Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The second semi‐annual Munk Debate took place in Toronto on December1, 2008. The debate’s resolution was: “Be it resolved if countries such as Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burma will not end their man‐ made humanitarian crises the international community should”. The ‘pro’ debaters were actress and activist Mia Farrow and Gareth Evans, the CEO of the International Crisis Group. The ‘con’ debaters were General Rick Hillier and Ambassador John Bolton. The capacity audience of 800 people voted 79% in favour of the motion at the debate’s outset and 68% in favour at the debate’s conclusion. The Munk Debates are a signature initiative of the Aurea Foundation, a charitable organization founded in 2006 by Peter and Melanie Munk to support Canadian institutions involved in the study and development of public policy. For more information including audio and video of the December 1 Munk Debate on humanitarian intervention please visit our website www.munkdebates.com.
BS= Brian Stewart, Debate Moderator
RH= General Rick Hiller, Con Debater
JB= Amb. John Bolton, Con Debater
GE= Gareth Evans, Pro Debater
MF= Mia Farrow, Pro Debater
For full biographical notes on each debater visit www.munkdebates.com
(BS) Thank you very much. It is an honour to take the reins of tonight’s debate. The subject is so important. I don’t think that in my entire career, going back over three decades, any issue has caused me greater anguish than humanitarian intervention. It can haunt you. Intervention is the inescapable problem for reporters, for diplomats, for soldiers, for members of voluntary groups working in the field, indeed for all of us. Those questions keep coming up: when to act, when not, what would work, what action might make things even worse than they are.
The answers include the decisions of all of us because governments do ask and wonder ‐‐ does the public really care, for long enough, will it care even in the face of casualties? I learned a long time ago these questions do get asked because a lot of the humanitarian interventions have mixed results, as we know.
For example, look at Somalia in the early ‘90’s. It seemed for a while it would be easy to put a cap on the militias that were there interfering with humanitarian work. Three years later the United Nations had to retreat and chaos has existed there ever since.
And there was Rwanda, of course. Eight‐hundred thousand people may have been saved had there been intervention beforehand. It remains an open sore ‐‐ a terrible problem for Africa, the region and the world.
The Balkans ‐‐ long and arduous but would you not put that in the success column?
Afghanistan was not begun as a mission of humanitarian intervention, but more as an international security intervention. Still, it has morphed increasingly into a latter stage humanitarian crisis, thus raising the question, does one stay for the long haul or leave?
It was a few years ago, after Rwanda and Srebrenica, that the United Nations put forth the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine ‐‐ or R2P. It is, simply put, a doctrine that declares that if a state cannot or will not look after its people from abuse, from famine, from genocide, then the outside world should be able to step in as a last resort, even with the use of force. It is an extraordinary doctrine. It is critical and controversial and I would point out something else about it. It is not just a product of the post Cold War period, or of media emphasis on these situations.
The common human desire to intervene on humanitarian grounds goes back a very long way. In Ancient Rome, it was argued that human beings should be able to interfere to protect people at great risk, and in the 19th century the British, against their own national interest, fought slavery. In 1820, Lord Byron and Eugene Delacroix fought against the Ottoman oppression of Greeks. So the idea has been around for quite some time. It
is a continual flame. Whether it can flicker beyond this point is part of our debate tonight.
So let’s get started by reviewing the debate format. There will be opening statements, five minutes each. There will then be a half hour cross‐examination which I’ll lead, but not by any means try to dominate. A half‐hour audience question and answer session will follow, where your questions on cards will be brought up, and finally, there will be closing statements of three minutes each.
As you know, there’s been a first vote. The second vote will be held after the debate, the results of which will be announced at a reception in the Crystal at 8:45 p.m. Those of you who bought tickets were asked the question about intervention. The results of the first vote were that 71%, an overwhelming majority of you, thought there should be intervention in the case of people that are not in a position to save themselves. Twenty‐nine percent were against intervention, so that’s quite an extraordinary majority on the pro‐intervention side. But we’ll find out whether your minds will be changed by the debate.
We’re going to hear from four panelists tonight. First, I’d like to ask those from the pro side, Gareth Evans and Mia Farrow, to take the stage.
Gareth Evans was an extraordinary, highly respected Foreign Minister of Australia in the ‘90’s. He has since become one of the world’s leading humanitarian and interventionist activists. He’s head of the International Crisis Group and he works with the United Nation’s Committee on the Prevention of Genocide and Atrocities. He was one of
the first leaders in the development of the Responsibility to Protect Doctrine.
Mia Farrow is someone we all know as an actress, of course. But she is also one of the world’s leading activists in the fight against genocide. She has done extraordinary work bringing attention to some very dark places on our planet. She works with the United Nation’s Children’s Fund and we would all acknowledge, I’m certain, that Mia Farrow’s dedication has been extraordinary. I would add that she has demonstrated great courage, as well. She has been in the Darfur region ten times, at times in dangerous and what must have been, I’m sure, emotionally disturbing situations.
Now I’d like to ask the against side – John Bolton and General Hillier ‐
‐ to take the stage.
John Bolton was the US Ambassador to the UN during George Bush’s second administration, as well as being one of the most outspoken, sharp‐ minded and controversial American diplomats of our time. He’s been, at times, an extraordinary critic of the United Nations and much of his criticism has hit a nerve. He is highly respected for his intellect, which he brings to this issue tonight.
General Hillier is not only famous, but he’s really the first leading Canadian military figure to be a household name in generations. Before he stepped down as Chief of Defence Staff this summer, General Hillier lead the modernization reform movement within the Canadian military. He was, from the beginning, highly influential in Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan. Not many people know this ‐‐ because his controversial image
tends to be the one highlighted ‐‐ but he’s a serious student of military affairs and of international interventions.
Let’s start the debate with Gareth Evans ‐‐ five minutes each please, if you could stick to that.
(GE) Brian, Mia, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, I hope for all of us here this debate begins and ends with a very simple proposition. Whatever else we mess up in the conduct of international relations, in responding to deadly conflict and human rights violations, for God sake let’s not, as an international community, ever again mess up our response to mass atrocities, to genocide, to ethnic cleansing, to other major crimes against humanity and war crimes.
Let’s get to the point as an international community that when another man‐made humanitarian catastrophe like Cambodia or Rwanda or Bosnia or Darfur looms on the horizon, as it surely will, we will never again have to look back at yet another disastrous failure. Let’s get to the point where we won’t ever again be asking ourselves, with a mixture of anger and incomprehension and shame, how we could possibly have let this happen again.
But how do we make that happen? Responsibility to end man‐made humanitarian crises doesn’t mean that for every problem of this kind the answer is to send in the marines. Collusive military force is a blunt and extreme instrument, and should only be used in the most extreme and exceptional circumstances, as I’m sure Rick Hillier would agree.
Professional soldiers usually do. It’s the civilians that tend to be a little bit more gung‐ho about this, but I guess John Bolton can speak for himself.
The trouble is that most of the debate on these issues ‐‐ the whole controversy about humanitarian intervention that we all remember from the 1990’s ‐‐ is being conducted as if the extreme military option was the only one. Send in the marines or do nothing at all. There are, of course, cases where rapid and forceful coercive military intervention will be the only option. Romeo Dallaire was dead right about that in Rwanda in 1994. Srebrenica, a year later, in Bosnia, was another case when the failure to react militarily was catastrophic. Kosovo, in 1999, was another case where, although more controversial, the military intervention was absolutely necessary in practice and thoroughly justified, if not legally, then morally.
But there are plenty of other cases where coercive military force ‐‐ in the sense of mounting a full scale military invasion as distinct from a consensual peacekeeping operation ‐‐ is just not the right answer, if only because to do so would cause considerably more harm than good.
It hurts a little bit to rule out any option at all. In the case of the particular countries that we’re dealing with in this debate tonight ‐‐ Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma ‐‐ because we’re still deeply conscious of how unresolved the crises in each of these countries are, and how much appalling human misery continues to be suffered, I think we do have to rule out the coercive military force option for reasons which we can debate later in detail.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the alternative is to do nothing. There is a whole range of responses ‐‐ from the supportive to the persuasive to the coercive ‐‐ using a whole toolbox of measures ‐‐ from the diplomatic to the economic to the legal through to the military. These can and should be used by the international community to prevent atrocities from occurring in the first place, to react to them when they do, to rebuild societies that are shattered by crises and to ensure the underlying causes are addressed so that these situations never again occur.
This is the approach which is at the heart of the responsibility to protect doctrine, an initiative which Canada played such a huge part in persuading the international community to embrace unanimously at the 2005 World Summit. It’s a much more multi‐layered and nuanced concept than the one dimensional military‐focused battle cry of humanitarian intervention. It has shown already that it’s much more capable than any previous approach of generating the kind of global reflex consensus response we need if we are going to respond effectively to these catastrophic, criminal situations.
Getting people to appreciate these differences and the kinds of responses that are available is not going to be easy. Getting them to accept that ending humanitarian crises doesn’t just mean ending them by extreme and intrusive military force, and having a discussion, a sensible discussion, about other options is not going to be easy either. I hope during the course of this evening we’ll be able to persuade you that there is a viable set of responses of that kind that don’t involve military action.
But my last word in opening this debate is to acknowledge, as I think we have, that international engagement of any kind ‐‐ whether it be extreme military action or in terms of throwing resources at the problem or just trying to find a solution through diplomatic mediation or anything else
‐‐ is not cost free for any government or for any of the individuals involved. Particularly not when it involves the willingness to spill blood for the cause in question.
So what is the justification for incurring that kind of cost? Doesn’t charity begin at home? Where’s the national interest, I can hear John Bolton already saying, in mounting any of these international adventures, however noble the cause may be? Well, there is a national interest and we want to talk about that national interest tonight. It’s got a number of dimensions, but I think the critical one is this: in this day and age, the national interest is not something that’s just pursued by the most expedient form of protection of immediate national security and economic interests. In this interdependent, globalized era we live in, every country has a national interest in ensuring that atrocity crime situations are prevented or stopped. Even when they occur in faraway countries of which we know little and about which we could normally historically care less, it is in the national interest of all of us to prevent or stop them.
Because, and this will be my last word Brian, it is the case that states who cannot or will not stop internal atrocity crimes are the kinds of states which cannot or will not stop terrorism, or weapons proliferation, or drug and people trafficking, or the spread of health pandemics, or other global
risks which every country in the world wants to avoid. It’s not just national interests that this debate is all about. It’s about our common humanity. That’s obvious, that’s shriekingly obvious and that’s something Mia will talk about, in particular.
I want you to approach this debate in the spirit in which we’re trying to respond to these issues. I want you to understand that there’s a complex s*election of tools at our disposal, and that we should use them for reasons of national interest and we should do so for reasons of our common morality. Because if we don’t respond in this way, we simply won’t be able to live with ourselves.
(BS) Thank you, Gareth. That was two minutes and fifteen seconds over, which I’ll credit to the other side. Ambassador Bolton, please. To be followed by Mia Farrow and then General Hillier.
(JB) Thank you very much. It’s a great pleasure to be here.
You know, whenever I hear the advocates of the responsibility to protect talk, they always talk in terms of the international community. I actually know where the international community lives. It’s where I flew from yesterday, south of here, and it puts me in mind, when I hear this argument made, of the great American humorist Will Rogers who once said, “I’ve been around so long I can remember way back when a liberal was someone who was generous with his own money and his own soldiers.”
We’re told that the use of military force with respect to humanitarian intervention is only a small part of the game. We’re told that economic and diplomatic pressure can be applied as well. And that’s certainly true. But when it comes down to where the rubber meets the road, the point the humanitarian interveners make is that it’s going to come down to military force. And if you ignore that, if you say it’s simply a matter of worrying about bad things happening around the world, that’s really nothing more than saying, do good my children.
Even I won’t argue against that. The point you have to look at is when the real difficulty arises and here I think it’s important to understand a couple of things, especially in a Canadian audience. The responsibility to protect is not the same as UN peacekeeping, invented here by Lester Pearson. In fact, it is almost entirely the opposite of peacekeeping.
Where UN peacekeeping successes have occurred in the past, it’s because the consent of the parties to the dispute has been granted. That’s obviously not the case in responsibility to protect. UN peacekeeping is typically neutral as between the parties to the dispute. The whole point of the responsibility to protect is not to be neutral. And finally, UN peacekeeping operations have very limited rules of engagement. Again, precisely the opposite of what humanitarian intervention implies.
Moreover, the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention is far broader than what even its advocates really believe in, which is one of the reasons why the entire debate at an abstract level is not comprehensible.
Let’s take, for example, the case of North Korea, where over decades the height and weight of the average North Korean citizen has declined. Think about that. Over a period of decades and nobody talks about humanitarian intervention in North Korea. What about a country where the government kills its political opponents, bans political parties, suppresses the press and even goes so far as to threaten children with lower grades if their parents don’t vote the right way. Am I talking about Zimbabwe? No, I’m talking about the last presidential election in Russia. Where’s the responsibility to protect there? The fact is, these cases are too hard. So instead, the responsibility to protect focuses on those that are easy and cheap, or that people think will be easy and cheap.
The classic example was Somalia, which started off with an effort to open up channels of humanitarian distribution and ended with a failed exercise in nation‐building. Eighteen American Rangers were dragged through the dusty streets of Mogadishu leaving a situation in Somalia possibly worse after the intervention than before. Look at the cases of Iraq and Afghanistan. Look at them and consider not whether you agree with the decision to use military force there, but consider the consequences of the use of military force. You think it’s easy, even for the most powerful military in the history of the world, to avoid casualties to itself or to innocent civilians?
Look long and hard at those cases before you casually advocate the use of military force even for high moral purposes. Then ask yourself what the decision‐maker of this international community is? The advocates of
responsibility to protect say it’s the UN Security Council. That’s reassuring, isn’t it? Consider the great successes of the UN, a body that was unable to do anything during the great crises of the 20th century and during the Cold War, and that has failed to respond adequately to international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
This is a body that for three years has struggled to put an effective UN peacekeeping force in Darfur and has so far failed. This is a body that could barely bring itself to put Zimbabwe and Burma even on its agenda, let alone try and reach some kind of substantive decision on those points. This is the body that you want to entrust to decide for the responsibility to protect. This is a frail reed, indeed.
Now, I recognize that those who advocate the responsibility to protect are well‐intentioned and have good motives. I respect those who believe in it as a doctrine, and I would simply say this to all of you and I say it to you with great respect. If you want to engage in humanitarian intervention do it with your own sons and daughters, not with mine.
(BS) Ambassador Bolton, perfect timing, *** on five minutes. Mia Farrow, please.
(MF) Thank you. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. If we were to debate whether or not we are obligated to act in the case of mass atrocities then we are debating an obligation to which we are already committed. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of
Genocide of 1948 already obliges the countries that have signed it. In the case of genocide, the Genocide Convention of 1948 binds every party to it, and in the case of other major crimes against humanity, other treaties and conventions and declarations make up a body of international law that is clear and unequivocal.
The international community formed the United Nations precisely because of such crimes. If the UN, or even the idea of an international community, is to mean anything, we must acknowledge our moral and legal obligations to act to protect civilians from mass atrocity crimes.
The most pragmatic reasons for early actions are irrefutable. It is far better and more effective to prevent such crimes than to respond after they have begun. We look first, of course, at the cost in human lives. But we must also consider the financial costs and the diplomatic complexity of trying to end a full blown conflict. We should anticipate that unchecked mass atrocities will destabilize neighboring countries, raising issues of international insecurity. We have only to look at Congo today to see the far reaching, devastating effects of a crisis that began in Rwanda 14 years ago.
We must also acknowledge that since interventions will inevitably occur of one kind or another, it is prudent to clarify and strengthen some established set of multilateral rules to limit the frequency of such interventions and to enhance their legitimacy.
The Genocide Convention written 60 years ago was clear and explicit. In 2005, this obligation was unanimously reaffirmed by the international community in the World Summit outcome document which
states that when states are manifestly failing to protect their population and should peaceful means be inadequate, we, as a community, are prepared to take collective action. The member states have spoken. With the cumulative weight of these documents and the establishing of the international criminal court, a new concept of the international community is emerging. Sovereignty comes with responsibility. The World Summit outcome document was explicit on prevention. When early warning signs point to the fact that a nation is sliding toward a point where mass atrocity crimes are likely to occur, the UN or its member states need to dispatch highest level envoys to move to negotiate to halt such a slide. It is exclusively within the power of the UN Security Council to make sure that such envoys have at their disposal the full range of economic and diplomatic leverage, including sanctions and other penalties such as suspension of aid and trade, suspension of membership in international institutions public criticism, arms embargo, a criminal investigation, ICC. Detailed knowledge of a country could determine the sticks and the carrots.
You will note that so far I have said nothing about military interventions. The core of this approach is preventative diplomacy, de‐ escalating a situation before mass violence begins and before positions become entrenched. However, in my own view, it would be imprudent not to have a contingency plan for when all else fails. The idea that the United Nations might have a standing force to protect civilians from mass atrocity crimes and to allow humanitarian aid to reach those displaced by violence
should be open for debate on its own merits. While people of good conscience hope and work tirelessly for the United Nations to become the peacekeeping, peace‐building institution it was intended to be, the people of Darfur would remind us, at this point, that we cannot rely solely on the UN.
As a community we must admit our best systems have failed too often. As evidenced today in Darfur, Burma, Somalia and Congo, we have seen that if we take a clear and unflinching look at that institution, we see a painfully divided Security Council and the resultant paralysis. We have seen the tragic failures of the United Nations and its failure to protect the most vulnerable citizens on this planet.
For my own part, as a human being, I can only lend my voice to the chorus around the globe insisting that our leaders must do better. I believe our voices are insistent, our moral determination can, if we are prepared to work tirelessly, produce the political resolve to shape a world in which all populations have the right to protection under the rule of law and to live without fear. We are standing at the threshold of a great evolution both in the United Nations and in the lifetime of humankind. Thank you.
(BS) Thank you very much, Mia Farrow. Next, General Hillier.
(RH) Ladies and gentlemen, our opponents have already made some excellent points, several of them in regulation time. The late, great Yogi Berra used to say that in theory there is no difference between theory and
practice but in practice, there is. So that’s what I’m going to talk to you about ‐‐ the practice of intervention.
Because as I look at my fellow debaters this evening, pro and con, I realize that I’m the only one who’s actually had the experience of being involved in intervention operations, and so I talk to you from the view of a soldier. And believe you me, the responsibility falls to soldiers when diplomats and those who want to do good things ‐‐ without question for good reasons ‐‐ scream that we must do something. That’s always the answer – a vague “something”. And we always believe that doing that “something” is going to be easy.
But do you know what? The diplomatic, the legal and the financial pressures that we hear about that should be applied, usually don’t work. If they did, we probably wouldn’t have had to have fought World War II, North Korea would be a democracy and Osama bin Laden would be in jail somewhere as we speak. Remember that we are talking about armed men who operate from very base motives, and have used violence to orchestrate their life in order to win power, gain money and remain immune from prosecution.
As a soldier, what I saw was that the international community had shown itself incapable of developing a strategy for any intervention efforts that it undertook. Tactics without strategy are a variety of roads that are going nowhere and will lead to a very short‐term focus on a mission. Let’s face it ‐‐ there is no strategy for Darfur. You can’t have a strategy for Darfur because you must actually have one for Sudan, and you can’t have one for
Sudan because you must have one for the region and the seven nations that border on Darfur. So actually what you’re talking about is a grand strategy for that failed continent of Africa. Sadly, nowhere in the international community have we seen the capacity or the capability to develop a strategy for the failed continent of Africa, let alone any of the other strategies that must therein be inclusive.
This lack of any strategy results in incoherence in command and control and how you set up a structure, and it leads to short‐term tactical benefits that disappear as soon as the troops depart. International cohesion is usually the first casualty of having tactics without a strategy to guide you.
On top of this, there are institutions in the international community that are unfit for the present security environment. We have already trashed the United Nations significantly tonight, but one of my commanders ‐‐ who is in the audience tonight ‐‐ once said that the United Nations was really all about lessons observed from the intervention operations they’ve had, as opposed to lessons they had truly learned. Because they’ve applied none of them. In fact, a further comment of his was that the United Nations could not run a one man rush to the latrine.
As for NATO, it is still very much focused on the Cold War. With its command structure reflecting exactly that, and 26 to 28 nations operating in consensus and making even minor tactical decisions that way, NATO simply does not work.
Where is the individual or the country that can actually put their lips on the blue lips of the decomposing corpse of those two organizations and breathe life back into them again?
Further, the capacities and the capabilities and the size of those things necessary for intervention operations simply do not exist. In the military, special forces, intelligence, UAVs and amphibious platforms are all things you need in intervention operations, but they simply are not there and you also, of course, need soldiers, you need boots on the ground. If we were serious about participating in humanitarian interventions, the armed forces of Australia and Canada would have to be doubled in size. The civilian capabilities simply are not there.
Along with the security of a population in an intervention, you also have to help build a government so that when you leave you’ve left it in an improved state. You have to develop the country in question so that when you leave the people there can have hope for the future. The capacity to go into a given country and do that sort of work does not exist in the international community.
Finally, I would say that the countries that comprise the international community simply do not have the collective will to conduct an enduring operation. We are conditioned, by one hour TV shows where you have a cataclysmic evident followed by 50 minutes of events that sum it up before giving you a happy ending ‐‐ all interfered with by 10 minutes of commercials – to expect the same in an intervention operation. But the reality is that all of those missions become enduring missions, and go on for
what another officer said to me are generations. Populations don’t have the robustness of will to accept collateral damage, and that is dangerous because it leads to what we in the military call “TV tactics”. This means shaping your tactics so that they appear better to the folks back home.
So I would conclude by saying that you might speak from the heart when you say we must do something. The reality, however, is that the international community and most of the countries that comprise the international community simply don’t have the capabilities, the ability to develop strategy and institutions, and most importantly the robustness of will for the kind of intervention operations about which we are talking. Thank you.
(BS) Thank you all for those tremendous, clear opening statements. Let’s examine some of them.
General Hillier, it is true the military are very uneasy about intervention missions? They’ve had bad experiences in the past, but how much is it perhaps the resistance of generations of officers to developing that kind of core intervention force, developing those skills? How much might the military be acting as a sea anchor against international efforts to really deal seriously with intervention?
(RH) Actually Brian, I don’t think that in most military forces there is a core obstacle to intervention operations. I think soldiers have realized, though, that once we declare that we must do something, that turns into
some action or idea that quickly deteriorates and becomes a responsibility left to the soldier. So you have the soldiers carrying all the weight of the mission, and you have precious little support. Still, what we worry about is not our job as soldiers. I should say that though I’m wearing a suit and not a uniform, I’m still here as a soldier. And as soldiers we know that we’re going to do our job. We’re trained, structured, equipped, prepared to do that, perhaps one small mission at a time. What we worry about, what we don’t have the capacity to do is take that small operation and turn it into a long‐term stable structure that will last after we leave. Those capabilities and the public will are not there.
Where is, for example, government‐in‐a‐box? Which organization in our world, in our country, in any country actually, has a deployable government‐building battalion designed to do what was done in World War II? I’m not talking about individuals. I’m talking about a trained, built, cohesive capability that you deploy into Darfur, into Afghanistan, in order to help them build the kind of government they need to sustain their country after we leave.
(GE) That is a straw man, Rick Hillier. Are you really saying there is no capability in the entire international community to provide the 5,000 troops that your colleague Romeo Dallaire argued so persuasively would have made a difference to 800,000 lives in Rwanda in 1994? Are you saying there’s no capability right now in an international community which has a military inventory of helicopters of 11,842 units at last count, but has been
unable collectively to supply 22 of them to the peacekeeping operations in Darfur, knowing they would make one hell of a difference to the effectiveness of the human protection operation on the ground? There may be a problem about political will, I don’t disagree with that, but capability? Come on ‐‐ this is a straw man.
(RH) Do you want me to respond to that one? There is a problem with strategy, there is a problem with the robustness of will and there is a problem if you have a capability but simply don’t have the will to use it. So yes, there may be some helicopters available, but they are useless in Europe so if they’re not in Afghanistan or they’re not in Darfur then it’s virtually the same thing as not having the capability.
Even in missions for which countries have signed up you still cannot find the troops, the helicopters, or the equipment to do the job on the ground. Yet hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on other things which are actually more Cold War‐related than humanitarian intervention‐ related.
(BS) Does not intervention occasionally work? Remember the British marines, the Royal Navy going into Sierra Leone to back up UN troops in 2000, or French forces going into Côte d'Ivoire in 2003? Haven’t there been times when troops from Britain or France have been able to go in quickly and put a lid on the violence? There are examples of that.
(MF) Right now a European Union force is on the Darfur/Chad border. An EU force is deployed there effectively.
(RH) I would say that on that last one, the jury is still out, because it is a temporary calm in one area, and will it last? The question is, will it achieve anything greater than that and can it be maintained long enough to get some good out of it? What I would say to you about Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast is that one nation leading, not an international community effort per se, is the key. And as in Darfur, you have to ask, is that change actually going to hold forever? We all hope it does, but it’s certainly not guaranteed and the fact is that there was already a structure in place in those areas that actually wanted to see the conflict resolved. That doesn’t exist in Sudan, where the government itself doesn’t want to resolve the issue.
(BS) John Bolton, you raised a very interesting ethical question in your presentation that some might find a slippery argument. And that is that we, the world, cannot put sufficient pressure on the giants, China or Russia, when they abuse human rights and when they go even further into state‐ sanctioned *** or what have you. So the dilemma is whether we ought to take on the small powers if we can’t take on the big ones.
(JB) No, I don’t think that’s the argument at all. The real point of bad places like North Korea, which is a large prison camp, or Russia, or a
number of other examples I could cite, is that even the advocates of responsibility to protect don’t seriously believe that they can do anything about them. This is an acknowledgement of a critical point, which is that any intervention has to be considered on its own merits and the cost and benefits have to be weighed on their own merits. That’s why in the abstract, in my view, this discussion is essentially meaningless.
(GE) We’ve had more straw men erected here tonight than in 17 showings of The Wizard of Oz. I mean, there was Rick’s little excursion at the beginning and then we’ve had John Bolton saying the responsibility to protect is only about military intervention and if you can’t engage in military intervention in some of these cases then the whole doctrine, the whole concept is meaningless. We’ve also heard you saying that if you can’t engage in dealing with human rights violations of the kind that are occurring in countries like Russia and elsewhere the concept is again meaningless.
But the point is that the responsibility to protect is only about a very small subset of the conflicts and human rights violations that are occurring in the world. It’s only when mass atrocity crimes are occurring or are anticipated that we invoke the responsibility to protect, and in those situations the repertoire of responses we have available is vast and extends across the whole range of diplomatic and economic pressure, legal prosecution before the international criminal court and much else. Now
John, aren’t you simply caricaturing the debate by confining it in the way that you are?
(JB) Of course not. And now I’m going to do something really extreme. I’m going to read to you two sentences, only two sentences, of the outcome document from the 2005 World Summit on this subject. It’s Paragraph 139: “The international community through the United Nations also has the responsibility to use appropriate diplomatic humanitarian and other peaceful means in accordance with Chapter 6 and 8 of the Charter to help protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council in accordance with the Charter including Chapter 7 on a case by case basis and in co‐operation with relevant regional organizations as appropriate should peaceful means be inadequate, and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their population from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.” Now that’s clear, isn’t it?
(GE) This is the way you conducted yourself at the United Nations. You arrived with 400 amendments in your bag and you destroyed single‐ handedly the potential for consensus on a mess of other issues. You didn’t succeed.
(JB) If you want to argue the merits, then let’s argue the merits. But let’s stop the personal attacks, okay?
(GE) You did not succeed in destroying consensus on the responsibility to protect paragraphs on the World Outcome document because they were remarkably clear. They say three things: 1) that sovereign countries have the responsibility not to perpetrate atrocity crimes against their own people; 2) that other countries have the responsibility to assist them in creating the capacity to ensure that they will act that way if they are willing to do so; 3) that where states manifestly fail to exercise that responsibility then it’s the responsibility of the wider international community to step in under Chapter 7 of the Charter, and the other things that you mumbled in the very clear language of that particular document. I couldn’t do better than that.
(BS) I’d like to change the direction slightly. Mia Farrow, a very serious objection was raised here, from both the General and the former ambassador, and that is that countries, when they decide to intervene, are risking the lives of their own soldiers. And while the public may sympathize with these interventions at first, people often begin to ask, in what way is this in the national interest? Why is an intervention in a very faraway place like Darfur or Rwanda or the Congo really in the national interest? Or should it be?
(MF) Let’s not leap to the conclusion that an intervention means a military intervention because there are myriad options before we arrive at that point. A military intervention would only be in the failure of what I referred to as sticks and carrots. I have pages of things that an envoy can do. We saw the success of that just now ‐‐ Kofi Annan going to Kenya as Kenya was sliding toward something very ugly indeed. Kofi Annan went, stayed with it and there was a cessation of the violence there. So we’ve seen diplomatic intervention at work. Intervention doesn’t necessarily mean military intervention.
Forgive me, with all due respect General Hillier, but your insistence that any action must be a military invasion is a deeply flawed argument. You’ve ignored the nature of UNAMID in Darfur and its goals and the nature of the negotiations between the United Nations and Khartoum. Those negotiations did result in United Nations Resolution 1769, which did result in a peacekeeping force that is there ‐‐ albeit compromised ‐‐ and I’ve spoken to military, private military and US military, and the troops there are sufficient in number. But they are under‐supported and under‐ trained. Were they fully supported by the international community, if that could happen ‐‐ and you know all the stipulations about African countries that the force must be African in character ‐‐ they would be fully able, at 9,000, to do the job.
(RH) If diplomatic, financial and legal pressure and the rule of law were significant enabling levers we wouldn’t be having this debate. It comes
down to the fact that the vast majority of the interventions are because those kinds of pressures simply don’t work. There may be the rare one where they do in a preventative manner. But more often than not it comes down to putting young men and women on the ground. And when you put them on the ground in compromised missions, you are putting their lives at risk without moral high ground, without being able to explain to them why. They’re not going to be able to assist the people on the ground the way they need to be assisted and further, you’re not going to leave a sustainable structure behind that’s going to make life better. Rather, you’re probably going to make it worse.
(BS) But could an argument not be made that one of the reasons diplomatic efforts may fail is because the generals are all at home saying we don’t want to intervene, so there’s no looming threat there of a military intervention?
(JB) May I address that? The three provinces of Darfur are geographically the size of France. The distances are large and there is no infrastructure. It is precisely because the African Union peacekeeping mission failed that people said we need an outside force and yet in repeated negotiations over Security Council resolutions, the government of Sudan, supported by China, objected to the kind of UN force that many people were calling for. Why supported by China? Because China has large and growing energy needs and it wants the oil and natural gas assets controlled by the government in
Khartoum, but supported by whatever Islamic members of the UN happen to be on the Security Council at that time. So why is there a requirement that there be a joint command between the AU and the UN ‐‐ a prescription for real trouble down the road as was the case in Somalia ‐‐ why the requirement that the forces be predominately African? Because the government of Sudan and its friends on the Security Council have consistently watered down the efforts to have a really effective UN peacekeeping force. This is the reality of the Security Council and this is the reality of military action in Sudan.
(MF) He’s right about the Security Council and the division in the Security Council and China. If you look at Zimbabwe, Burma and Sudan we have to look at China propping up all these regimes and China on the Security Council has been a major problem.
(BS) But have you not been working at ways in fact to embarrass China into action?
(MF) I was surprised, actually, that I could write an op‐ed with a child and that we did see China move. That op‐ed was published in one newspaper and was written about a week later on the front page of the New York Times, an article about that article, because China moved.
(BS) We did somehow slip over the point I was trying to get at, though. Eventually, in many of these cases, military force might be used. The question then becomes, what democracy can risk the lives of their own sons and daughters in a foreign war for something that is not clearly in that country’s national interest?
(GE) Well, Brian, that’s the point that I was trying to respond to when you cut me off in such an untimely fashion at the beginning. Because the truth of the matter is that there is a national interest which is universally acknowledged, in ensuring that fragile and failing states don’t descend into this kind of catastrophe because if they do they put the rest of us at risk.
We saw that, of course, with Afghanistan harboring the Taliban. We’ve seen it potentially applicable in Somalia, with the harboring of terrorists and the transit of weapons of mass destruction. Certainly, we’ve seen the potential and the reality in many of these cases around the world with the spread of refugee camps, health pandemics, drug and people trafficking and all the things that impact upon us.
I think we have to take that seriously into account in making this calculation of what is in the national interest added to the moral interest that is unquestionably involved here and the public sentiment which is clear every time you’re tested on these issues. If people can see the nature of the horror that’s unfolding as well as some rational relationship between a commitment of this kind and a result, they’ll support it. And that’s because people are basically decent.
(BS) Mr. Bolton?
(JB) Of course, morality is important to all of us. But in many of these conflicts morality doesn’t come conveniently divided into forces on one side that wear white hats and forces on the other side that wear black hats. This is certainly true in Darfur right now, where the government in Khartoum has unquestionably been committing the bulk of the gross abuses of human rights, committing genocide as Secretary Powell said, but the rebels are hardly free from blame, nor are they a cohesive force.
When you say that national interest encompasses this broad abstraction, you’ve made national interest into an impossible distraction as well. America saw this concretely in Somalia in 1993 with the 18 dead Rangers. That’s a calculus. Any American President has to make a wrenching decision when he puts young Americans in harm’s way, and morality doesn’t all come down on one side in that calculation either.
(BS) General Hillier?
(MF) Let me just say, on the Darfur issue, that had we intervened in some capacity in 2003 and 2004, it would have been a far more simple scenario, far more easily resolved before the rebel groups splintered. Then we did have a very clear bad, bad guy in that scenario.
(JB) I must say, I’m flashing back to members of the Bush Administration advocating the invasion of Iraq, how simple it would be.
(MF) I’m staying on topic here. That’s a fiasco ‐‐ I don’t even want to go there.
(GE) Which side do you want on that debate, John?
(JB) I was in favor of it, but I’ll tell you this…
(GE) Of course you were in favor of it.
(JB) Don’t get wise on this, Gareth. Come on, Gareth, calm down.
(MF) It was inexcusable.
(JB) You see, this is an argument that essentially says the use of military force is best only when there’s no national interest at stake, and when you think there is national interest at stake you shouldn’t use military force.
(RH) I think there’s some danger in assuming that we’ve articulated our national interest sufficiently clearly that the population of a country would support an intervention, even when it means sacrificing the lives of their sons and daughters. In fact, we see national interest articulated differently
every single day by different people, who sometimes confuse those interests with values. And when the confusion takes place, the support that Gareth speaks of, the support of a population who see bad things being done and want to march to the sound of the guns and actually do something about it, that support starts to disappear pretty quickly. Especially when a) it disappears from TV screens and b) the first bodies of those young men and women start coming back home. When a young soldier is out there on those dirty, dusty dangerous trails, that nation must walk with him or her if they’re going to be successful in doing what we ask them to do.
(MF) But when it comes to protecting an unarmed civilian population, I can’t believe I’m alone in that I would volunteer with my children to ‐‐ I’m not talking about overthrowing a government or shooting every kid on a camel, I’m talking about defending defenseless civilian populations.
(RH) And what I would say to you is this ‐‐ you would fail because you’re coming at it from the heart. What I’m saying is that a ruthless, pragmatic approach by the international community would be better. And the international community needs the United Nations resuscitated. If President‐elect Barack Obama can do anything at all to resuscitate that organization and give it some capability, and when we have countries signed up beforehand with the proper nation‐building tools, then we might have a vision for what we’re going to do and a strategy that meets it. So
far, the international community appears incapable of being able to do those things.
But I want to go back to the generals at home not wanting to intervene, which Brian laid out a few moments ago.
(BS) What was that again?
(RH) You said it is that the generals back here at home, if you will, don’t want to intervene. I think the generals, the ones that I know, from many nations, are very pragmatic and very loyal men and women. They want to do what’s right and they want to take on the operations that are in our national interests and in the interests of a stable international environment, a stable world. But they also know that the burden will follow them, and the other parts at present in the international community will not be helping, because the capabilities are not yet there.
(BS) I just want to say one thing. We have this image nowadays, of your average soldier going somewhere you may not have heard of, dying, and people asking why he was wasted on a foreign cause. Every Western military I look at now has these big special forces, glamorous special forces, quickly trained to go anywhere, especially in new areas. We could replay Rwanda on the ground and probably 1,000 of them could have put down that massacre of 800,000. We seem to have ever more spectacular military
resources. But is it not the unwillingness of politicians and generals to risk casualties that prevents some interventions?
(RH) Not at all. First of all, I question whether a 1,000 or 5,000‐strong force could make a difference or would have made a difference in Rwanda. When we all went to the revolution of military affairs that brought us small units and high technology, we thought we wouldn’t need many people. What we have discovered in operations since 2001, is that God remains on the side of big battalions, and we need boots on the ground and we need lots of them to have an effect in helping secure populations. I don’t think 1,000 troops in Rwanda would have made a single bit if difference, nor would have 5,000. It would have required a lot of men and women on the ground and should we have been there? In all truth, absolutely. But with a hell of a lot more than 5,000 troops.
(BS) I want to bring the Canadian question in here if I might, because Afghanistan is a bit of a puzzle. It doesn’t really fit in here clearly but yet it is in here clearly. You were one of the first, General Hillier, to go into Afghanistan and make statements that, yes, people really warm to the idea of us helping the Afghan people towards a better life, towards education for children, but we went in specifically for the national security interests of Canada. We were part of an international obligation to make sure that the Taliban didn’t again allow a safe haven for al Qaeda. It seems to morph
though, into the kind of humanitarian intervention mission now that you doubt could work elsewhere.
(RH) Of course, you realize that we went into Afghanistan as a nation long before I became the Chief of the Defence Staff.
(BS) Of course.
(RH) There are those who say that we went into Afghanistan because we did not want to go to Iraq, and that’s why our troops initially showed up on the ground in Afghanistan. Yes, we have honorable goals. Yes, we believe that our national interests are at stake in that region. But all the things that I have discussed are the things that I’ve lived through both as a commander inside of Afghanistan, and then as the Chief of Defence Staff making those decisions once the government had given me the direction to send our young men and women there.
(BS) But my point here is that when you go to the military and say, why are we actually in Afghanistan until the end of 2011, they don’t say that it’s to stop the Taliban taking over and Afghanistan becoming a rogue state. They say, well, the people need security, they need a better life, they need agriculture, more education, it’s becoming more of a back door humanitarian mission which seems to justify it.
(GE) Brian, I think that misstates the situation in an unhelpful way for this debate, because what we went in as an international community to do in Afghanistan, was an exercise in self‐defence after the Taliban attack on the United States. What we’re doing there still is trying to rebuild that failed state in order to ensure that there’s no resumption of a Taliban‐led government of the kind which will create similar problems for us in the future. In order to do that rebuilding operation as an international community we have to address these issues of community confidence in government, and some of these issues of fairness with which everybody is now wrestling.
But this is a long way away from the kind of fire brigade operations in extreme cases when all else has failed to stop immediate mass atrocity crimes, genocide of the kind that we saw in Rwanda. And let’s just please focus on recognizing that military stuff is always ugly, always horrible, always bloody, always awful for those who lose their kids or their relatives. But sometimes in extreme cases we just have to do it.
(BS) I understand your point, your objection. But what I’m describing is how Afghanistan is justified to the Canadian people now, and that is the way it tends to be justified because I hear it in my ear every week.
Mia Farrow, does hearing views as hard as these make you more pessimistic?
(MF) No, I’ve heard much worse than this. No, I’m absolutely convinced that we can summon the political will and that it has to start at the grassroots level in rooms such as these. So I go from place to place and to government, three times before the US Congress, three times before the Senate. I go from campus to campus, divestment hearing to divestment hearing, and I think in the United States, anyway, we’re seeing the largest response to an African atrocity, Darfur, since Apartheid. So I do think we can summon the political will and I do think we must if we are to have a world that’s worth giving to our children. And if we’re all to sit here and say, well, that’s it, this was the best we could do and everything else is impossible, then we might as well call it an end and take the cyanide and drink the hemlock but that’s not so.
I think that if we don’t have the will then we should get out of the kitchen and leave the cooking to someone who does have the will and does have the stomach for it.
(BS) Mister Bolton, what about the argument that maybe things really aren’t changing and that certain countries might take a new look at United Nations reform, intervention reform. Your experience has been very negative, but do you rule out the possibility that the responsibility to protect might be worked into applicable international doctrine?
(JB) No. I think you have to be practical about the Security Council and if you look at ‐‐ let’s take Burma. We tried to put Burma on the Security
Council agenda as a threat to international peace and security for a variety of reasons. The Chinese objected over and over again. We finally forced it to a vote on whether we would even have the Security Council talk about Burma and we won that vote. China voted no because it was a procedural vote. It didn’t have a veto but there’s simply no doubt and there hasn’t been since the day we won the procedural vote that if we tried to do anything in the Security Council with any meaningful impact on Burma, that China would veto it.
So I think the question for the advocates of saying that we’ve got to do something and use more than military force would be, what happens when the Security Council won’t act?
(GE) Can I just introduce a slightly more optimistic note about what has been achieved by the much maligned UN and Security Council over the years since the end of the Cold War? A Canadian institution, Simon Fraser University, has done the stats on this and they’re compelling. The reality is that there’s been an 80% decline in the number of serious conflicts with 1,000 or more battle deaths a year over the last 18 years. There’s also been a decline of that magnitude in the number of mass atrocity crimes of the kind we’re talking about tonight. Why? The analysis suggests that there’s been a remarkable increase in international commitment, mainly through the United Nations but also through some regional organizations, to effect diplomatic peacemaking operations with expanded mandates of human protection now given regularly by the Security Council. There has also been
a much expanded commitment to post‐conflict peacekeeping to ensure that there’s no relapse back into the recurrence of these atrocity situations.
All of that is good news and I think we ought to recognize it because it does mean that our efforts are not wasted and not useless. And most of those strategies have not involved the aggressive use of invasive coercive military force of the kind upon which this debate has put too much focus.
(BS) General Hillier, God knows I don’t ask the question about the Canadian government at this moment, but do you think Afghanistan’s going to occupy us for almost three more years? Do you think after that, the Canadian military and the Canadian people will be ready to return to not just peacekeeping but enforcing the peace in more operations abroad and developing some of these trends Gareth just mentioned?
(RH) I think that the Canadian military certainly would be ready to recover, to prepare for other missions abroad or to do things around Canada, and to be able to do so at the direction of the government. The great concern still would remain do the other capabilities which mean success ‐‐ other than the very short‐term tactical operations ‐‐ such as helping build a government, such as helping build an economic system that might actually work and offer some hope for the future, are those things being built? Where is the battalion that’s going to go and train a police force in Darfur or in Zimbabwe or in Burma once we have helped them build a government and actually changed their structure somewhat?
(BS) But that’s something the Canadian government could aim to develop in the future.
(RH) The point is that those things have to be started and developed right, learning from the lessons in Afghanistan, learning from other nations around the world. Right now, the very real capabilities to do this are miniscule at best, and the greatest concern is that we’ll go in and do the security piece, train an army well, let a government get in place that is corrupt, inept and in three or four years that professional military that’s now built will say, now move aside, we’ll take over. Will we then have created the kind of area with the kind of stability for the longer‐term good of the inhabitants that we wanted to create?
(BS) One thing I’m really curious about is whether there’s any indication, apart from falling violence, that tyrants of the world are becoming more uncomfortable, that the heat may be on their back? There are international courts now and with this international pressure, is there any evidence that tyrants are sitting in their presidential palaces, a little more nervous now about committing atrocities and brutalities?
(GE) The evidence is anecdotal but it’s real. We are seeing in the response of President Bashir for example, in Sudan, to the indictment at the International Criminal Court, a much more careful response than was being
feared by a number of people who said the prosecution was going to set the place alight. The truth of the matter is that people know that they’re not usually at immediate risk of arrest but they know now that this is a process and that they’re highly unlikely to spend the rest of their lives out of the dark. And it is altering behavior. This has been the most important single form of pressure introduced into international affairs in recent times. It’s just a pity that the United States opposed it for so long, and I hope that under the new administration we’ll have a full‐blooded and full‐throated commitment to the international criminal process.
(RH) I’d like to make a comment on that topic. I don’t think the President of Sudan’s behavior is changing. I think the lead story this afternoon on the BBC was the fact that he’s selling off all the fertile ground along the Nile River to other countries in Africa and the Middle East so they can grow crops to feed their population while a good part of his population starves. So I’m not sure the effect really has taken hold yet in Sudan as you describe.
(GE) So what is your solution for Sudan, for Darfur at the moment, what kind of leverage would you apply?
(RH) The first thing I would say is that diplomatic incentives are not working, financial incentives are not working or are not sufficient. What you’d have to do is look at just how rich President Bashir is, and how rich
the group of men and/or women who actually run the country are, and see what you can do to incite them to do better.
The legal constraints on killing people are clearly not working, either. So it would require a strategy for Africa, as opposed to a strategy for Darfur, which simply doesn’t work.
(JB) I’d like to try and answer your question about whether there’s an effect on leaders around the world and I have to say I think the evidence goes in the other direction. In the Kremlin in August they ordered military forces to cross an international border into the territory of a state, a former state of the Soviet Union, for the first time since the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991. And they did it using the argument that they had to protect ethnic Russians in South Ossetia from Georgian interference.
The Russian government today is handing out Russian passports to ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, obviously laying the basis for a subsequent argument that they’re going to protect the Russians in the Ukraine. If you look at the use of aggressive military force by a nuclear armed power you can see it right before us just in the past few months, and if any of you have been away from your TVs for a while look at the situation in the subcontinent between India and Pakistan. We are approaching a really very tense situation because of terrorist attacks conducted against vital Indian interests.
Those people obviously aren’t that worried and let me just close with one other example regarding Somalia. We are seeing international piracy,
based in Somalia, of a magnitude we haven’t seen since the 19th century. And NATO so far, has been unable to do anything about it for fear ‐‐ among other things ‐‐ of being prosecuted for violating the human rights of the pirates.
(BS) I think it’s time to bring the audience in now. A reminder that you can write questions on the cards you have and send them up. I will read them out but I’d like to start with the top question of all the ones that came from the munkdebates.com question form. What should be the determining factor in deciding whether to intervene ‐‐ national interests or national values? Mia Farrow, why don’t I start with you on that?
(MF) Actually, Gareth has listed these so magnificently in his book, which I highly recommend, Responsibility to Protect. So perhaps you ought to leave that one to Gareth.
(BS) National interests or national values?
(GE) It’s a combination, because national interest does extend in the way that I previously described and won’t repeat. National interest also exists in reputational form. Every country has a national interest in being seen to be a good international citizen – an area where Canada has led the world traditionally. In pursuing these issues beyond ourselves, a country can generate an enormous amount of benefit internationally because of the
respect that flows from being willing to put treasure and sometimes even blood into advancing these particular cases, so national interests and values do, in a way, overlap.
If you mean militarily, there’s a whole bunch of criteria you have to satisfy before you even get to that. You have to satisfy the threshold criteria and the seriousness of the harm that’s an issue to people who are at risk of atrocity crimes. You’ve got to satisfy criteria of last resort, of proportionality, of right intention and above all the balance of consequences. You’ve got to be confident that you are actually going to do more good than harm. There are very, very few cases where in fact, when you apply those criteria, you can justify coercive military invasion and even give rise to this judgment about national interest. It’s a whole bunch of hurdles you have to jump over and rightly so, because war is an ugly business.
(RH) I would say that certainly not based on values alone. Certainly based on national interests but you cannot separate national interests completely from some national values, very difficult to do. If you do it on values alone, let’s face it ‐‐ people have described one of Canada’s values as our medical care system and I’m not sure we want to impose that on anybody around the world…or perhaps we do.
I believe that when it comes to national interests, the seriousness of the situation has to be certainly understood and thoroughly accepted. You have to have a method of approach, a strategy, and you have to have set
conditions to have a good chance of success. Otherwise, you will definitely make things more difficult for many people and that’s not what you want to do.
(JB) I generally agree with Rick on that point. I think that the danger was well summed up in a story that Secretary Powell told in his autobiography, which took place early in the days of the Clinton administration when they were debating what to do in Somalia. Then‐UN Ambassador Madeline Albright said to General Powell, what’s the point of having this wonderful military if you’re not prepared to use it? General Powell said that he just about had an aneurysm with that kind of attitude. That’s what I think we have to guard against.
(BS) Some of the cards have been sent up now and one question for the entire panel is ‐‐ how are humanitarian interventions different from past attempts by Western powers to civilize developing nations? I guess that’s the Neo‐colonial attitude and indeed there were after 9/11, some calls by prominent conservatives for a kind of new empire.
(GE) There is a huge suspicion in the developing world that this talk of humanitarian intervention is just an excuse for the big guys to throw their weight around – more of the civilizing missions that they experienced so often in the past. And when you have got many countries coming into the international system very conscious of their fragility, very proud of their
independence, they’re going to be very, very resistant indeed to signing on to any generalized doctrine or intervention of that kind.
That’s why there was so much debate about this and so much disagreement in the ‘90’s. There was a gulf between developing countries and a Western world that was all too enthusiastic about waving the banner of intervention. The whole point of developing the responsibility to protect concept was to bridge the gulf between those two extreme positions and to talk not in terms of the rights of anybody to throw their weight around, but the responsibility of everyone, including sovereign states themselves, not to let these things happen and to talk not in terms of intervention but in terms of the protection of the men, the women and children whose lives are being put at risk.
Changing the terms of the debate in that way if we can stick to the debate in that way and not divert and pervert it in the way that it so often has been, then I think we will get a much better understanding in the developing world of these issues then perhaps has been the case so far.
(MF) And first to encourage that nation to help itself. The first option is to work with the nation in question, helping it to use its own capabilities to bring about its own resolutions.
(RH) And I would say exactly that, because one of the first things that should be done is to reinforce the present country’s government structure if there’s any trust left in it, and to help them become effective and
efficient enough that they can deliver what the population needs. I think there is a significant difference between what we are discussing now and what were the classic interventions with a so‐called mission of civilizing the population ‐‐ and look what civilization of the populations of Africa got them. Millions killed as proxy soldiers in World War 1, slavery, endemic diseases that spread throughout the continent and a whole variety of other ills. I’m not sure they can withstand many more humanitarian interventions of that nature.
I think right now, global communication changes everything. What happens in Darfur, what happens in Afghanistan, in Zimbabwe or Burma or anywhere else is seen and heard instantly by people who have family members serving there, by people who are from there or by people who make decisions with respect to things that will go on there. That changes things dramatically because the events are still building as people start to get engaged from around the world, as opposed to being long over and done with as they were in previous times.
I would also say that the stateless threats that we see out there are different now. Yes, we had that kind of thing in the past, but those extremist groups, terrorist groups, criminal groups, linked by global communications and with an instant ability to travel back and forth now – well, I think the dynamic of an intervention has changed. That’s why I reiterate that you have to have a strategy, not for Darfur, not for Sudan not even for the 7 or 8 countries around it. But you’ve got to have the strategy for how you’re going to look after that ailing continent of Africa itself,
because you cannot dismiss the impact that those stateless actors will have out there, the desire and ability they will have to take the good away from what you’re trying to achieve.
(MF) I resent referring to the continent of Africa as a failed continent. We’re looking at very separate nations with very separate goals and cultures and languages which have to be respected each on their own terms. I’m not talking about the colonial divisions but all that Africa is. And yes, there are success stories in Africa and yes there are failures in Africa, and failures right now and a collapsed state in Africa or anywhere else serves no one and is in no one’s national interest.
We’ve seen that when we talk about pirates off the coast of Somalia. Pirates are off the coast of Somalia because that’s a collapsed state. If Darfur were a separate nation it would be a collapsed state. We see how it’s destabilizing Chad, we see its effect on the Central African Republic and I just go back to the African Union force. Let’s not too readily dismiss them, because wherever those troops are ‐‐ and I’ve seen it firsthand ‐‐ those people are feeling safe, those women are going out to collect firewood. The basic right of a human being to wake up in the morning and not live in terror while just going about the daily acts of surviving, that force has provided that.
I’ll be sorry when that force leaves and everyone along that border land will be, as well. I think you have to credit them with some measure of success. They’re altruistic, they’re not looking for regime change. They are
simply protecting a civilian population, people in camps and humanitarian workers trying to sustain them.
(RH) We have to see a strategy for Darfur which encompasses all the neighbors around it, which equates roughly the northern part of Africa. I would be happy to see a strategy for the Congo and Zimbabwe and all of their neighbors which encompasses essentially the southern part of Africa as opposed to the failed continent of Africa as I stated. That was the wrong way to put it.
(JB) I can tell you, from my experience dealing with the African ambassadors in New York, from private conversations, that there is no group more acutely aware of the failings of the United Nations and its inability to deliver what’s needed in Africa than the Africans themselves. If they could only break lose from the stifling political correctness you’d be surprised to hear what they have to say about the UN…but not publicly.
(MF) What would you propose having instead? We all agree the United Nations needs to be better. What are you proposing to do about that?
(JB) It’s not my obligation. The responsibility to protect specifically says it’s the Security Council that decides when the intervention will take place, agreed? That’s what it says, which is where we are in Darfur, right?
(GE) But nobody’s arguing the place for military intervention is Darfur.
(JB) We are precisely talking about military intervention in Darfur. We are talking about the deployment of a UN peacekeeping force. The whole argument is about replacing the failed inadequate African Union force with a more robust force ‐‐ particularly as Kofi Annan once saw it, NATO‐ equipped troops that had greater logistical capability and more helicopter transport to defeat the lack of infrastructure. That’s was what Kofi Annan wanted and that’s what has been prevented from taking place in the Security Council. So you can talk about the aspirations all you want, but until you explain how we get through the problem of the Security Council you’re spinning wheels.
(GE) Let’s just clarify that there is a huge difference between a voluntary consensual peacekeeping force of the kind that has now been approved in full by the Security Council and the other issue of sending in an invasion force. We’re sure the Sudanese government is being obstructive, but most of the problem is the inability or unwillingness of individual states, including the Western states, to supply it with the resources ‐‐ including helicopters – that it needs.
There’s a huge difference between that set of problems and a humanitarian intervention in the traditional sense, and you’re just running the two things together because nobody is arguing the case now for an
invasion force in Darfur, because to do so would be wholly unproductive for the survival of the two and a half million refugees there.
(MF) To protect civilians and humanitarians is a very different thing. We’re not talking about Iraq. We’re talking about going in to protect civilians and humanitarians.
(JB) What I was trying to say was – and this is the point I made at the beginning ‐‐ that I think it’s especially important to understand that humanitarian intervention is very different from traditional UN peacekeeping. In the case of Darfur, Sudan and its allies on the Security Council have, for over three years, prevented the deployment of that force. It is still not clear when it will actually happen on the ground in Darfur, as opposed to the halls of the United Nations, and in the meantime the tragedy goes on. If you fault the governments of the West for not contributing troops, how do you get past the consensus position of the African Union that they don’t want Western forces?
(GE) They sure as hell want helicopters, John, and they’re sure as hell not getting them.
(JB) Well, it is all fine to complain about this massive inaction, but at some point you have to say that the inaction reflects the unwillingness of governments to do what some people are calling for. This is what Rick
Hillier was saying before. If you’re not attuned to the reality you can propose remedies that won’t happen, and while you’re proposing them the situation will further deteriorate.
(MF) Who was in government? You sir. So yes, I think when you’re talking about the failure of governments you’re talking about the failure of my government and your government.
(JB) Actually, three of us have been in government at different points, but I want to tell you I wish you could have been with the US mission in New York when we were arguing to put Burma on the agenda of the Security Council. I wish you could have sat with us in these negotiations ‐‐ not in the public chamber of the Security Council that we all see on television, but in the informal meeting chamber arguing with countries like China and others about why they didn’t even want us to talk about Burma, hours and hours and hours.
(GE) I agree, you’re right. It’s a travesty, you’re right.
(BS) Part of the reality of the world is big power politics and the ability to use leverage and get things done. I still don’t quite understand why, on the Security Council, there has not been a concerted effort to embarrass the hell out of China and embarrass the hell out of Russia if necessary. The
Olympic Games proved very useful when it came to embarrassing China, and has been done by other powers.
(JB) May I just give you one example?
One of the overwhelming cultural attributes of the Security Council is the desire for unanimity. Most countries ‐‐ and I include in that certainly Britain and France almost all the members of the European Union that serve on the Council and pretty much all of the Third World countries ‐‐ argue that it’s more important to have a unanimous Security Council resolution than one that’s more effective but that has a couple of negative votes. I personally ‐‐ I’m not speaking in a government capacity ‐‐ think that is flat wrong. I think it’s in fact a good thing to make countries from time to time stand out in the rain.
The US has to stand out in the rain from time to time when we veto resolutions in the Security Council that are unfair to Israel. It doesn’t bother me to do that nor should it bother governments on the Security Council to say we’re not going to compromise this resolution any further, let’s go to a vote and if China wants to stand out and veto it, fine. Let China take the consequences.
I’m just telling you, ladies and gentlemen, that is not the view in New York. My view is in a distinct minority, as in many cases in New York. But if you think that consensus decision‐making on the Security Council is so important that it should override these other concerns then you have to
acknowledge you’re just not going to have resolutions that are as effective or as positive as you might otherwise have.
(RH) This conversation confirms everything that scared the hell out of me when I was on a mission working for the United Nations and trying to interpret the mumbo‐jumbo that came out of the United Nations’ New York headquarters.
(BS) I have a question from the audience here addressed to Gareth Evans. It goes to the heart of the question of whether intervention can sometimes have consequences down the road that were not anticipated, and indeed be very negative. Was Russia’s use of the humanitarian rationale for invading Georgia precipitated? Was it was coming as a result of NATO’s humanitarian intervention in Kosovo?
(GE) Russia’s attempt to explain what it did in Georgia in terms of the responsibility to protect was a travesty of the first order. I, for one, wrote about that to make clear that this was a total misuse. Defending their own citizens when they created those citizens by issuing Russian passports for them, going in with the use of military force when the provocation was probably there but certainly not such as to justify military intervention, when it certainly wasn’t a last resort with other options being explored to deal with the problems and where it was certainly disproportionate, made this a conspicuous example of an inappropriate use of this kind of concept,
just as the United States and Britain’s use of the concept of humanitarian intervention or responsibility to protect was utterly misguided in the context of Iraq in 2003.
I’ve no doubt that Russia felt itself slightly justified in doing what it did in Georgia because of the Kosovo example. But frankly there was no contest in terms of the nature of those two exercises. Kosovo in 1999 was a situation of massive ethnic cleansing and given all that Slobodan Milosovic had done previously, there was every reason to believe it was going to be followed by genocide. It was a totally justified case for international military intervention.
The Security Council didn’t endorse it, so the coalition went and did it with NATO but without the endorsement of the Security Council. That made it a very tough call for those of us wrestling with the rectitude of this response. The only answer you could possibly give was it was not legally right for the US and others to do what they did but it was certainly morally justified. It’s the international equivalent to mitigation in domestic law.
Yes, we broke the law but we were justified in doing it. You can do that occasionally but you can’t do it all the time.
(BS) We only have about two or three minutes left but John Bolton had something he wanted to add.
(JB) Yeah, well I’m glad that point came up because it shows that you can ignore the Security Council in some cases when it happens to be convenient for you, and yet attack others when it’s not convenient for you.
(GE) It just happened to be convenient for a few hundred thousand Kosovo citizens who weren’t killed as a result of that little exercise but I really do think that’s a sort of debating point that ought to be avoided.
(RH) That’s simplifying the issue also, though, because tens of thousands of Kosovo Serbian citizens in the north part of the province now feel themselves under massive threat and feel their homes, their lives are going to be destroyed, in fact have been destroyed by those same implications from the intervention itself. So it is not always as cut and dry, not always as pure as it could have been and yes maybe some lives were saved. I don’t disagree with that whatsoever. But the longer‐term implications still have not been felt in the southern part of Eastern Europe.
(BS) We’re moving toward voting time and first we have closing statements. I will ask John Bolton to speak first, Mia Farrow second, Rick Hillier, third, Gareth Evans, fourth. Three minutes each please.
(JB) Well, thank you all again for coming this evening. Thank you for your attention and for your questions. We’ve heard a lot tonight about morality and obviously all of us view moral questions as the most important we face
as individuals. They should be, but I think it’s very important to understand that morality does not always point in one direction. There can be legitimate disagreements among conflicting moral principles, and that because you don’t necessarily agree with the operational conclusions that follow from one set of moral arguments doesn’t mean that you’re ignoring the moral question or that you’re prepared to act immorally.
I think for an American president ‐‐ and that’s all I’m going to try and speak about ‐‐ the highest morality that he has is the protection of American life. He is elected under our Constitution to lead the nation, to be the Commander‐in‐Chief and to defend American interests and values around the world. Every American president thinks long and hard before deploying American forces into harm’s way and it should not be an object of denigration when an American president says, in my judgment, as horrible as the situation across the sea may be, my moral imperatives lead me to conclude that American troops should not be deployed into that situation.
That’s not immoral. That’s a disagreement about moral principles and when the disagreement can be played out in the loss of life of young men and women, this is serious indeed. So when you think about this question I simply urge you to not be casual with other people’s blood. Thank you.
(MF) On a personal note, some of you may know that I am a mother of 14 children. My children and I are not, for the most part, related by blood but
by something much stronger, by love and the deepest kind of commitment. My children come to me from all the corners of the earth. We are a multiracial family and I tell my children that we are part of the larger human family. When we speak of loss of life I don’t restrict the value of human life to that of my own country, because this larger human family is important to me, to my children and to the cultures from which they come.
I realize that time is ticking I want to talk to you about it because I think there are people who have not been represented here ‐‐ the people of the Darfur region. I really came here to bring them into the discussion and since 2004, when I was first in Darfur, I have worn this around my neck. It was given to me by a woman named Halima. She was wearing it when her village was attacked and when her baby son was torn from her arms and murdered. Three of her five children were similarly killed on that day and her husband too. But Halima survived and she gave me this for my protection. I could offer her no protection and Halima clasped my two hands and said tell people what is happening here, tell them we will all be slaughtered, tell them we need help.
Since that moment, I have conducted my life with Halima and the courageous people in Darfur who are facing terrible atrocities as we speak, in mind. And it isn’t only Darfur. Now we’re looking at Congo and other places and I do think being a human being involves being responsible. I tell my children with knowledge comes responsibility. But for the most part our world leaders don’t reflect that at all and I’m not sure that that was reflected fully on this stage by everyone. I do feel if we know that horrific
things are happening, that we must then do our utmost and nothing less than that to address them with whatever means are available. And I leave it to you because I do think this is a defining moment. Who are we?
Elie Wiesel wrote, “What astonished us after the torment, after the tempest, was not that so many killers killed so many victims, but that so few cared about us at all.” We have to decide whether we are among the few or among the many.
(RH) My remarks will be brief.
You know, it is a soldier who guarantees democracy, not the politician. It is the soldier who guarantees freedom of speech, not the reporter. It is the flag‐draped coffin of the soldier that we’ll pay if we don’t get those interventions right. Yes, to interventions, if you can guarantee that you have a strategy in place with which you are going to achieve an effect that will last beyond the duration of a six month tour or a twelve month rotation. Without that your actions are incoherent and short‐term.
They are also then susceptible to being hijacked by everybody who comes into that theatre, everybody who has their opinion ‐‐ and nothing was more frightening to me as commander than the 72‐hour visitor who arrived on the ground, instantly assessed everything that they saw and pierced through the complexities of the situation with a simple solution which invariably was wrong. The institutions are not capable of giving us the direction, the support, the synergy, the coherence in the international
community, and I will say no more than simply that the discussion we have had here about the United Nations has confirmed all of that.
We do not have the right capacities and capabilities, we don’t have government‐in‐a‐box, we don’t have developmental organizations that know how to take a region and actually help the people there to improve the region. I’m not talking about one or two individuals, I’m not talking about drive‐by PhD students. I’m talking about a deployable capability, not somebody that can just work out of the loan hospital or loan school, valuable as that might be.
We do not have the robustness of will in our society to support a long‐term mission. I know that as Chief of Defence I always felt that before our first soldier stepped foot on that foreign hostile soil, Canadians had better be stepping with them. We do not have the capacities, the capabilities, to develop the expertise in the shorter term for all of the cultures into which we are going.
Yes, we can do it in the longer term but there all kinds of things which unfortunately do occur and for which we are ill‐prepared. I give you the example of trying to remove toy guns from the streets of Kabul. They were using guns to point at our soldiers and we had some dangerous incidents and all the soldiers were concerned about this. So we offered prizes for kids to turn in toy guns. In Afghanistan a toy gun is one that is not working, so they look very real and what we quickly realized is that we were collecting more toy guns than existed in Afghanistan. The packages we were giving out to those kids were more valuable to them than the
guns, and we ended up with an import industry with guns being brought in from Pakistan and turned into the staff troops in Afghanistan.
We don’t always understand all of those things that need to be built before you go off to do an operation. You simply don’t build a team on the run going into a mission if you’re going to be successful. The NATO response has almost always been a complete failure at getting countries to ante up the forces necessary. And without that kind of support, we do not have the moral right to ask our young men and women to go somewhere and do something for which they might pay with their lives, and at the same time not have the effect of saving lives on the other end.
(GE) George Bush once famously said to Joe Biden that he didn’t do nuance.
I think both John and Rick have shown tonight that they’d rather learn something from the master in that respect. I think it is a pity that we spent so much of this debate talking past each other about absolutes and about alternatives which are not the real alternatives we face in a world where mass atrocity crimes are an all‐too present reality, and for which we have to struggle to find collective solutions.
When we talk about ending man‐made humanitarian crises we’re not talking about conflicts generally, we’re not talking about human rights violations generally. We’re talking about quite a small sub‐set of really tough, really ugly cases where governments ‐‐ either because of their
unwillingness or their incapacity ‐‐ are allowing or are themselves perpetrating terrible crimes.
We have, as an international community, to think about, worry about what our response to those situations are going to be and in that respect all the options have to be on the table. Diplomatic persuasion, the use of economic sanctions and incentives, the use of legal instruments and yes, ultimately of course we have to keep open the option of military force.
But let’s be nuanced in our understanding of this, that military force is only one and really the most extreme of the ways of ending humanitarian crises and is something we should only sign up to because of the stakes that are involved ‐‐ not the least of which is the blood of our own kids. We have to be very, very cautious indeed about ever embarking on military missions, but that shouldn’t stop us from doing a whole bunch of other things that we’re perfectly capable of doing and which don’t involve that kind of traumatic choice.
It involves an exercise of collective will to put in place the preventative strategies, to put in place the reactive strategies, to put in the place the helicopters that are needed in Darfur. These things do make a difference. At the end of the day it’s about more than national interest, though of course, national interest matters and we’ve tried to explain on our side how national interest factors in.
But it can’t just be a debate about that. It has to be, as Mia has said so well, about our common humanity and about our obligation simply as human beings not to stand by watching our fellow human beings suffering
unutterable, unbearable horrors. That is our obligation as international citizens, that is why we have to do everything within our capacity to get these situations right, to prevent them and to react to them when they occur. That’s why it’s so important for countries like Canada to maintain the finest traditions of doing the sort of thing which has made you such stars in the international community. And that’s why we’d like to see Canadians, as a result, reaffirming in the votes to follow, the commitment to doing the right thing.
(BS) I would just like to say that many people can give speeches but for an extraordinary panel of people to be so superb and so committed to their view is exceptional. Now, a reminder to fill out your second ballot. This is terribly important. We have the wording of the original ballots. If countries like Sudan, Zimbabwe and Burma will not end their man‐made humanitarian crises the international community should.
A reminder too that the results of our first ballot showed 79% agreed with the pro side, 21% against, so it was a formidable majority on the intervention side. At this point, we’ll announce the result of the second ballot in about 15 minutes out in the Crystal, to where I now invite you. See you all in the Crystal in fifteen minutes.