Global Policy Forum

By Kevin Ward

Canada hopes to start building a coalition of countries that want to define when international action should be taken to prevent genocide in an attempt to overcome past United Nations failures to act decisively in places like Rwanda. Prime Minister Jean Chretien was scheduled to formally present a paper written by a group of experts on Monday on the issue at a summit meeting of 14 centre-left national leaders who support what is called the progressive governance movement.

"We have to develop the process to be able to intervene when it's needed and intervene without creating the impression that you are intervening for your own personal interest," Chretien told a weekend news conference after attending a conference of centre-left politicians and experts in London before the summit meeting.

The 85-page document was written by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty after UN Secretary General Kofi Annan challenged world leaders three years ago to develop rules on when action should be taken to protect human rights and prevent genocide, ethnic cleansing and mass rape.

"If humanitarian intervention is, indeed, an unacceptable assault on sovereignty, how should we respond to a Rwanda, to a Srebrenica - to gross and systematic violations of human rights that affect every precept of our common humanity?" he said at the time.

The report written by 12 experts, including Canadian academic Michael Ignatieff, was largely funded by the federal government and completed in December 2001, but was overshadowed by the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States.* Chretien has been asked to reignite international discussion about the idea by British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the summit meeting in nearby Bagshot, just outside London.

The summit began Sunday night with a dinner meeting that included South African President Thabo Mbeki, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark and Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson.

In the current international climate, the commission report raises tricky questions. British newspaper reports on Sunday suggested the Germans are suspicious of the idea, fearing that it could be used to justify the war in Iraq, a military conflict it opposed with France. As a permanent member of the UN Security Council, the French government had threatened to block UN resolutions authorizing the use of force against Iraq, further complicating how a mechanism triggering action could be used.

Chretien, who laid a wreath on Sunday at a Canadian war cemetery in nearby Brookwood, conceded that there are no easy answers to some of the problems the concept raises.

"It's complicated, because you have the United Nations and veto rights," he said on Saturday.

In Rwanda in 1994, the UN was unable to prevent a genocide from occurring because it did not have enough military personnel available, despite warnings of bloodshed. Five years later in Kosovo, Russia used its Security Council veto at the UN to prevent an ethnic cleansing, which was stopped when NATO authorized military action.

A senior government official said Canada sees Monday's summit of centre-left leaders as an opportunity to get the debate back on the international agenda.

"It's a vehicle to generate a discussion that would more properly occur at the United Nations," he said Sunday.

The report also weighs the political, operational, legal and ethical considerations that the UN would have to deal with when it intervenes in a sovereign country to protect human rights.

* The International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty issued its report, entitled "The Responsibility to Protect", in Dec. 2001. The report is available on line at http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/iciss-ciise/menu-en.asp.

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