by Paul Martin
The suffering of people in places such as Darfur — where as many as three hundred thousand people may have died and more than 2.5 million (most of them children) have been displaced, according to the United Nations — should give us all pause to reflect on the bounty of wealth and peace we enjoy in this country. It should give us some perspective on our own lives, and perhaps also on our politics. One great disappointment I felt as prime minister was how our efforts in Darfur, as imperfect as they were, were reduced to crass politics in the context of the minority Parliament here in Canada.
In the spring of 2005, the government was facing the prospect of a vote of non-confidence. Even if we were able to secure the support of the NDP, which we eventually did, we also needed to corral the votes of several of the independent MPs to survive. Among the independents was David Kilgour.
Kilgour had been a junior minister under Prime Minister Chrétien and a supporter of mine in the 2003 leadership. However, I decided not to include him in cabinet. In April 2005, he announced that he would sit as an independent, citing the sponsorship scandal, same-sex marriage, and Darfur as his points of contention. When the question of the non-confidence motion arose, he was neutral in public but privately made known his intention of voting against the government. Fair enough. But the public posture he adopted in laying out a price for his vote struck me as cynical and self-serving. He said he wanted Canada to commit five hundred soldiers to peacekeeping in Darfur. No one was more interested in finding a solution to Darfur than I was, of course. But it was also perfectly clear that the solution to the crisis had to have an African face. We were already the second or third largest supporter of the African Union in Darfur; NATO was not getting involved. The idea that five hundred Canadian troops out there on their own in that huge territory would make a decisive difference was ridiculous. None of the Canadians who were on the ground in Darfur supported the idea of a unilateral Canadian force, nor did General Dallaire, whose experience in Rwanda gave him the most authoritative voice on the subject here in Canada.
General Dallaire and I met with Kilgour to explain our position. I made it very clear that we rejected his proposal, and that he could vote as he pleased. As it happened, we were working behind the scenes on Darfur at that very moment. We had made a decision to commit $170 million, mainly for trucks and other equipment, as well as eighty logistical troops, likely to be based in Addis Ababa. Kilgour seized the moment of our announcement for further public grandstanding, and to make official his decision to vote against the government. He dressed his decision up in the clothing of principle, but I believe it was an expression of little else but his desire to avenge his exclusion from cabinet.
You can imagine my frustration when the media reported the announcement of our new commitment to Darfur as an attempt to snag Kilgour’s vote, which was already lost precisely because we had rebuffed his demands! If anyone had followed the story in detail and with precision, they would have understood how farcical the whole episode was. In the end, Kilgour’s press conference certainly blunted the effort to rally public support to the cause of Darfur, but happily it had no ripple effect in Africa or internationally, where our commitment was understood and welcomed.
A few weeks after I was in Khartoum, I travelled to Libya, which was a key element in the Darfur crisis because of its border with Sudan and its prominence in the African Union. It was to be a fascinating diplomatic adventure, as any encounter with Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi inevitably is. Gaddafi has been the ruler of Libya since 1969, espousing a highly individual ideology of Islamic socialism. He lives in a huge tent outside of the capital, Tripoli, and keeps hours that are uniquely his own.
Like other Western leaders, I felt able to meet with Gaddafi in this period because he had moderated his international policies considerably in the previous few years. Over time, Gaddafi had shifted his foreign policy interests away from the Arab world, where he had been a folk-hero of sorts, to seeking a leadership role in Africa. His co-operation was crucial to maintaining a route for humanitarian relief from the Mediterranean to Darfur, whose northwestern corner touches on the southeasternmost part of Libya. This overland route limited the potential for interference by the government in Khartoum.
Although I was well acquainted with sub-Sarahan Africa, I was relatively new to the Maghreb. So the trip was also an education for me, and, it offered a chance to raise some commercial issues as well. Because Canada’s relations with Libya had warmed more quickly than those of the United States, Canadian companies had stolen the march on their continental rivals in helping the Libyans to revitalize the aging infrastructure of their oil industry. Petro-Canada and Nexen were bidding on various contracts in Libya and were keen for me to show the flag. SNC-Lavalin had been present in the country for some time in a major way. I had extensive discussions with many of Gaddafi’s ministers and officials, some of them surprisingly satisfactory, in which we discussed the pace of economic, political, and social reform in the country. Dan McTeague was with me, and he argued strenuously on behalf of a number of Canadian consular cases but without much immediate progress.
Over a long lunch in Tripoli, Gaddafi and I spoke mainly about the African Union and Darfur. He treated me to a lengthy lecture on his philosophy of the world, embodied in his “Green Book.” When he was finished, I was content that my job in Libya was pretty much done. But some time during the afternoon, I was informed that Gaddafi had invited me to his tent palace in the desert outside the city. Our Canadian diplomats were very excited because this was an unusual honour that was not always extended, even to the leaders of European nations who, on the face of it, were more central to Libyan foreign policy. Jacques Chirac, for example, had recently visited and had not been invited.
The tent was larger and more elaborate in structure than any other I have ever seen. Inside, however, it was austere, if comfortable, with the austerity broken only by the presence of a large TV screen. The meeting, which began around ten-thirty at night, turned out to be another elongated affair. Though our talks did not range beyond what we had discussed earlier in the day, I expected that when it was done, the Canadian reporters gathered outside were going to be very keen to talk with me, and I was trying to think what I could possibly say. When I eventually emerged, however, I discovered that the pressure was off. While Gaddafi and I were inside the tent, the reporters who were outside had been stationed not far from a group of Gaddafi’s camels, two of which chose the occasion to have sexual congress. This proved to be far more interesting to the Canadian press corps than anything I could ever say.
While the media’s attention was elsewhere — I mean the minority parliament, of course — we were also working on some fundamental reforms to the principles and mechanics of the international system, with the hope of preventing future Darfurs. One of the most successful diplomatic appointments I made as prime minister was Allan Rock as ambassador to the United Nations. Allan was not only crucial in coordinating action on Darfur, as I have already said, he was also a leader in reforming the United Nations. On these issues, the main burden of diplomacy fell to him, and he proved a worthy successor to the many illustrious Canadian diplomats to hold the job of Canada’s envoy to the United Nations. Allan demonstrated how, with a strong-willed person in this post, Canada can punch substantially above its weight.
In September 2004, when I made the annual prime ministerial trip to the United Nations, Allan arranged for me to have dinner with the “High Level Panel” that was charged with assessing the challenges facing the United Nations and proposing approaches to deal with them. The panel was led by the former prime minister of Thailand, Anand Panyarachun, and included Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister and head of the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental association that aims to avert bloody conflict. I raised what I believed to be some of the crucial issues facing the United Nations, emphasizing that its success was crucial to Canada. The Human Rights Commission, which — incredibly — included some of the wo
rld’s worst abusers of human rights and had been egregiously politicized with a deep hostility to Israel, needed to be replaced. Structures to address the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction needed to be revived and strengthened. The Security Council, still dominated by the victors of the Second World War, needed to be enlarged and reformed to reflect the world of the twenty-first century. I also made the pitch for the creation of a leaders’ version of the G20, which I saw as an adjunct to the United Nations, though not a creature of it. Finally, I discussed the idea of the “responsibility to protect,” or R2P.
The R2P was a Canadian initiative — developed under the leadership of Lloyd Axworthy when he was foreign minister — in reaction to the failure of the United Nations to intervene effectively in the Balkans, Rwanda, and Somalia during the 1990s in the face of terrible and systematic massacres there. The problem was that the United Nations, as a body that represents the governments of states, had always been extremely circumspect when it came to the sovereignty of its members. Kofi Annan, who was secretary-general of the United Nations at the time, challenged the world to find a way to reconcile the notion of sovereignty with the moral imperative to act in the face of these evils. It was an area in which no superpower could take the lead, and so it was the perfect role for Canada. For this reason, Allan Rock took the lead, along with Gareth Evans. R2P had three elements. The first was the responsibility of the international community to prevent outrages against human rights before they happen — to act, for example, as the United Nations and others had failed to do, when the Hutu-led Rwandan government first began exhorting violence against the Tutsi people. The second was a responsibility to act in the first instance by political, economic, and diplomatic means, perhaps, but ultimately militarily if necessary. And the third was a responsibility to rebuild after the crisis was over.
The moral imperative to these responsibilities may seem obvious. But they were deeply controversial. To begin with, while they flowed from the failures of the international system in the 1990s, they were being considered in a quite different context in the early twenty-first century. The United States had invaded Iraq, which created the fear among some countries that the responsibility to protect could be used as a diplomatic instrument for neo-imperialist conquest. Moreover, in the wake of September 11, the focus of the United Nations had been broadened from the “Millennium Development Goals” — an ambitious set of targets to lift the developing world up economically and socially — to include the West’s growing concerns about security. Many developing nations at the United Nations resented this shift away from their priorities to ours, and came to see the responsibility to protect through that prism.
The UN summit in September 2005 would address UN reform, the Millennium Development Goals, and the responsibility to protect. It is not too much to say that the responsibility to protect might have been doomed by the resistance it was facing in the developing world had South Africa not stepped out on the issue, making it clear that this was in large part about Africa and saving its citizens from harm at the hands of irresponsible governments. In the end, the process was an almost perfect illustration of how difficult it is to get anything done in a body with hundreds of countries at the table. For this reason, Kofi Annan eventually set up a working group of about fifty countries, but that too was unwieldy, and eventually, it came down to about twenty countries that were deeply involved — not a bad illustration, incidentally, of the principle behind the G20 I had been pushing for.
Still, as the summit approached, some countries such as Jamaica, Pakistan, Algeria, and Cuba continued to oppose it. Allan phoned me to see what I could do to help.
In the case of Jamaica, the problem was that the prime minister, P.J. Patterson, saw the responsibility to protect in the context of the recent ouster of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. Though the details of Aristide’s flight from Haiti remain in dispute, many, including Patterson, believed that it was the result of direct action by the U.S. government. I spoke with Patterson and was able to persuade him to change his view, partly because of Canada’s bona fides in the region and in particular with respect to Haiti, as well as by arguing that no intervention would occur without regional approval. This was important in Africa as well, where Allan worked to refine the proposal to meet some of the concerns, decentralizing the process so that it would operate under the aegis of the African Union.
In the case of Pakistan, I already knew the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz, quite well, from our time as finance ministers. In some ways this was an easier task because when I phoned Aziz, it soon became clear that he had not been aware of the positions taken and the tactics adopted by Pakistan’s delegation at the United Nations. He said he would look into the matter, and the fact that I had got through became evident when the Pakistan delegation suddenly dropped its fight at the United Nations.
In a way, the most difficult case was Algeria, which of course had its own colonial legacy with France. The president of Algeria when I was prime minister (and as I write) was Abdelaziz Bouteflika, whom I knew and greatly respected. I had met him many years before when he approached me at an international gathering and introduced himself. He had been Algeria’s foreign minister in the 1960s, coinciding with my father’s tenure in that role for Canada, and had known my father quite well. When I phoned Bouteflika to discuss the responsibility to protect, he was very cool to the idea. I used every argument that came to mind, but he was reluctant to budge. Finally, he told me: “This is a very big thing you are asking of me, a very big thing.” He gave me no commitment during the call, but the Algerian delegation at the United Nations stopped any active intervention against us, which, as Allan reported to me, was sufficient to make the difference. Another case of personal diplomacy being effective.
Although I did not get as personally involved with Cuba, my officials, including Jonathan Fried, did. They very effectively made the argument that the responsibility to protect was not a pretext for American military intrusion in Latin America. Our long-standing independent foreign policy with regard to Cuba was crucial to our credibility in making this argument. The Cuban delegation did not object to the final text, and this may have contributed to Venezuela’s decision in the end to acquiesce as well. I used the same argument with Ricardo Lagos, the president of Chile, who shared Latin America’s skepticism. In the end, he also supported the concessions.
When it came my turn to speak to the United Nations in September, I devoted much of my time to the responsibility to protect. In the end, the resolution adopted by the United Nations was weaker than we had hoped. Specifically, it retained a role for the Security Council, where a single one of the permanent members could hold up action with a veto. This is precisely what we had seen during the Balkan wars, when Russia had rendered the Security Council impotent with its veto, ultimately forcing NATO to step in. Still, the adoption of the principle that the international community has a responsibility to the citizens of a country whose government has turned against them was a profound turn in the thinking of the world community. The huge challenge ahead is to give that principle life.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Acts of God and Humankind
When I became prime minister, Haiti was in deep turmoil. The populist ex-priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was losing control of the country, and we were preparing ourselves for the possibility that we might have to evacuate our nationals if the situation got worse. I authorized a small military advance team to go to Port-au-Prince to prepare an exit route for Canadians stranded there.
In February 2004, Aristide fled the country during a rebellion. The American role in Aristide’s departure quickly became controversial. Aristide left after his security detail, which was provided by an American-based private firm, told him they could no longer protect him. He was evacuated on an American plane. He later claimed, once he had been whisked off to Jamaica, and then on to South Africa, that the Americans had engineered a coup. It was a charge that the Americans de
nied, and I did not have any particular cause to doubt them.
Still, in the aftermath of Aristide’s ouster, I was struck by the reaction of the leaders of the nearby Caribbean countries, such as Jamaica’s prime minister, P.J. Patterson. Many of them raised very strong objections to the American role in Haiti. They felt that as the democratically elected president of Haiti, Aristide should have been supported, or at least left in place, for all his manifest flaws as a leader. I did not share their view. Aristide had conducted himself in a thoroughly undemocratic manner as president, ignoring the constitution and subjecting his political opponents to brutal attacks. That having been said, I thought it was good to hear the Caribbean leaders speak out so forcefully in favour of political legitimacy derived from elections rather than force. Democracy was an important part of their history and I hoped that they might be a source of light in the developing world, influencing African nations in particular.
In the autumn of 2004, I was in Hungary to attend the “progressive governance summit,” originally a Clinton-Blair vehicle established in the 1990s. There, at the margins of the conference, I was able to take aside the South African leader, Thabo Mbeki, and press on him the importance of curbing Aristide, who had taken refuge in his country. From exile, Aristide was egging on his supporters back in Haiti, making it yet more difficult to restore a semblance of order there.
In November, the government invited me to visit Haiti as a means of helping Haitians move toward reconciliation. It gives you some sense of how unstable the country still was that we were warned that my motorcade might be attacked on the way in from the airport. The RCMP and Canadian Forces dispatched a special unit to assure the safety of the corridor. In fact, I was told they eventually made an agreement with the rebel forces to let me through.
