The ‘right’ is wrong
By SID RYAN
In 1957, Canada’s Lester B. Pearson received the Nobel Peace Prize for his groundbreaking vision of a United Nations peacekeeping force dedicated to resolving disputes and saving lives in the world’s trouble spots. In the ensuing decades, Canada has had a proud record of peacekeeping in places like Cyprus, Bosnia and Somalia.
With the election of Stephen Harper as prime minister, the future of this role is being called into question. The ideological right — including this newspaper’s editorial board — would have you believe that Canada is so stretched militarily that we can’t send 1,000 troops into the Darfur region of Sudan to prevent the genocide of its people.
The argument goes that Canada is committed to fighting the “war on terror” in Afghanistan and any distraction such as Darfur would only detract from this mission. The “right” in this country view the link between Afghanistan and George Bush’s war in Iraq as sacrosanct. The argument for the “right” is that they no longer want to see our troops deployed as mere peacekeepers in global conflicts. Instead they want a beefed up fighting machine where we spend billions of taxpayers’ dollars on military weapons and equipment.
They salivate when the chief of Canada’s defence staff, Lt.-Gen. Rick Hillier, describes our mission in Afghanistan as “chasing down scumbags.” Comments like this are morsels of raw meat fed to the ideological right in Canada.
Harper has hitched his government’s foreign policy wagon to this new vision for our armed forces. He’s desperate for a successful Kandahar mission to justify spending billions on the armed forces instead of building a national child care program, for example. Meanwhile, as we dilly and dally over sending troops to back up a fragile peace agreement signed between the government of Sudan and its main rebel opponents, there are reports of civilians still being attacked and murdered in villages and refugee camps.
The conflict between two distinct groups in Darfur dates back to the 13th century. One group is mainly non-Arab agriculturalists whose ancestors come from the pre-colonial Fur kingdom. The second is Arab nomadic herdsmen from different tribes collectively referred to as Baggara. Both are Muslim and continually fight over access to land and water. Since gaining independence in 1956, Sudan has been ruled by a series of military dictatorships and suffered two major civil wars.
The latest conflict began in February 2003, when two rebel groups aligned with the non-Arab population accused the mainly Arab Sudanese government of oppressing non-Arabs. The rebels attacked government forces and installations. The government was caught by surprise and responded with an aerial bombardment of villages in Darfur. Compounding the problem was the government’s mistrust of its own Darfurian troops in the region. They recruited and armed the Janjaweed, a militia drawn from local Arab tribes. The Janjaweed has been accused of engaging in ethnic cleansing of whole villages on a scale compared to the genocide in Rwanda.
180,000 dead
Both sides have been accused of human rights violations, mass killings, rape and looting. Independent observers have accused the government backed Janjaweed militia of dismembering and killing non-combatants, even babies. More than 180,000 have died of starvation or have been killed in the conflict, with a further two million displaced.
Surely, Canada can afford to send troops to at least two troubled spots in the world. Why should the debate be limited to an either-or situation, Afghanistan versus Darfur?
Our PM should listen to Romeo Dallaire, the retired general who tried to stop the genocide in Rwanda. He criticized the government for setting up the debate as a trade-off, saying there is “something absolutely unethical and perverse that a leading middle power in the world is trading off or potentially trading off one mission for another mission.”
Meanwhile, Harper’s friend George W. Bush, who alleges the U.S. is too overstretched to chase down Bin Laden in Afghanistan, has 10,000 National Guard troops to send to the U.S./Mexico border to keep out migrant Mexican workers. No wonder so many Canadians are coming to believe the “right” is wrong.
