Hell or High Water

by Paul Martin

  I thought it was crucial from the start to underline the necessity of democratic reform, so I made it clear that I would not participate in a formal luncheon put on by the government unless the opposition parties were also present. This happened as I requested, and it was the first time since the rebellion that the various parties had all agreed to come together in one place — a significant event in itself. I wanted to encourage the development of a “loyal opposition” in Haiti, which would not head to the hills with guns every time they found themselves out of power.

  One incident during the trip left a particular imprint on me. A few weeks earlier, there had been mudslides in Haiti in which many people had died. As part of my itinerary in Port-au-Prince I was taken to a school and orphanage. The priest who was in charge there said that he wanted to show me something. He took me to the roof of the building, which was several storeys high, and asked me to look across the valley that was pinched on each side by steep hills.

  Then he said to me: “Look down and what do you see?”

  There were hundreds of tar-paper shacks on the hillsides, so I said that.

  “What more do you see?” he asked.

  At first, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, and then the chaotic picture below me began to pull into focus. “Good lord, they are building shacks on top of other shacks,” I said, suddenly realizing that these tumbledown structures were literally going to collapse one on top of the other in the next serious storm, which would inevitably come.

  Aristide’s departure left Haiti struggling to re-establish a legitimate governing authority. There continued to be bitter, often bloody clashes between the supporters of various parties and factions. I thought that Canada, as a francophone country with a large Haitian diaspora community, could play a leadership role quite different from that of France, the former imperial power, and the United States, viewed in some quarters as the current one. But I was determined that if we stepped into this difficult place, we would not hit and run. We needed to make a significant long-term commitment in three areas: security, development, and political stability. We contributed RCMP and other Canadian police officers to help restore order in Port-au-Prince and other cities, and provided development assistance to get the economy on its feet and technical assistance for government administration.

  I left Haiti determined that Canada would do all it could to ensure that the country would stabilize and grow. But I was under no illusion about the scale of the challenge. Not long after I left my hotel with my retinue of soldiers and policemen, an armed gang rushed in and kidnapped the hotel manager. She was later released, but it was another sign of how far this fractured land had to go. Canada has played an important role in the agonizingly slow process of rehabilitation since then. Life in Haiti is improving, but very slowly and painfully. We will have to be there for a long time. We cannot make the mistake the international community had made time and time again in Haiti and elsewhere, which is to descend in force during a crisis, but then ignore the longer term reconstruction that might prevent further crises.

  A few weeks after my visit to Haiti, something like the disaster the priest and I foresaw that day atop the Haitian orphanage occurred half a world away and on an unimaginably larger scale. The Sumatra-Andaman earthquake reverberated under the Indian Ocean just to the west of Indonesia at one minute before 8 a.m. on December 26, 2004. It was still Christmas evening in Canada. The earthquake unleashed what came to be called the Asian Tsunami, claiming the lives of as many as two hundred and thirty thousand people widely dispersed along the shores of Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India, as well as many smaller and more obscure places. It was at its root a geological event. But such a huge human catastrophe could not have happened a hundred years earlier. The population explosion of the twentieth century meant that there were vastly larger numbers of people than ever before living along the shores of the Indian Ocean, many of them poor and poorly sheltered.

  The news media beamed pictures of devastation and human horror into our living rooms on a week when many of us in the West were feeling fat and comfortable and uniquely open to the deep feelings of empathy the tragedy evoked. The Biblical scale of the event presented a unique challenge to our preparedness and, I hope, has taught us some lessons. Within minutes of the first reports of the scale of the destruction my foreign policy adviser, Jonathan Fried, phoned me in Morocco where I was on Christmas vacation with my family after my trip to Libya. We spent many hours on the phone that day as I followed the news and ensured that our operations were moving ahead. A few days later, I cut short my vacation and returned home to Canada. I was no more effective operating from Ottawa than I had been by phone from North Africa, but criticisms of the pace of government reaction always flourish as people struggle to cope with the overwhelming, and it was important to demonstrate our commitment visibly.

  In these circumstances, the media invariably clamour for the “number” — the exact figure in millions of dollars the government is prepared to commit — before the scale or nature of the needs can possibly be known. They then criticize the government for increasing the amounts as the days pass, saying that it has reacted too slowly and is now only reacting to public pressure. The reality is that this ramping up of commitments as the situation becomes clear is exactly the right way to proceed: announcing an initial amount to galvanize the international effort, and increasing it as better information comes in as to what the needs are. In the first few days after the tsunami hit, the media also got caught up in a sideshow about the Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART), which is designed to provide medical assistance and water purification in the case of an emergency. There was some validity to the criticism. DART is a logistically heavy and expensive system that needs the co-operation of local authorities to deploy and it may not always be the most cost-effective way of delivering emergency relief. Dumping the DART somewhere in Indonesia on short notice might actually have been counter-productive, as the government there struggled to manage the offers of help coming from the international community. But not surprisingly, many people were asking what the point of having a disaster assistance unit was if it was not deployed in this, of all crises. Once we identified a location in Sri Lanka where the DART could usefully be deployed, we made the decision to do so, just one week after the tsunami.

  The truth is that we probably could have provided clean water more cheaply and more rapidly than the DART was able to do. At the same time, it was important for Canadians to see tangible evidence of our commitment to the relief effort. In the end, the soldiers we deployed treated thousands of patients in Sri Lanka, produced millions of litres of potable water, and assisted in general relief projects such as setting up temporary shelters and repairing schools. Although it constituted only a fraction of our overall relief effort, it gave Canadians a human connection with the efforts of their country to help — and that is important too.

  More fundamental than the issue of the DART, however, was that as a government we do two things: leverage the enormous goodwill that Canadians felt in a moment of global need and ensure that it not be just another of those international photo ops in which governments make huge promises on which they have little intention of delivering. In the case of the tsunami, Canada did deliver. When we promised to match individual donations made by Canadians to relief organizations, we did not anticipate the scale of individual generosity the crisis would produce. It was a wonderful thing to behold. It did create a problem, however, which was that we quickly had more money than we needed for emergency humanitarian relief, or than the humanitarian organizations could absorb, when some of those funds might have been better directed to longer term recuperation and development. I raise all this for one reason: to point out that environmental disasters appear to be on the increase and that all the world’s governments, including Canada’s, need to develop a greater capacity to respond quickly and make a greater commitment to staying in place through the process of reconstruction.

  In
mid-January, at the beginning of a previously planned trip to Asia, Sheila and I went to see some of the scenes of devastation. First, we went to Phuket in Thailand. As it happened, we had considered spending the Christmas holidays in Phuket ourselves that year. Our son Paul was living in Singapore at the time and had recommended it for our family get-together. In the end, we had decided on Morocco instead. It was a sobering thought.

  We found it even more sobering when we toured the devastated resort city, where we were met many dedicated Canadian volunteers, and were briefed by the former coroner of Ontario, Dr. James Young, who was assisting in the grisly task of identifying the thousands of unclaimed bodies. On the side of one building there was a poignant picture gallery, mounted by relatives searching for their loved ones. Sheila and I took a walk on one of the beaches. It was a beautiful day — the kind that had once drawn tourists here: cloudless sky, deep blue sea, gentle breeze. It was difficult to imagine that this peaceful scene had been transformed into one of horror just a few weeks before.

  The devastation wrought by the tsunami did not hit us with full emotional force until we visited Sri Lanka the next day. We took a helicopter out to see a fishing village that had taken the brunt of the wave. From the air, you could see the carcasses of fishing boats piled up two kilometres inland. When we landed, we went for a walk along the beach. As we walked, we sometimes would stub our toes in what looked like pristine sand, only to realize that we had just kicked the foundations of a house that had stood there just three weeks earlier. Eventually, we came to an area where the skeletons of former houses were more visible and encountered a man and a little boy. The boy spoke a bit of English, and so I started to ask the man questions that the boy translated. He told me that his house had previously stood right where we were standing and talked about his worries for the future. After we had chatted for a while, I said to the boy directly that his father must be very proud of him for his courage after the destruction of their home. “This is not my father,” he replied. “My father disappeared in the wave.”

  For every catastrophe that humankind suffers at the hands of nature, there is always another that we have brought on ourselves. Of all the world’s disasters, crises, and conflicts, none insinuates itself so deeply into every dark crevice of the globe, and with such poisonous results, as that between the Israelis and the Palestinians. The Israeli-Arab conflict lies at the heart of the turmoil across the broader Middle East. And the travails of that region, some of them rooted in religion, some in the legacy of colonialism, and others in developmental challenges and the struggle for resources, have incubated the dominant global security concern of our time.

  It seems obvious that part of the remedy to this contagion must be a direct dialogue between the Israelis and the Palestinians, and between the Israelis and their other Arab neighbours. Tony Blair was absolutely right when he was British prime minister to insist that the Arab-Israeli conflict be addressed directly by the United States and the world community, and not simply as an afterthought to the war in Iraq. Canada is not the lead player in the region, of course, but I was convinced that, given our long-standing connections in the region, and given our large and various diaspora populations, we could play a larger role. Our support for Israel is well known and of long standing. I thought we could also carve out a larger constructive role as friends of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for statehood.

  As prime minister, I had frequent contact, sometimes in person, and much more frequently on the phone, with the leaders of Israel, the Palestinians, and the Arab countries. One of my first phone calls as prime minister was with my Israeli counterpart, Ariel Sharon, with whom I subsequently had a lengthy meeting at a UN summit in New York. I was impressed with his willingness, notwithstanding his reputation as an implacable warrior, to make the changes that he hoped would lead to a more peaceful region. Many doubted his readiness, given his history, to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, for example, but he did it. Although subsequent events in Gaza have been tragic, I think that history will judge the Gaza withdrawal alongside other Israeli moves to evacuate conquered territory, from the Sinai and Lebanon, as a necessary precursor to a lasting peace.

  Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen as he is sometimes known, never enjoyed as much freedom of action as Sharon, though he was surely a committed partisan of a peaceful settlement to the conflict. I hosted a dinner for him at the Pearson Building in Ottawa when he visited in 2005 and was impressed by his gentle but determined manner. His son Yasser Abbas is a Palestinian-Canadian businessman, and I also had two meetings with him during my time as prime minister. After succeeding Yasser Arafat in the fall of 2004, Mahmoud Abbas called elections on the urging of the international community and won handily. He felt, however, that he never received the support he deserved from the international community (including Israel and the United States), and he was right. A greater effort to improve the lives of ordinary Palestinians in the year after his election might have forestalled the Hamas victory in parliamentary elections a year later, and all the trouble that ensued. The Israeli withdrawal from Gaza in the summer of 2004, while laudable, was essentially conducted unilaterally, without negotiation with Abbas. The result was that Hamas claimed it as a military victory, while Abbas looked on as an apparently impotent bystander.

  By the time I became prime minister, my Middle East policy was already well articulated. I had made it clear that I supported the legitimacy not only of the state of Israel, but of Israel as a Jewish state. I also disagreed with the view of the Department of Foreign Affairs that UN resolutions regarding the region were “balanced.” There was no doubt in my mind that while Israel might be subject to legitimate criticism, it had been singled out at the United Nations as if it were the world’s most egregious miscreant, which it clearly was not. Take the issue of the barrier — or “wall” — that Israel was constructing. I disagreed with the route the Israelis had chosen for it, which clearly cut through Palestinian lands and potentially prejudiced future peace negotiations. On the other hand, the Israelis had a right to defend themselves against the suicide bombings that had reached a terrifying pitch in 2002, and there was at least circumstantial evidence that the wall had reduced the number of such bombings, and therefore saved lives.

  At the same time, I felt strongly that Canada and the major powers had to have as a priority the development of a realistic plan for a viable, peaceful Palestinian state. It should be obvious that an impoverished Palestinian territory, whose people are left without hope of normal life, will not be fertile ground for peace. When I spoke to the UN General Assembly in September 2004, I explained why Canada felt it had to change its vote on some of the resolutions there, and in other international bodies. But I also made it clear that Canada would be much more active in support of the Palestinians. As prime minister, I announced a new aid package, which included aid to refugee camps, support for Palestinian parliamentary elections, and a commitment to build a Canadian democracy centre in Ramallah.

  At the same time as we did what we could to help the stabilization of the region we also tried to assemble some of the building blocks for a lasting peace. This included using our understanding of border issues, through our experience with both the United States and NAFTA, to help the Palestinians prepare to control their own borders in the future. Our customs service had scanner and transponder technology that might be adaptable to future Palestinian borders with Israel, Jordan, and Egypt. I also believed that Canada should be prepared to contribute to a peacekeeping or a policing force in the case of a settlement of some kind. At one point, in discussions with my old friend Jim Wolfensohn, I thought this might be a possibility, albeit a remote one. Canada had been involved in the region in a peacekeeping role in the Sinai and until very recently also in the Golan Heights. Whereas American troops would be deeply suspect on the Palestinian side, and European troops might have similar problems with the Israelis, Canada would likely be acceptable to everyone.

  Prior to the su
mmit of G8 leaders in Gleneagles, Scotland, in July 2005, Jim called to discuss the Middle East. After leaving the World Bank, Jim had been asked by the group known as the “Quartet,” consisting of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia, which took the lead on Middle East issues, to work out the non-military aspects of the Middle East dilemma. He had developed an ambitious plan that might have contributed to a genuine revival of a path to peace in the region. Jim’s idea was that the international community would provide $3 billion (U.S.) each year for three years to economic reconstruction in the Palestinian territories. A third of the money would come from the G8, a third from the Arab League, and a third from the rest of the world. Jim intended to make this proposal at the Gleneagles summit and asked me to jump in a split second after he made it to ensure that the proposal got some momentum from the start, which is what I did. Jim had obviously done his homework with the other leaders as well, because it quickly passed. This is precisely what had to be done. It was exactly what I thought was needed. Palestinians without hope would do what people without hope do. They were entitled to decent lives.

  Unfortunately, as so often happens with bold international commitments, this one faded from view soon after the ink was dry. In the months that followed the summit, Jim discovered that the Bush administration was growing cool to his plan, particularly after the election of a Hamas majority in the January 2006 parliamentary elections, held the same week as my last election here in Canada. As a result, Jim resigned in the spring of that year, feeling that he had been undermined and could no longer continue. Still, he was keen to play a role in finding a successor as Middle East envoy. He approached me to see whether I was interested in having my name put forward, after I had found myself involuntarily out of the prime minister’s chair. My reaction was that, as fascinating as it might sound, it was a detour from the route I had chosen for a post-prime ministerial career, which pointed to Africa and Canada’s Aboriginal peoples.