Response to Maureen Hiebert

Below Frank Chalk's response to Maureen Hiebert's post

Frank Chalk is professor of history and director, Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies at Concordia University. With Gen. Romeo Dallaire, he directed the Will to Intervene project
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I want to thank Maureen Hiebert for starting a discussion thread about MOBILIZING THE WILL TO INTERVENE: LEADERSHIPAND ACTION TO PREVENT MASS ATROCITIES (W2I), before I disagree with her and offer my understanding of our report, which differs from hers. Maureen attended two of my presentations in Calgary and was a much appreciated participant in the discussions there. She is a fine colleague and I take very seriously the questions she has raised, but I must disagree with her reading of what we wrote.I see three differences in emphasis and possible misinterpretations of our report and its recommendations in Maureen's appraisal.First, she and I really agree on the need for early warning and the early use of diplomacy and development assistance to support good governance and to head off conflicts before they escalate into mass atrocity crimes, including genocide. Recommendation 2 to the Government of Canada under “Building Capacity” (p. ix of W2I) and the explanation which follows state this clearly: "W2I recommends that the Government of Canada increase its diplomatic and development presence in fragile countries" The elaboration of this point in the report on pages 38 to 41 calls for the Canadian government, through CIDA, to "increase and target development assistance to reach countries where the threat of mass atrocities is most likely."Our report also very strongly recommends substantial increases in the development budgets and staffing of CIDA and DFAIT. We buttress this recommendation by noting that, as I am sure Maureen would agree, "Development, if conducted strategically, can alleviate the structural conditions that engender violence and repression. Economic growth and development, when wisely planned, reduces poverty and inequality by generating employment opportunities for youth in vulnerable countries. This, in turn, reduces the recruitment of unemployed and disaffected youth into radical movements or criminal gangs while decreasing large-scale illegal migration." (W2I, p.40) You can read a fuller discussion and elaboration of these points in the remainder the section on Building Capacity. The full report is posted on our web site in English and French at: http://migs.concordia.ca/W2I/W2I_Project.htmlI might add that we wrote these recommendations with due regard for Peter Uvin’s important findings in Aiding Violence regarding the negative consequences of poorly conceived aid to Rwanda, which only made matters worse and contributed to the conditions leading to the genocide. That is why we emphasized planning aid “strategically” and noted that it must be “wisely planned”. I am sure that Maureen agrees. In her concluding paragraphs, she calls for “Using diplomacy and development assistance wisely to support good governance . . . .” W2I agrees completely with her view and vice versa.Second, the argument in W2I, which is based on interviews with over 80 decision makers and shapers of opinion at the time of the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the 1999 events in Kosovo, is that Canada and the US must build both (my emphasis) "hard power" (military forces specifically trained and equipped to protect civilians against mass atrocities and to deter spoilers) and "soft power" (development and diplomatic aid), so that we never again get into another situation like that which followed the Arusha Peace agreements for Rwanda, when the "spoilers" recognized that no country would be willing to stop them if they overthrew the peace deals and murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, as well as Hutu advocates of peace and human rights. We conclude in W2I that diplomatic interventions are only credible when the potential spoilers recognize that the peace agreements they sign are backed up with force and they will be stopped if they try to destroy them. If we haven’t learned that lesson by now, we have really missed the boat.We argue in the W2I report that the deployment of soft and hard power to prevent mass atrocities is no longer only a matter of humanitarianism and morality, but is also of vital national security concern. We contend that Canadian and American Realpolitik imperatives have fully converged with humanitarian concerns as a consequence of the rapid increase in globalization, characterized by huge increases in international and domestic air travel and unprecedented changes in the quantity and quality of global trade. W2I calls for applying the rigorous criteria specifying trip wires and boundaries for action elaborated in the Responsibility to Protect report; in appendix G of W2I, at the end of the W2I report (p. 139), we specifically label Bush’s Iraq Two war as a violation of R2P’s precautionary principles and distance ourselves from retrospective rationalizations of the war as implementing R2P. Our call for mobilizing the willingness to intervene is nuanced; like R2P, our report is not a blueprint for neo-colonialism or imperialism.Third, Maureen hints that to meet empirical tests our argument requires us to demonstrate that the widespread mass atrocity crimes in the DRC have already produced North American pandemics, created sanctuaries for terrorists and pirates, and denied Canadian and American business access to key raw materials in order for us to demonstrate that they threaten the vital interests of Canada and the United States. And even if we could demonstrate that these consequences already exist, she continues, using our approach, the “cavalry” would not be mobilized to help countries in those parts of the world where Canadian and American interests were not engaged. But these points oversimplify our argument.It is true that national security concerns alone will not mobilize the will to intervene when Realpolitik issues are absent. But we who advocate preventing mass atrocities should recognize that security planners are already aware that mass atrocities threaten national security and are widening their horizons to include early warning and early action to prevent mass atrocities. Delivering the U.S. intelligence community’s annual threat assessment to Congress on 2 February 2010, the Director of National Intelligence, retired Admiral Dennis C. Blair raised the threat of a new outbreak of mass killing or genocide in southern Sudan (http://www.dni.gov/testimonies/20100202_testimony.pdf, p. 37).Note that from discussing such “Mass Killings,” he moved on to consider “Strategic Health Challenges and Threats.” Adm. Blair’s testimony is so important, that I will quote it here at length:“The current influenza pandemic is the most visible reminder that health issues can suddenly emerge from anywhere in the globe and threaten American lives and US strategic objectives. It also highlights many of the United States’ critical dependencies and vulnerabilities in the health arena. But like an iceberg, the visible portion is just a small fraction of the myriad of health issues that will likely challenge the United States in the coming years. Significant gaps remain in disease surveillance and reporting that undermine our ability to confront disease outbreaks overseas or identify contaminated products before they threaten Americans. The policies and actions of foreign government and non-state actors to address health issues, or not address them, also have ripple effects that impair our ability to protect American lives and livelihoods and impair Washington’s foreign policy objectives. . . . As seen with H1N1-2009 pandemic, travel between countries links our population’s health to the health and sanitary conditions of every country, and our knowledge of the potential threats is limited by the inadequacies of international disease surveillance in animals and man. We have warned in the past that surveillance capacity to detect pathogens in humans varies widely.” (Ibid., p. 41)The Obama administration is paying attention to a far broader range of security threats than its predecessors. The recently released US Department of Defense’s Quadriennial Defense Review (February 2010,p. vi, at: http://www.defense.gov/QDR/QDR%20as%20of%2029JAN10%201600.pdfdeclares that:“the Defense Department must be prepared to provide the President with options across a wide range of contingencies, which include supporting a response to an attack or natural disaster at home, defeating aggression by adversary states, supporting and stabilizing fragile states facing serious internal threats, and preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities [emphasis added] or large-scale natural disasters abroad.”Of course, we must also recognize that even in the best of all possible worlds the governments of Canada and the US will not intervene everywhere or every time to prevent mass atrocities. R2P proposes that there should be “reasonable prospects” for success, specifying: “There must be a reasonable chance of success in halting or averting the suffering which has justified the intervention, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction.” (R2P, p. xii) There will be times when our governments must not intervene and we should learn to live with that fact.As in epidemiology, as in actuarial calculation by insurance companies, and as in security planning, W2I’s new approach pivots on the probabilities. Leading experts in public health, national security, and business share our concerns about the consequences of mass atrocity crimes and agree with our conclusions. Rather than dismiss their insights which are based on having monitored the spread of HIV/AIDS from the DRC to the rest of the world, the known risks of tropical and other drug-resistant epidemic infectious diseases jumping to North America via air travel or vice versa before they can be spotted, the dangers from terrorism and piracy, and the vulnerability of the world economy to warlords and their allies holding rare minerals essential to our prosperity for ransom and destabilizing the world economy, we should be paying attention to their concerns and enlisting them as allies in our efforts to mobilize in Canada and the US the will to intervene to prevent mass atrocities.We already know the fundamentals. Mass rape, population displacements propelled by mass atrocities, confinement in camps lacking safe water, basic health care, and adequate sanitary facilities are formulas for the development and spread of drug-resistant infectious diseases, the recruitment of child soldiers, the growth of militias and the destabilization of entire regions. Our world is criss-crossed by air travelers flying in every direction, to and from every continent. Container ships and oil tankers are the lifeblood of international commerce today, yet our ports are as porous as sieves, as Carolyn Nordstrom demonstrates in her book, Global Outlaws. Trade, tourism, immigration and overseas missions put millions of us on the move daily. Must we wait to reduce the threats heightened by mass atrocities until our defences are fatally breached and the victims once more are butchered before our eyes? If we delay, the odds are against us. We need to act now to mobilize the will to intervene with soft and hard power to prevent mass atrocities. That is the message of our report and I hope that Maureen will come to endorse the way we have formulated it.

Frank Chalk