfer all coercive power to the state on condition that their rights are protected, those rights do not include group rights.

The compact between the individuals and the state goes further. The rights to determine who belongs to the state, that is, who can be its members, is transferred to the state. So if a state wants to abrogate the rights of a group, the only way to protect those rights is to insist they belong to every individual member of the state. But group rights only belong to a group and its members within the state, not to all members of the state itself. So if groups within a state are to have specific group rights – such as aboriginal peoples within Canada concerning the rights of a community to exclude non-aboriginal members or revoke the rights of individuals in that group when they marry non-aboriginals – then it is the group, not the state who defines who is a member of that group. If the state assumes responsibility for that decision – as was done in the Holocaust, in the Rwanda genocide and in some cases of aboriginal rights -, then the very idea of a self-perpetuating collectivity with rights within the state is undermined. The fact is, the issue of collective rights is the Achilles heel of a democratic liberal state. Insisting that a state cannot mistreat any of its minorities and, if it does, the collectivity of all states will take over the responsibility, means only that the irresponsibility only gets writ large and exposed for what it is.

So what has actually happened? The Obama regime has sincerely bought into the principle that the U.S. does have a responsibility when minorities are persecuted. And, unlike the United Nations, it is not just a rhetorical buy-in. As stated above, Obama issued a directive that “the prevention of mass atrocities and genocide is a core national security interest of the United States.” But then the most powerful state in the world showed that it could not possibly implement that responsibility – not only for all the minorities being afflicted with atrocities, but surprisingly, not one single one – except when the real and deep motivation is the old fashioned self-interest of the state.

So the issue is not even which group, among all those persecuted, a state should protect. Nor is the issue simply when to apply the doctrine of protection, let alone adopt the last resort of coercive intervention. The inherent incapacity of the most powerful state to protect any group outside its own jurisdiction based on R2P, which requires collective authorization via the United Nations before any action based on R2P is legitimized, undermines both the sovereignty of the state as well as the potency of that sovereignty. Does the endorsement by the UN authorizing military force help, as when the U.N. Security Council authorized military force to protect “civilians and civilian-populated areas” in Libya? R2P does offer permission to a state to act on behalf of the international community, which may provide temporary protection and which can prevent some murders from proceeding, but what happens next? Unless the intervening state or group of states is willing to assume full responsibility for those endangered citizens and not simply provide protection in an acute crisis, then the violence simply recurs in a different form.

Further, if a country decides to become involved, the intervener has to either take full control (unlikely) or to support one side in the struggle, presumably representing those persecuted. Then the persecuted are empowered to destroy their enemies – which inherently means the other side, the persecutors. They take control and sometimes even become the persecutors. Those states which have an interest against that group that have gained power become highly critical of the intervening state as behaving like an imperial power, not as a saviour of minorities. The intervener is no longer the representative of the world community, but only a section of it intent on victory. R2P just becomes a cover for an exercise in imperial power. At the same time, the intervener becomes a producer of victims as well as a protector of victims.

One result is that altruism is depreciated and devalued. Force in the service of altruism is an oxymoron. What is more, the altruism only seems to work when it is intermixed with the self-interest of the intervening state that drives the intervener to assume the full responsibility required to complete the task at hand. Of course, that only further undermines the moral status of R2P. Since the ostensible success, protecting civilians, is difficult to assess and measure, but the body counts, the civilians killed, those wounded as “collateral damage,” are quantifiable – the empirical evidence seems evident for all to see. The cure may be worse than the disease.

What is more, when a state assumes the responsibility for its members, for its citizens, this is an ongoing and continuing duty, not one that ever ends. But intervention inherently demands and requires an exit. Yet there never is an appropriate time to leave by the very nature of the problem. In reality, an intervener leaves when the government of the state within which the intervention takes place insists once again on assuming responsibility, thereby both undermining the R2P doctrine, which is based on the presumption that the will of an individual state is trumped by that of the international community.

Further, the resentment and internal discord within the intervening state are enhanced. A state assumes responsibility for its own citizens, not in gratitude for the “international” community acting as a temporary protector, but because the country has become tired and even resentful of the so-called protector. On the other side, the citizens of the intervener sooner rather than later grow tired of the burden and resentful in turn of the lack of appreciation of those who they sacrificed to protect. Alternatively, the situation gets worse, and the intervener is required to increase its commitment, the self-sacrifice of its citizens and the cost of its project, which in turn enhances the resentment of at least part of the citizenry of the intervening state and exacerbates the divisions and schisms within.

As we shall see, none of these paradoxes and dilemmas has even touched the problem that neither the strongest state in the world and certainly not the international community can possibly assume the responsibility for even a small portion of the atrocities taking place in various parts of the world. So the international community and the intervening state(s) come across as hypocrites incapable of living up to the promises they have ostensibly made.

One of the results of all these inherent failures is a propensity to boast about relatively tiny and insignificant accomplishments, even when one had hardly anything to do with responsibility for them. Before I begin the series of case study analyses, let me offer an example of one case that is neither about prevention nor intervention, but about accountability. The Obama administration supported the arrest of Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić and boasted about it. What did that support amount to?

Samantha claimed this credit among a long list justifying her successes as the chair of President Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board set up in 2011. It is true that the R2P doctrine is not only about prevention, but also includes punishment of those guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide. But that is not what is novel about R2P. As President Obama said himself on 2 April 2013 upon learning of the arrest of the Butcher of Bosnia, Ratko Mladić: “Fifteen years ago, Ratko Mladić ordered the systematic execution of some 8,000 unarmed men and boys in Srebrenica. Today, he is behind bars. I applaud President Tadic and the Government of Serbia on their determined efforts to ensure that Mladić was found and that he faces justice. We look forward to his expeditious transfer to The Hague…From Nuremberg to the present, the United States has long viewed justice for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide as both a moral imperative and an essential element of stability and peace. In Bosnia, the United States – our troops and our diplomats – led the international effort to end ethnic cleansing and bring a lasting peace. On this important day, we recommit ourselves to supporting ongoing reconciliation efforts in the Balkans and to working to prevent future atrocities. Those who have committed crimes against humanity and genocide will not escape judgment.”

That is a fair and judicious statement. Obama gave credit where credit was due for the arrest – to President Tadic and the Government of Serbia that first gradually asserted control over the Serbian military. The effort was helped both by EU pressure requiring the arrest of the wanted war criminals as a condition for the entry of Serbia into the EU and the British military and British politicians, particularly Paddy Ashdown when United Nations High Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2004. Obama did not link the arrest with R2P, but with a long American bipartisan tradition going back to the Nuremberg trials after WWII. He also gave credit to the Clinton administration for its leading role in the intervention in the former Yugoslavia and for forging the peace agreement. The only credit he gave his own administration was for a recommitment to supporting ongoing reconciliation efforts in the Balkans and his government’s work to prevent future atrocities. None of this had anything to do with the arrest of Ratko Mladić and Goran Hadžić.

Even the rewards offered for information leading to his arrest, initially €1 million by the Serbian government, upped in 2010 to €10 million, and $5 million dollars offered by the American government, subsequently supplemented by an offer of €1 million by the U.S. embassy in Belgrade just for information on his location, had nothing to do with those arrests. Initially Mladić was protected by the governments of Serbia and Republika Srpska, then after 2002 by the Serbian army and the army of Republika Srpska, then by paramilitary extremist organizations similar to the ones that helped Nazi war criminals escape Germany after WWII, and finally only by members of his own family. Neither strenuous UN and NATO efforts nor offers of bounties led to his arrest – just good police work and serendipity.

Goran Hadžić was the last fugitive war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and he was arrested by Serbian police just over a month after Ratko Mladić near the village of Krušedol, where he had been hiding since his indictment by the ICTY. He had tried to sell a stolen Modigliani painting and police tracked him down. America had no more to do with this arrest than with the capture of Ratko Mladić. President Obama’s statement on Goran Hadžić’s arrest was in the same vein as the previous one, with one exception. “Over the course of its 18-year history, the United States has been and remains a steadfast supporter of the ICTY and its critically important work.” A smidgeon of credit was taken for supporting the ICTY. Was this what Samantha Power was declaring as an example of an “unprecedented action”?

My country may have been the sponsor and midwife of R2P. I continue to believe in military intervention – when possible and when needed. But the overarching doctrine supposedly providing a rationale for such actions is a far greater hindrance than help. It is much better to establish practices than to proceed from an abstract principle, especially one so terribly flawed.

VI: Samantha Power: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

VII: Samantha Power: The Responsibility to Protect (R2P)

by

Howard Adelman

Evan Osnos’ New Yorker pre-Christmas piece on Samantha Power provided me with a window into the priorities and workings of the Obama administration and an opportunity to comment on one of the most high profile figures in that administration. These series of blogs have not been an analysis of Osnos’ essay. Rather, I have used the essay to discuss much of what he did not say. For example, he not only did not discuss the doctrine of “The Responsibility to Protect” (R2P), he did not even mention it once. Yet R2P is the doctrine with which Samantha Power has been most closely identified by both her friends and certainly her enemies. In this blog I want to discuss Samantha Power’s understanding of and commitment to the Canadian originated doctrine of “The Responsibility to Protect” (R2P) that was so conspicuously absent from the article. As a follow-up in subsequent blogs, I will first explore the credits she claimed for the USA related after chairing the ABD, President Obama’s Atrocities Prevention Board, set up in 2011 and subsequently discuss the application of R2P to specific cases.

At the beginning of this century, Tom Axworthy, when he was Foreign Minister of Canada, initiated a commission to study and make recommendations on how countries should behave when there are indications that wide-scale atrocities are or may be taking place or even about to take place. Formed in September 2000, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS) delivered its massive two volume report, “The Responsibility to Protect,” in 2001. Its goal was to develop a global political consensus about how and when the international community should respond to emerging crises involving the potential for large-scale loss of life and other widespread crimes against humanity. The report pointed to the central challenge – the primacy of the doctrine of the sovereign state as absolute. It outlined how that could be overcome by limiting sovereignty and creating a doctrine of intervention as a trump when states failed to fulfill their responsibilities to protect their own citizens. Under the auspices of the United Nations, the doctrine was to include both a “Responsibility to Prevent,” endorsing early warning systems and root cause analyses, and a duty both to respond and rebuild, although the overwhelming public image has been on intervening within a sovereign state. In 2005, the doctrine was endorsed by the United Nations unanimously.

In the doctrine, a state has a responsibility to protect its own population. If it fails to do so and mass atrocities seem immanent or underway, the international community assumes the responsibility of, in the first instance, assisting a state unable to provide protection on its own. If the state fails to protect its citizens from mass atrocities, the international community has a right to use a variety of tools at its disposal to ensure protection of those citizens. Coercive military intervention could be used as a last resort.

The uptake of R2P by the international community in a very short time is very instructive. Contributing to a Safer and More Secure World. (2005-05-12) and its complementary International Policy Statement were issued at the very beginning of 2005 by the Government of Canada (GofC) followed by “A Role of Pride and Influence in the World” that set forth the principles of R2P, how Canada would implement it, and the steps Canada would take to get the international community to buy in. One part of the last document reads: “While diplomacy remains the preferred tool in the pursuit of international peace and security, our country must possess the hard military assets necessary to achieve our foreign policy goals.” Coercive military means would be used to back up diplomacy in the traditional realist mode. However, the policy document also stated that, “the Government has made clear that it intends to engage members of the United Nations in moving forward with the ‘Responsibility to Protect’ initiative.” In fact, that process was well underway.

The UN High Level Panel on Treats, Challenges and Change wrote “A More Secure World, our Shared Responsibility;” the document was released by the Office of the Secretary-General of the UN in 2004; R2P was endorsed in 2005. The objective was to develop new rules to enable the international community to protect civilians from extreme harm when their own government is unwilling or unable to do so.   In 2005 at the UN World Summit, when the UN unanimously endorsed the doctrine, it was already clear that it was a stillbirth. China, for example, was just one of many countries that put caveats on their support. That country was quite clear that it was voting for motherhood; anytime the issue came up and R2P was to be applied, it was to be subordinate to the absolute sovereignty of a state. Sovereignty must always trump R2P. A nation’s permission to intervene would still be required. The doctrine was only to be applied with the consent of the nation targeted, a principle that the doctrine was intentionally designed to overcome. The United States under George Bush’s administration also voted in support of the doctrine while making quite clear that decisions of multilateral bodies, such as the UN, would be subordinate to the decisions and interests of the United States. Sovereignty still ruled.

Samantha Power’s first book was not A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide published in 2002, which traced the history of genocides in the twentieth century and government responses to those atrocities as they developed, but a co-edited volume with Graham Allison the previous year called Realizing Human Rights: Moving from Inspiration to Impact. The order of the books and their titles are instructive. For her focus was not to provide a scholarly understanding of why genocides take place nor why governments stand by and do nothing. The book was intended to inspire action, initially by ensuring that warning information was collected and analyzed and a box of prevention tools developed, including military intervention.

This coincidence of timing led to the close identification of Samantha Power with the R2P doctrine rather than any role she played in its development or getting the UN’s endorsement in unanimously adopting the doctrine while gutting it of any meaning, though undoubtedly the fame of her second book, combined with the aftermath of the failure to prevent atrocities in both Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, helped in both publicizing the doctrine and linking her name closely with it. Samantha Power had no significant role, even in the International Coalition for the Responsibility to Protect (ICRtoP), which was organized to ensure the doctrine was implemented.

The New American, as a very loud voice on the far right in America, has insistently contended with the original R2P doctrine and insisted that U.S. sovereignty and interests had to be protected against the insatiable hunger for power of the UN, the globalist government-in-waiting. Right wingers claim that the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, with its commitment to make human rights principles central to the formulation of U.S. public policy, and, more particularly, Samantha Power as its founding executive director, participated in the advisory board of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty established by the Canadian government. In fact, Michael Ignatieff, at the time Carr Professor of Human Rights Practice at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, was on the commission, not Samantha Power. The Carr Center itself, however, is not included in the index of the report. Further, in the supplementary second volume of the Responsibility to Protect Report edited by Thomas Weiss and Don Hubert, to which I contributed an essay and which includes an exhaustive bibliography, Samantha Power did not contribute to any of the thematic essays. Nevertheless, these facts never stood in the way of the right in the United States linking her intimately with the doctrine or for branding Samantha as a “worldwide leader” in the promotion of this “sovereignty-stealing” doctrine that Samantha Power allegedly worked to develop in partnership with The Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCRtoP).

How does this have any significance since Samantha Power unequivocally endorses R2P? It is significant only in pointing out that anything the right says about Samantha Power, both generally and with respect to R2P, is not to be trusted. Unfounded comments from the right make Samantha Power an epitome of scholarly accuracy and acuity. Ramesh Thakur, when he was director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and a distinguished fellow at The Centre for International Governance Innovation, published an op-ed in a number of Canadian newspapers on the new world order. The right wrote that Thakur in his article quoted Samantha Power as “pushing for a “global rebalancing” and “international redistribution” of power that would usher in a “new world order.” Contrary to their claim, Samantha was not even cited in the article.

What really bothered Marco Rubio (R-Fl) at her inauguration hearings for her appointment as UN permanent representative to the UN was not Samantha’s threat to the supremacy of the absolute sovereignty of the USA, but her call for the USA to confess its past sins, for a collective public mea culpa, a public equivalent to the secret confessional in a Catholic Church. In her article, “Force Full” in The New Republic in 2003, Samantha had criticized George Bush’s use of “illiberal power.” “U.S. foreign policy has to be rethought…We need: a historical reckoning with crimes committed, sponsored, or permitted by the United States. This would entail restoring FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] to its pre-Bush stature, opening the files, and acknowledging the force of a mantra we have spent the last decade promoting in Guatemala, South Africa, and Yugoslavia: A country has to look back before it can move forward. Instituting a doctrine of the mea culpa would enhance our credibility by showing that American decision-makers do not endorse the sins of their predecessors.” Samantha favoured humanitarian intervention and opposed imperial military intervention. Samantha’s response to Marco Rubio’s query, however, was an exercise, not only in sophistic political side-stepping, but in turning a challenging political question into an exercise in obfuscation. Further, she used the question to exclaim her vaulted view of the United States.

In this blog I focus on words and ideas rather than claimed deeds, such as Presidential Study Directive 10 (PSD-10) of September 2011 declaring the prevention of mass atrocities and genocide to be a “national security interest and core moral responsibility” of America and directing the National Security Advisor to conduct a comprehensive review assessing U.S. government capabilities and needs in this area.

Ambassador Power told one interviewer that, in addition to the constraints around the moral imagination and budgets that she encountered, and the time required to convince others, she had to cajole and convince after understanding where those resistant others were situated even when she experienced herself as an outsider and an alarm went off, “intruder alert, intruder alert.” Although she had come to appreciate and understand those constraints, nevertheless she always felt blessed “to have the chance to bring these issues to the fore.” Barack Obama was not one of those constraints because he has had a longstanding interest in multilateral efforts to combat war crimes and genocide and supported a more constraining international legal regime on war crimes, even at the cost of national sovereignty even as he appears more the “realist” than an advocate of humanitarian intervention. So she had always been working with the imprimatur of the president.

At an International Symposium on Preventing Genocide and Mass Atrocities in Paris convened by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, Samantha Power, as Special Assistant to the President for Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights and Senior Director for Multilateral Affairs at the U.S. National Security Council, gave a keynote address on 15 November 2010. The conference focused on genocide prevention and policy initiatives, current threats of mass atrocities, and prospects for greater international cooperation. Samantha made four points.

To the question of what we should do differently as governments and members of civil society to reduce the likelihood of atrocities, she stressed the importance of strategic commitments to prevent mass atrocities in Obama’s National Security Strategy that go beyond a vow of “Never Again!,” beyond the UN’s endorsement of R2P, or even citing R2P in a Security Council resolution. The strategic commitment is one that sends a critical message throughout the government and to the world of American priorities in order for resources to be allocated and political will to be mobilized and harnessed.

In the Torah, there is a distinction between oaths, vows and promises. When one reads Samantha Power, a strategic commitment is not an oath which a higher authority will require you to fulfill, nor a vow where there are consequences if you fail, nor even a promise where your sense of self to yourself and others will be diminished if you fail to act. A strategic commitment is none of these. It is about symbols. It is about messaging. It is about enhancing and reinforcing a constituency. It is about creating an organization that can work towards a singular goal. But it is not about developing practical tactics on the ground and certainly not about delivering results. In other words, it is about politics. It is about spin.

Samantha went on to insist that the strategic commitment also had to be personal and embodied in an individual who will ensure a president’s legacy and an organizational structure that will guarantee that the information flows up and the options are available to the president. This is consistent with her misplaced analysis of what went wrong when President Clinton was dealing with Rwanda. It is not consistent with my analysis of that failure nor with my appreciation of the significant humanitarian successes by governments. Ron Atkey, when he was Minister of Immigration and was confronted with the Indochinese Boat people crisis, told his staff in the Ministry that he did not want to go down in history like those Canadian officials who turned their backs on the Jewish boat people in the thirties and said “None is too many.” Practical more than rhetorical leadership is required.

Look at the difference. In Samantha’s world view, underlings are required to ensure a legacy so “that the President doesn’t look back on his presidency and wonder why he wasn’t informed or presented with decisions.” In the Canadian understanding of commitment, that commitment is a will to act in a specific direction in a specific context faced with a specific problem. Whether it was Jack Pickersgill’s commitment to facilitate entry of Hungarian refugees into Canada or the Clark government’s approach to the problem of Indochinese refugees, commitment was not a strategy but an action, not setting up and devolving the problem onto an organization and making an impersonal structure responsible and simply appointing someone at the top committed to the same purpose. Those steps followed from a specific commitment to act, not as a condition for acting. For Samantha, what is required is governmental organization that matches the methodical organization characteristic of mass-killings. However, a prior requirement of genocide is the commitment of a few to destroy a group. The organization is simply a tool to accomplish the task.

Samantha simply demonstrated that she neither understood the source of the problem nor how commitments are formed to deal with them. Her approach is essentially bureaucratic and not action-oriented, concerned with general abstract propositions not specific deeds. Though it has some resemblance to mass lining in the Chinese political system, it lacks the key element of determination on the part of leadership to get something done.

Samantha’s third requirement to combat the prospect of mass atrocities focused on institutionalization. “Governments must work to systematize ‘prevention…to routinize our response to indicators of mass atrocities.” But indicators, as demonstrated in the developing East and West African early warning systems, do not connect with action but with the process for gathering and classifying information. Structures and organization do not necessarily make it easier to ensure early engagement. They just can help make it possible. Possibility should not be confused with engagement. Further, instead of announcing a new “Tech Challenge for Atrocity Prevention” that will “invite ideas–and award grants–for innovative technologies that strengthen the U.S. government’s capacity for early warning, prevention, and response with respect to mass atrocities,” why not, instead, recognize and enhance what is already in the field and is working by strengthening local capacity to anticipate the prospect of mass killing? It is not the American DOD that needs strengthening in its capacity to deal with atrocity prevention and response. The U.S. already needs to be on a weight loss program relative to its array of intelligence services. The military in Africa need to be strengthened. It is hard to imagine the American army being authorized to, let alone embarking on, an “atrocity prevention mission.”

Osnan’s article on Samantha was subtitled, “In the realm of the possible” with the implication that ideals had to be tempered with reality. But that is simply the result of construing idealism and realism as poles apart. In fact, they are complementary. The problem is to get the two into a dialectical embrace. Strategic commitments, in Samantha’s construal, structure and organization, and even institutionalization simply will not do. The focus has to be on decisions and deeds in responding to concrete challenges, not creating abstract general principles and a bureaucratic structure to enact them. Principles must be embodied in practices and not in abstractions. So all the convening of bureaucrats would not have led to the decision to take Hungarian refugees or Indochinese refugees into Canada. Decisions to act were crucial. “Whole of government” meetings focused on prevention are a crock, except as an educational tool. They do not and will not drive plans and responses. Samantha is just demonstrating her ignorance of the way governments actually accomplish anything.

Samantha’s fourth and final point in her address was to stress the importance of civil society and the value of social movements, such as the movement of which she was a part on the Darfur issue. I will take up that as an example in more detail tomorrow. But having been very active in many social movements rather than politics, from the nuclear disarmament movement to Operation Lifeline in the private sponsorship of the Indochinese refugees, it is my considered opinion, as a result of my research as well as critical reflection, that they are not a sine qua non, as Samantha contended. As both my involvement and research have tried to establish, civil society pressure can be complementary and enhance the ability of government to lead and act. But government has and must provide real leadership. It is not a graduate seminar for considering options. That leadership can initiate actions independent of social movements or, preferably, with their help, but the existence or non-existence of a social movement is not key.

Samantha’s involvement in the Darfur movement is a prime example. It has been a total bust as I will try to show tomorrow. Contrary to what she claimed, there was a movement dealing with Rwanda headed by Alison des Forges. The failure was not because of the absence of such a movement, but because the government was traveling in a very different direction with very different commitments. Her contention that, “it (a social movement) didn’t activate for Rwanda. However, because of Darfur, which reached its peak killing period around the ten-year anniversary of Rwanda, the movement has been broadened and institutionalized.” Indeed, but to what effect?  On Sudan, as I will try to show, what was needed was an accurate assessment of the problem and a commitment to action. To conceive of government working because of grass root and grass top pressure is just a fallacy. The top is not a pressure point but a centre of activity. Grass roots can help the centre; it cannot mobilize it.

President Obama’s endorsement of Samantha’s prophylactic recipes to strengthen the U.S. government’s ability to foresee, prevent, and respond to genocide and mass atrocities are misplaced. “Strong organization,” “a whole-of-government approach,” “bureaucratic monthly meetings,” “appropriate burden sharing,” “National Intelligence Estimates on the global risk of mass atrocities and genocide,” as if genocide and mass atrocities were equivalent to climate change and anticipations of food shortages. Pap! Bureaucratic spin for doing nothing. Training peacekeepers and local capacity building are not new tools. Neither are targeted sanctions, even if the targets are tweaked somewhat. Nor visa bans. These, and lessons learned studies, have been utilized by both Republican and Democratic administrations in the past. Very economical initiatives on the ground have been underway, ironically largely financed by the American government for over a decade. These should be recognized and enhanced rather than concentrating on bureaucratic remedies. But I have not been able to find whether Samantha knows they exist.

Samantha’s fallacious analysis would not be so awful if it was not the prime cause for the impotence of the most powerful country in the world.