Now, the essence is the protection of civilians because we're into civil wars. We are into civil conflicts. The civilians are the prize as much as they are the victims. As such, they are a central point of all the operational considerations. They are a core element in these conflicts.
Negating that impact by simply looking at forces being deployed and looking at the higher level of pure political structures and power sharing without considering the depth of impact on civilians, the refugee camps, the internally displaced camps, and the impacts of ethnicity, tribalism, and religious reasons for the conflicts, you are not going to have an answer to the problem, and you're going to be there for decades.
If we do go into missions and think we're just going in there for a short while, it won't work. These are grounded elements that have created the friction and have potentially exploded. We need a multidisciplinary capability.
Canada has been engaged. We were engaged at the time, not only in the Yugoslavian campaign, which we did extensively, but also in a number of all the other missions. Until 1996, we were in every mission that existed. We supported the Brahimi reform. The “Brahimi Report”, which is a reform of peacekeeping, was a very tactical piece of work. It didn't look at the strategic construct of peacekeeping. It looked at how we make peacekeeping work better in the field, how it could talk better with the headquarters, and how the headquarters could talk better with it.
I could not talk to another mission that was next door, nor could we exchange material or anything. It was totally separate. Command and control now is better, but it is still locked in with SOFAs, MOUs, and of course, mandates that often create barriers for missions to reinforce each other.
We were very instrumental in moving the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, in 2000. It's a great deterrent for us to be able to move into the field, having that hammer behind us to say that they are criminals. They are committing crimes against humanity and can be held accountable for using children or using rape. Rape is considered torture, and torture is considered a crime against humanity by the International Criminal Court.
In stumbling through this era and trying to figure out what to do, one real, bright light came up very strongly. That was “responsibility to protect”, which Canada lead quite extensively through Gareth Evans, Michael Ignatieff, and others, and produced the “responsibility to protect” concept, which was tabled in September 2005 by Paul Martin. In that, it makes it clear that sovereignty is no more an absolute. You can't hide behind sovereignty if you are massively abusing the human rights of your people or if you can't stop it. It also calls upon the international community and sovereign states to go in and intervene.
The positive of that concept has been held back by the fear of engaging, the fear of intervention. The fear of intervention has been more a matter of politics than statesmanship. That is to say, “What is the political gain? How much am I going to be risking?” and by nations, “What is the risk of casualties? What's in it for us in self-interest?” It has been emasculated from being able to be fully implemented.
In Libya they attempted it without ever using it. The Canadians commanded the force there, but it was misconstrued by the Chinese and the Russians as regime change. It only ended up that way because the UN Security Council has no command and control capability, and NATO ran amok.
There's been a study by General dos Santos Cruz on the protection of peacekeepers. I recommend that study. It's a very strong study on trying to ensure that peacekeepers can be effective as they are being deployed.
The era of chapter VI-style peacekeeping is over. The United Nations and the troop police contributing nations and countries, by and large, are still gripped with some chapter VI syndrome. I would say that if you are talking about risk aversion to casualties then you are in another era. We are no longer there. We are in chapter VII. We are sending forces that must be capable and must be credible in order, in extremis, to have to use kinetic force to establish an atmosphere of peace and to permit the other elements to be able to function.
I've only started, but thank you very much.
I will now introduce Dr. Whitman, who will follow on with the innovative dimensions of our commitments into this arena that I think are essential.