Moving from Words to Actions
From Never Again
Moving from Words to Actions was a panel discussion hosted by Aegis Trust between 4-6pm on 25 January, 2006 held at the Canadian High Commission in London, England. The discussants were Lt. Gen. Roméo Dallaire, who was UN Force Commander in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide; Rt. Hon. Clare Short MP, former Secretary of State for International Development, now Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Genocide Prevention; John Bercow MP, her former opposite number on the Tory benches and a member of the International Development Committee; and Dr. Mukesh Kapila, who as UN Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan 2003-2004 blew the whistle on the Darfur crisis. Video of the event is available in Windows Media format and audio in MP3 format.
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Commercial Interests
DALLAIRE: Commercial interests have a whole variety of aspects when it comes to genocide. A DC-8 aircraft loaded with ammunition and weapons landed in Kigali a couple of weeks before the genocide, and we seized it under the mandate I had. The Chief of Staff of the Rwandan Army came to me and said I was not allowed to seize the munitions because they were ordered before the ceasefire and peace agreement, so the U.N. wasn't allowed to have it. The Rwandan Army was preparing to demobilize and integrate. The Officer came back two days later with paperwork, and the paperwork reflected banking arrangements, production, and transport of these weapons in Israel, Belgium, France, the UK, Holland, and Egypt: all participant in that load of ammunition and equipment. It's pretty hard for the West to say they want to cease and desist the proliferation of small arms and their use in conflict around the world when their major producers and policies are permitting this to happen.
In my own country, when we have weapons and we don't need them anymore—and these weapons can last 100 years—we don't go and destroy them. We tend to sell them to some nation we think is responsible, but these weapons are so lasting, successive militias will be using them. And ultimately, we don't want to waste the taxpayers' money by destroying them, so we try to get a few bucks back by selling them to somebody else. The whole nature of arms distribution is a fundamental instrument of instability in the world. Six hundred million small arms are distributed in the world, and we are trying to stop that process, but we're really fiddling on the margins. The commercial dimensions of that have ramifications in some of the instruments of the actual conflicts themselves.
Child Soldiers
DALLAIRE: In Northern Uganda, we have a protocol on child rights, which states that nobody below the age of 18 should be carrying weapons. The bulk of the combatants in the Lord's Resistance Army are children. That in itself...is more than reason enough to intervene, yet it does not mobilize any nation in the Developed World to want to intervene. One of the responses you get is 'yeah, the LRA's got children, but there are other governments in the world who also use children, so what do we do about them?' If you don't put teeth behind any of these solutions, then the solutions don't exist for anything other than continued debate and discussion. Maybe by attrition one day, we might eliminate impunity. What the U.N. did with all of these protocols trying to stop child soldiers was create a committee, but ultimately they took no action against the new weapon of war: nine year-old kids with small arms.
Excuses for Inaction
KAPILA: After my experiences with Darfur, I suddenly became an expert at hearing all of the excuses why one should not do anything about it. I made a list of seven reasons I was told when I came to London, Paris, Washington, and many places I went to when I was the U.N. Coordinator in Sudan. The first reaction people had was, 'The situation is not as bad as you make it out to be, surely it cant be that bad.' The second excuse was 'You are being too impatient. Give them a chance to sort it out, the best thing is let them find their own solution to their own problems.' The third excuse was 'It is very difficult, Sudan is not a tiny country. If we were to intervene, it would only make matters worse.' Fourth, 'Why should we do it? Let the someone else do it, then we'll join in and we'll all do it together.' Another excuse was 'We've got other problems to solve. Let's solve the other problems first, then we'll deal with Sudan.' Another reason was, 'We've already brought this problem to the attention of high-level officials, and it's been discussed at the very high level.' Another excuse, which someone gave me yesterday, was, 'We can't intervene because we have to get a proper framework for intervention, then discussions must take place, and then we have to do this and that.'
The truth of the matter is, it is not just a question of instruments, and it is not just a technical matter; it's not just a debate about whether we need 6,000 troops in Darfur, or whether we need 12,000 troops; or whether we need to find a different financing mechanism; or whether it needs to be the U.N. or the African Union. These are reductionist and technical arguments, and these are not the arguments which the leaders of the world should be arguing about when serious evils are being committed. Serious evils require serious actions.
Scrutiny of Inaction
BERCOW: A state that proposes to stop action and to use its place on the Security Council to stop action should be obliged to state, in terms, its reasons, and should be subject to cross examinations and scrutiny by others.
