Dec 2005/Jan 2006: Canadian Foreign Policy

The Responsibility to Protect Dissect

Dave Oswald Mitchell
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2005/January 2006
Justice will not come to Athens until

those who are not injured
are as indignant as
those who are.
THUCYDIDES, 455 BCE

RCMP training Haitian police

ON A RECENT visit to Haiti, writer and activist Justin Podur wrote:

“I came to Haiti on a short trip to study a country that doesn’t really understand its place in the world or in the Americas. A country whose people feel too much pride and not enough responsibility for what has been done, what is being done, by their government and elites. A country that it seems very difficult to keep or understand in perspective.

“Of course, I am talking about Canada.”

The foreign and domestic policy of that uncurious and out-of-touch country is the topic of this issue. We set out to investigate the charge leveled by Yves Engler and Anthony Fenton in their book Canada in Haiti: Waging War on the Poor Majority, that “while Canadians prefer to see their government as a force for good in the world, the reality is that it most often sides with the rich and powerful.” The case presented in the following pages lends much credence to these charges.

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By Joseph Castaldo
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2005/January 2006

A Hungarian Roma demonstration in Toronto in 2003

AT TORONTO’S CULTURELINK centre, an organization that helps settle new immigrants, Mark Reczkiewicz and Hajnalka Hamori sit on a couch in the common room. Hajnalka’s four-year-old daughter Regina flops down between them and closes her eyes as Mark drapes his sweater over her. There is a small stereo in the corner, a table covered with juice jugs and crackers, and empty chairs placed here and there. Mark and Hajnalka helped to organize this International Roma Day celebration in April for the few thousand Roma (or Gypsies, as they are commonly known) in Toronto and Hamilton, but no one has shown up yet. I ask Mark how many people he’s expecting.

“Eight,” he says, only half-jokingly.

An hour later, a few more Roma have shown up, music blasts from the stereo, and the children are gathered together to paint a mural. Hajnalka’s mother Gyongy, who also helped organize the event, leans against the wall and looks at the small group of kids splashing paint on the canvas. “I don’t know why we do this,” she says. “I don’t know if this helps anyone.”

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by Justin Podur and Sonali Kolhatkar
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2005/January 2006

A family of refugees recently returned to Kabul. Like most returnees, they have found themselves to be internal refugees in their own country, with no housing, health care, employment, or training. (Photo: Sonali Kolhatkar)

ON JULY 11, 2005, WITH great nuance and tact, Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff General Hillier described the forces arrayed against the NATO mission in Afghanistan: “These are detestable murderers and scumbags, I’ll tell you that right up front. They detest our freedoms, they detest our society, they detest our liberties.”

This was not Canadian officialdom’s typical line on operations abroad. Canada’s Haiti mission, for example, is framed in terms of “helping” Haitians with democracy. Although the Prime Minister’s Special Advisor on Haiti, Denis Coderre, occasionally uses violent language about “terrorists” (following the normal practice of presenting such labels without evidence) to describe Haiti’s ousted Lavalas government, for the most part Canada’s foreign policy is presented to the public as “peacekeeping,” helping those “failed states” to build “capacity.” Canadian military operations are likewise presented as somehow peaceable.

Hillier was explicitly trying to dispel this image, and not merely with the tactics of demonization (”detestable scumbags”), fear and racism (”they detest our freedoms”), and repetition (”they detest our liberties”). Hillier also wanted to dispel perceptions of the Canadian military as a peaceable, humanitarian force in world affairs: “We are the Canadian Forces, and our job is to be able to kill people.”

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Maple Flag, the Israeli Air Force,
and “the new type of battle we
are being asked to fight”
December 2005/January 2006

By Jon Elmer
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2005

Canadian DND officials pose in front of an Israeli F-16 in Cold Lake

OUT OF TWO HUNDRED warplanes that took part in Exercise Maple Flag 2005 in Cold Lake, Alberta in May, only ten were Israeli F-16s. It would be easy to miss their significance. Yet, when Canadian forces extended an invitation to the Israeli Air Force for the first time in thirty-eight meetings of the Maple Flag war games, it signalled, according to military planners, a marked shift in Canadian military and political policy in the twenty-first century: good night Battle of Britain, good morning Gaza.

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By Anthony Fenton
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2005/January 2006
“Neither imperialism nor colonialism is a simple act of accumulation and acquisition. It�s not just a matter of going out there and getting a territory and sitting on it. Both of these practices are supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive cultural formations, that include ideas that certain people and certain territories require and beseech domination.”
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism

A Canadian helicopter hovers over Haiti’s Presidential Palace, May 20, 2004

At the 60th UN World Summit in October, the Canadian government figured prominently in hijacking the UN reform process in the interests of the powerful when it forced the UN General Assembly’s adoption of their new doctrine of humanitarian intervention, The Responsibility to Protect.

Contrary to the almost-universal praise the doctrine has garnered in the Canadian press, its adoption in fact raises very serious questions about the ends to which it will ultimately be put. Many fear its true purpose is to serve, not as a guarantor of human rights, but rather as a means of legalizing and legitimizing imperialist interventions in sovereign nations that dare to step outside the Washington (Free Market) Consensus. An examination of the “humanitarian” intervention in Haiti in February 2004 largely confirms these fears.

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By Richard Milligan
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2005/January 2006

ON OCTOBER 17, representatives of the Lubicon Cree delivered a formal complaint to the United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva. The delegation sought the UN’s help to pressure the Canadian government on two demands: to return in good faith to land claim negotiations, and to cease its support for the systematic destruction of Lubicon land through illegal resource extraction for narrow corporate interests. Reiterating a similar ruling handed down15 years ago, on November 2 the Human Rights Committee reported concern that “land claim negotiations between the Government of Canada and the Lubicon Lake Band are at an impasse” even as abuses of the Lubicon’s rights continue. The Committee insists that the government must return to negotiations and further stipulates that the government “consult with the Band before granting licenses for economic exploitation of the disputed land.”

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by Melissa Gibson
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2005/January 2006
IMPERIALISM USED TO BE A political and military game of land conquest and resource stealing. Now, in the age of free markets and transnational corporations, imperialism not only wears the reassuring suits of politicians or the uniforms of generals, but also the sleek, modern veneer of economic development. However, economic development is an elusive term - one that can mean either trickle-down economics or community grassroots initiatives, depending on who speaks the word. In Canada and around the world, the mining industry raises serious development-related questions. Who should benefit from mining? Who does benefit? What responsibility do mining companies have to the well-being of the region? And who is responsible for ensuring they meet their responsibilities?

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Security Certificates and Secret Trials in Canada

by Jessica Squires
Briarpatch Magazine
December 2005

“Those who exchange liberty for security will soon find they have neither.”

Benjamin Franklin (attributed)

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The “Responsibility to Dissect”
Foreign Policy Issue

Editor’s Dispatch:
The Responsibility to Protect Dissect

No Longer Welcome
by Joseph Castaldo
Canada’s Immigration Refugee Board
closes the door on Romani refugees
from Hungary

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