matt's boring

Romeo, Romeo. Whyfor aren't thou Prime Minister, Romeo?

Sunday, March 12, 2006

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Thursday of this week I attended a presentation by Romeo Dallaire. A podcast of the event can be downloaded through iTunes by clicking here.
Anyways, as promised, the synopsis:

The lecture was titled "From Rwanda to Darfur: The Failure of Humanity"

He started out by telling us that one thing he learned from his experiences in Rwanda, is that all humans are human. No one is more human than anyone else.
He followed this with an anecdote from Rwanda. Children had been used for a wide variety of terrible tasks, from being forced to walk through minefields to explode mines, to the more-familiar child soldier. Also, he said, often 5-8 year olds would be herded onto roads used by supply convoys. The convoys would have no choice but to stop, and then would be ambushed, the drivers killed, and the goods stolen and sent to the army, instead of the displaced persons they were originally intended for.
This is why he was at first worried about the prospect of an ambush when his convoy was stopped by a sole, 3 year old boy on the road in the middle of a small village. However, no ambush came. He had is driver honk the horn of the jeep in an attempt to bring out the child's parents, but no one came. They then got out to search through the huts, and as they did this the child ran off into one. Following after the child, he found him crouched by the dead, rotting bodies of his parents. The child was bloated from malnurishment, bloody, covered in scabs, and dirty, but Romeo said that when he looked into the eyes of that child, he saw the same that he saw in the eyes of his own child.

Romeo put forth the idea that NGOs (Non-Governmental Organisations) are the future of any attempts at real, effective humanitarian aid. Currently 80% of humanity is living in inhuman conditions, he said. The NGOs of today are currently immature, and some are even dangerous. He believes that NGOs will come into their own, and their effectiveness will be found in that they are beyond statehood and nationhood, which tends to be dominated by self-interest.

Humanity, he said, has stumbled into a new era. In 1989, with the fall of the Cold War, the 'classic' atmosfphere of war ended. Prior to then it had been conflict and friction between soveriegn nations, where the expression of the use of force took the place of the threat of the use of force. Remember the Soviet Union's massive troop parades, and the expression of the use of force that came about by missile stocks. In the 'classic' era, it had always been nations, and alliances of nations against each other.

The end of the Cold War changed all that. We now have barbarism, and slaughter of populations, with populations, and children, used as instruments of war. How do you counteract things like children used as instruments of war? What do you do when a drugged up 9 year old boy has the barrel of a kalashnikov pointed at you?
Moving from there, he related another story (I'm not clear on whether this was hypothetical, or actual). A group of peacekeepers comes across and empty village, and find a group of 100 people hiding in the local church. As they're escorting the villagers to vehicles for extraction, a group of 30 boys emerges from one of the alleys, and open fire on the peacekeepers and villagers. Then, from the other side of the square a group of 20 girls walk out, ahead of another group of boys. Being used as human shields. Romeo asks, do you kill childrend who kill? Just what is the right answer, and can you live with that answer?

He then moved on to comment on something that's been in the news lately, the questioning of some of Canadians about the commitment to Afghanistan. How many Canadian deaths will it take for the public, or the government to change heart?
In Rwanda, it took 10 deaths for Belgium to pull out.
In Somalia, it took the deaths of 18 US soldiers for the US to completely abandon the Pakistani, Canadian, and UN soldiers there, as well as the thousands of Somalis who were relying on their help.

We're in an era of complexity that we have created, he said. We have countries throwing off the shackles of colonial powers, and looking to establish their own human rights. However they have to deal with autocrats that had been bought up by the West during the Cold War. Once that ended, the West had no need to keep them from going to the 'other side', so they left them to sort themselves out. However they were then forced to deal with unrealistic timeframes for establishing themselves and their soveriegnty. Rwanda used as an example, had 150 years of colonialism, then 30 years of a dictatorship, and was then given 2 years to establish a democracy, or risk losing international aid dollars.
In the 90s there were conflicts all over the world that had nothing to do with classic diplomacy. No more national armies, but there was still shooting and killing.

He then outlined his view of the "New World Disorder"
-80% of humanity living deeper in the mud, blood, and indignity
-Ethnic cleansing, intra-state war, and genocide
-Global terrorism
-Legal mercenaries

He moved then to talk a bit about fear. Fear allows governments to control the population, and also creates humanitarian catastrophes. An example he used were rape camps, in Darfur. There, Arab Darfurians were impregnating African Darfurians in an attempt to create a new race which would help eradicate the African Darfurians. He talked about how youngest girls were most often chosen as they were less likely to be infected with AIDs.

Are all humans human?
At the same time the genocide in Rwanda was happening, the world was also dealing with ethnic cleansing in the ex-Yugoslavia. While the nations were pulling troops out of Rwanda, there were more than 10,000 troops in the ex-Yugoslavia. In the roughly 100 days that the Rwandan genocide lasted, more people were killed than in 6 years of the ex-Yugoslavian conflict.
Once 300,000 people were killed, and over 1 million displaced in Rwanda, it was declared genocide. General Dallaire was then granted a 5000 troop reinforcement (a drop in the bucket), and even then he did not get them until 2 months later.

He touched then on the recent genocide in Darfur. The US is busy in Iraq and doesn't have troops to spare, even though money for humanitarian aid has poured into Darfur. One thing missing however, is that no one has stepped in in a leadership role to assist the Darfurians. This is partly due to the African Union, but he talked more about his later.

Why no reaction?
Romeo said that 9/11 was the Pearl Harbour of Liberal Democraties. Now the tools of counterterrorism are similar to the tools of terrorism. Things like torture, and the reigning in of civil librities. How far will we go to establish security? How far away from our ethical and moral rights will accept our governments take us?

He also said that while we have many, many politicians, we currently have no statesmen. No clear vision, no precise ideas, and no concrete proposals. There are no more mandates and missions, we live in a world where ambiguity and complexity are the norm. We negotiate with criminals, and 'tweak' human rights to suit our needs.

Some options he outlined for dealing with the New World Disorder are:
-we merely survive
-we build a wall around ourselves
-we resolve the problem at the source

He said that rage from the developing world is the root cause of terrorism, and assistance, and sacrifice from the developed world to the developing, is the first step to resolving it. International development has to be effort and commitment, not just cash.

The UN's reponse to conflicts in the world he summed up as four different approaches, which he called Strategic OOTW (other than war) Tasks:
-Preventative deployment (which always happens after the fact)
-Peacekeeping
-Intervention
-Humanitarian

He did say that Kofi Annan and the UN had started out on the right track to solving the last two points, with their Right to Power agreement. It basically states that any state's right of sovereignty, is limited by an obligation to its people. Meaning, if a state is abusing its population and human rights, we have an obligation to intervene. The problem, Romeo said, is that the actual definiton of the Right to Power is something like 'a massive abuse of human rights', so he feels the scope is still too broad.
Annan came up with 101 recommendations to move the UN into a more pertinent and useful organisation. He was elected chiefly by an effort from the US to modernize the UN, and then they were the ones that ended up shooting down most of the recommendations.

How can we change the 'Big 5' UN members, and their veto power?
He proposes that the UN needs more tools, more options. The middle powers (Canada, Japan, Germany, etc) have not been providing enough to the UN to offset the Big 5. The Big 5 chooses mandates because they are the only ones with the individual capability.

He also said that Canada was right not to take part in a non-UN sanctioned war in Iraq, but we were wrong in abandoning the Iraqi people. A better way, he proposed, would have been for the US to stop at Baghdad, and let the UN go into Baghdad with troops from the middle powers, removed from the US-lead coalition. The UN has credibility, and in this case impartiality.

Things we need:
-multi-disciplined leaders
-mature NGOs
-adopted sovereignty with a reformed UN
-middle power coalition in the UN

Currently the UN has 26 nations under its command. They lend troops to the UN, where the commander uses the troops under the accepted mandate. He told a real-life story about a platoon entering a village, which they found abandoned. On the road leading out of the other side they came across a rape camp, where the girls had been slaughtered and mutilated. The majority were killed, but there were a few barely alive in a ditch. The commander haced a difficult question. Does he send his troops in to provide what little aid they could, or to provide solace to the dying? Or does he order them not to go in, due to the high risk of AIDs (as the soldiers had no rubber gloves), because they girls will all die anyways. 23 out of 26 different platoon commanders said they'd order their troops to keep going. The Dutch and the Ganayans both said they would order their troops to help. For the Canadians, he said that the order came too late, as the soldiers had already jumped into the ditch.
What makes us different, he asked. He answered by saying that it's the nature of our society, and how we see oursleves. There is a higher demand or higher calling in this country.
We:
-are risk takers
-have self confidence (as a nation)
-sense our own potential
-are a leading middle power

This was how he closed his lecture, the next segment was a question and answer session.

First, he was asked about the media coverage, and if they were to blame for the lack of world attention on Rwanda.
He answered by saying that ABC, CBC, and NBC gave more time to the OJ Simpson glove fiasco, than on the Rwandan genocide during its 100 day duration. He said that they were most likely told "don't goad the constituency into urging us to go in". He has first-hand knowledge that news WAS getting out, and he suspects that it was stopped at the editors desk. The editors are more concerned with what's going to sell. The censorship was an economic one, rather than a dogmatic one.

Next, a Sudanese student asked what Romeo had to tell him and his compatriats about how to rebuild, or prevent conflict.
Romeo answered y saying that there are of course, problems with conflict, but also with reconciliation. Some solutions, he thinks, are the empowerment of women, and the free education of children.

The last question, I felt, was the best. He was asked, that if all humans are human, were the Rwandan generals as human?
No, he answered. They had lost their humanity. Their comments, their eyes, he said, were not human. He also said that it is not in the African tradition to kill and rape people, these were ideas imported by the colonial powers, and things that the Africans had seen in European history (i.e. the Holocaust).

His last comment was about the World Tribunal that he took part in to charge the Rwandan generals with war crimes. The Rwandan trial was held in Tanzania, in a building he said that didn't even have working toilets. He also commented on how it took over 2 years to establish a witness protection program to prevent the murdering of the witnesses willing to come forward.
He contrasted that to the ex-Yugoslavian trial in The Hague, where it took place in a state-of-the-art facility with an established witness protection program.

I STRONGLY recommend listening to the podcast, if you want to find it just scroll ALL the way to the top of this post.

EDIT: I forgot to add that after the lecture, James used his connections to get us into a reception that was hosting Sen. Dallaire. He was on his way out, but he shook mine, and my friends hand and said "It's good to see some men here!" Then he was ushered away.

posted on Sunday, March 12, 2006 at 12:03 p.m.. There are . If you want, you can leave your own response by clicking here. You may also send this post to a friend of yours via email, or bookmark it for yourself by using icons below;