Darfur: Canada Betraying Reputation, Says Dallaire

From The Montreal Gazette

Canada should take a leading role in bringing the ongoing slaughter of millions of civilians in the Darfur region of Sudan to an end, Senator Roméo Dallaire said yesterday.

Mr. Dallaire, a retired Canadian Forces general who commanded the United Nations peacekeeping force in Rwanda during the Tutsi genocide in 1994, said the government has shown no willingness to uphold the "responsibility to protect," the doctrine it came up with and convinced the United Nations to accept in 2005.

"Canada loves its reputation but is not willing to pay the price," he said in an interview at a conference on the prevention of genocide.

The doctrine -- the brainchild of former Liberal foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy -- obliges the United Nations to shield people all over the world from genocide and ethnic cleansing at the hands of their own governments, even if it means military intervention.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, echoed Mr. Dallaire's sentiments, saying that Canada also took a leading role in establishing the ICC.

"What message does silence bring to the victims in Darfur? What message does the silence bring to the perpetrators?" he said. "People need our help and attention now."

About 2.5 million people have been forcibly displaced from their homes since February 2003 as a result of a government-supported campaign of ethnic cleansing in Darfur, Sudan's western region bordering Chad.

They've been executed, raped, tortured and had their property pillaged, observers say.

The Sudanese government has rejected the full deployment of a proposed African Union-United Nations protection force to Darfur and it impedes efforts to protect civilians.

"I'm still in awe in the most pejorative way of how we're being fiddled with by an astute, foxy and genocidal regime in Sudan," Mr. Dallaire said.

"What you have is the Sudanese applying all kinds of problems that ultimately will render a force ineffective."