Cotler pleads for doomed of Darfur

Adam Desaulniers

Arguably the most forgotten of forgotten issues in the current election, human rights policy in general, and foreign policy toward Sudan in particular, has been left largely untouched by press and politicians alike in favour of domestic concerns.

Ex-Justice Minister Irwin Cotler is one of few candidates raising the extraordinarily unsexy issue during the campaign rather than skating around it or giving it cursory lipservice, and nearly the only individual in public life capable of a straight answer about what the holdup is in deploying peacekeepers to Darfur. He’s alarmed about Canada’s absence from international efforts to intervene, and frustrated with the inattention it’s received from government and the media.

“It never gets covered,” he says of the subject and his efforts to talk about it. It can’t be for lack of a good quote admitting past mistakes: “The Liberal government in which I served was not as good as it should have been on Darfur – I acknowledge that. I think we should have done more. I was critical of my own government.”

But, he insists, it’s been all downhill from there under the Conservatives. “At least we had it on the radar screen – at least we said we’ll provide humanitarian assistance, we’ll support a hybrid United Nations and African Union protection force to stop the killing. It was in our speech from the throne,” he says, contrasting it with the Tory throne speech. “The most serious area of foreign policy concern, and there’s no mention – not of Darfur, not of Africa, nothing.”

Once chairman of the all-party Save Darfur Parliamentary Coalition, he’s seen it dissolved and his Save Darfur Action Plan ignored.

Not nearly catchy enough for the back of a t-shirt, the Save Darfur Action Plan entails a number of diplomatic objectives, largely immune to the influence of mass marches and passionate oratory. A scant African Union peacekeeping force of 10,000 is already in Southern Sudan, but impeded by lack of equipment and logistical support, and nearly helpless to protect the Darfuri against the ethnic cleansing campaign of their government and its Janjaweed militia. As an immediate stopgap measure, the plan calls on countries to properly equip this tiny volunteer contingent. “Canada can help as part of NATO,” says Cotler, “by supplying helicopters and by maintaining pressure for a Darfur Summit.”

To get more and better-equipped peacekeepers into the area, a Darfur Summit, the centerpiece of the plan, would bring together key international players to replace the “underfunded and undermanned” AU mission with a 26,000-strong hybrid UN/AU force. But already, regrets Cotler, “the Sudanese government is refusing key contingents from non-African countries... the Catch-22 is that the Responsibility to Protect provision [of the UN Charter] prohibits unilateral action. It says it has to be authorized by the UN. The problem is that there may be a veto at the UN, certainly by China, if not Russia. China is buying Sudanese oil and then Sudan is using the revenue to buy weapons from China – weapons that are then used to kill Darfuri. All this makes China complicit in that genocide by attrition.”

Likewise, China stymies enforcement of Security Council resolutions demanding a no-fly zone over areas where Sudanese planes have bombed Darfuri villages.

Other state actions called for by the plan include trade sanctions, asset seizures, and travel bans on Sudanese government officials. It demands that conditions be attached to World Bank and IMF aid. It also puts pressure on investment funds and portfolio managers to divest holdings in PetroChina and China Petroleum, two key funders of the Khartoum regime.

But failing an epiphany at the UN or capitulation under economic pressure, is Darfur doomed?

“We have to use whatever leverage we may have with regards to China,” Cotler maintains. “But if none of these things work, and we can’t get a [UN] resolution, the other choice would be to do what we did with Kosovo – we got NATO authorization rather than a [UN] resolution, which we couldn’t get because Russia would veto it at the time.”

Failing both UN and NATO action, US Democratic VP nominee Senator Joe Biden offers a solution notable for its familiarity: unilateral invasion. He has said that with the Sudanese junta “it’s time to put force on the table and use it,” because “those kids will be dead by the time the diplomacy is over.”

The ex-Minister’s reaction? “I’m hopeful that if Biden is VP and Obama is President, that they’ll act on what Biden has said – that ‘we will not wait, and we will give notice to al-Bashir that if a, b, c, d, and e aren’t done within a certain period of time, then we will intervene’ – and I hope McCain will take the same position.”

“Nothing has pained me more while I’ve been a Member of Parliament than to see this unfolding and ongoing genocide by attrition... Hansard isn’t a bestseller, but I’ve been speaking about it since 2002. The question is: how long does one wait? And Biden makes that point.”

Conservative Foreign Affairs Minister David Emerson and NDP Foreign Affairs critic Paul Dewar declined comment for this piece.