Canada’s role in Gadhafi’s fall

But the trail to Gadhafi’s last stand was a long and twisting one, leading through Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo — and Ottawa.

Gadhafi’s fall followed a seven-month NATO bombing campaign that was the first internationally authorized use of force to protect civilians, a doctrine known as R2P, or responsibility to protect. And it marks the 10th anniversary of the Canadian-backed report on humanitarian intervention that created a framework for protecting civilians in peril and changed the way we think about the once-sacred concept of national sovereignty.

It was the bloodshed, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the 1990s that shocked the international community out of its centuries-old conviction that sovereign states could do as they pleased with their people. The world seemed ready for change, and Canada took the lead.

“Back in the mid 1990s we adopted human security as the basis of our foreign policy,” says then foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy, now president of the University of Winnipeg. “We were elected to the UN Security Council on a platform of protection for civilians.”

Canada was not alone in challenging the age-old notion of ironclad sovereignty. Other scholars and diplomats had laid the groundwork, and then UN secretary-general Kofi Annan touched off a fierce debate on sovereignty vs. human rights. But it was Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic’s attacks on the Albanian population of the southern province of Kosovo in 1998 that tipped the balance, says Axworthy.

http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1074444

The ironic part is that R2P is a decidedly leftist, progressive, position, and internationalist at its core.

Sid

http://www.international.gc.ca/glynberry/protect-resp-proteger.aspx?lang=eng&view=d

Responsibility to Protect

The concept of the Responsibility to Protect was developed in response to the genocide in Rwanda and the deliberate targeting of civilians in Kosovo and Srebrenica. Since these crises, a series of governmental and non-governmental initiatives have focused on reconciling traditional notions of state sovereignty with the moral imperative to act -- with force if necessary -- in the face of genocide and crimes against humanity.

Canada launched the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty in 2000 with a mandate to tackle this issue, and has promoted its landmark report, entitled The Responsibility to Protect, as a valuable framework for building international consensus around the legitimate use of force to halt large-scale attacks on civilians.

Canada advocated strongly for world leaders to endorse Responsibility to Protect principles at the 2005 World Summit, and views their inclusion in the World Summit Outcome Document as a major achievement of the Summit.

The Outcome Document represents the first global consensus on the responsibility of individual states and of the international community to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Most importantly, it affirms the international community’s willingness to take timely and decisive action, through the Security Council, when peaceful means prove inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from such acts.

heated up in Darfur last year George Clooney stated publically that sattelite cameras would be focussed on Darfur and it worked.