Mr. Chair, it is with great urgency that we are gathered in this House this evening, as expressed in the very moving submissions that we have heard. I want to commend the member for Etobicoke North for her initiative and her sustained participation in this debate.
I have listened with great interest to my colleagues on all sides of the House and the graphic accounts of the savagery and brutalization endured by the civilian population in South Sudan. One must never forget that behind each person, behind the statistics there is a name, there is a life, there is a story.
The urgent plight of South Sudan is perhaps best summed up by Eric Reeves, who put it as follows, in an article published just today:
...no civilians in the world are in greater danger than those of South Sudan. Not in Syria, Central African Republic, or Darfur is the threat of targeting on the basis of identity so immediate as it is for certain ethnic groups in vulnerable areas of South Sudan. Given the lack of protection by Juba government forces, the inability of UN troops to protect large numbers of people, and the absence of significantly greater protection from the broader international community, hundreds of thousands of people are likely to die in the coming months, whether directly through targeted violence or indirectly through hunger. It is an unsurpassably urgent crisis and yet the world's response has been in no way comparable to the threats civilians now face on a daily basis.
It is the issue of response that I seek to address.
I must note that this debate occurs at a particularly important historical juncture, for we meet in the aftermath of the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Mass Atrocities, which we commemorated last week, the remembrance of horrors too terrible to be believed but not too terrible to have happened, of the struggle against mass atrocities wherever they are occurring, including, also, the unthinkable, unspeakable, ultimate crime against humanity whose name we should even shudder to mention: genocide.
As well, we meet at a historic moment of remembrance and reminder: the 70th anniversary of the Holocaust of Hungarian Jews, where some 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported in cattle trains to the death camps in Auschwitz in six weeks.
I raise this, not to draw comparisons between the situation in South Sudan and the Holocaust. There are no comparisons or analogies to be made here. Rather, I have just returned, today, from a moving and painful visit to Hungary and Poland on the occasion of Holocaust Remembrance Day. At Auschwitz, I had the honour to light a memorial torch with the great-niece of the Swedish diplomat and Canada's first honorary citizen Raoul Wallenberg, a hero of humanity, a person who showed how one man, with the compassion to care and the courage to act, can transform history.
As part of Yom HaShoah, we mourned those who perished as we paid tribute to the survivors among us. With them, we said, “Never again will we be silent in the face of evil; never again will we be indifferent to racism and anti-Semitism; never again will we be bystanders to hate or to the pain of the vulnerable.”
And as we stated this here in the House yesterday, as well.
However, what remains so tragic, and this is the theme of my remarks this evening, is that we have failed to learn the lessons of the Holocaust. We have failed to learn the lessons of the Rwandan and Darfur genocides. We have failed to learn the lessons of what we are seeing as we meet in Syria, and where we may well be on the precipice in South Sudan.
In a word, the international community cannot afford to stand idly by when confronted with ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity, mass atrocity, and the crime whose name we should always shudder to mention; namely, genocide.
What makes the Rwandan genocide, whose 20th anniversary we are also now observing, so unspeakable is not only the horror of the genocide, of the mass atrocities in Rwanda, where 10,000 were slaughtered each day, but that this genocide was preventable.
No one can say that we did not know. We knew, but we did not act, just as we know what is occurring in South Sudan today and we are failing to act.
Out of the ashes of the Holocaust came the Genocide Convention, the so-called “never again” convention which, tragically, has been violated again and again. In the shadow of Rwanda, however, 192 states unanimously adopted the responsibility to protect doctrine otherwise known as R2P.
In 2003, in the preface to his book Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, Canadian Senator Roméo Dallaire wrote as follows:
Almost fifty years to the day that my father and father-in-law helped to liberate Europe—when the extermination camps were uncovered and when, in one voice, humanity said, “Never again”—we once again sat back and permitted this unspeakable horror to occur.
Added Dallaire in words that were eerily prescient, his book was published in 2003, but written before what was occurring in Darfur was even known to any but the very few. He went on to say, “The genocide in Rwanda was a failure of humanity that could easily happen again”.
Yet we are beholding a failure of all R2P, or I would put it another way, a failure to implement R2P rather than a failure of the doctrine itself in South Sudan, and I would say elsewhere as in Syria.
Simply put, we do not even see the invocation of the doctrine itself by the government. Indeed the Government of Canada has been reticent to even use the term R2P, even though it is one of the most important normative, if not juridical doctrines certainly of the 21st century and going back even to the latter part of the 20th century. It has been reticent to even use the term, let alone give expression to the compelling principles of civilian protection, that whole range of protective options that underlie it. But, if one is going to implement R2P, one has to at least begin to acknowledge it, to affirm it, and then move on to implement it.
We must ask ourselves now in relation to what is happening in South Sudan and in reference to R2P, what is it that we have learned, or more important, what must we do and where is R2P in all of this?
In my brief remaining time I propose to summarize some of the foundational lessons of the Rwandan genocide, again not because South Sudan is the same, the contexts are clearly quite different and the factual dimensions, while bearing some resemblance, are also different, but rather because it may shed some light on what we mean by R2P, how we can pour content into it and how we can ensure that the responsibility to protect like never again does not become an idle slogan or cliché, but can rather serve as the basis for preventive and protective action for the benefit of the people of South Sudan.
The first lesson is the danger of forgetting and the importance and responsibility of remembrance itself, le devoir de mémoire, of bearing witness to unspeakable horrors and learning from the collective failure to act which made them possible. Remembrance is an abiding moral imperative that must underpin R2P itself, that we are each, wherever we are, the guarantors of each other's destiny and we must act accordingly.
The second lesson, which emerges both from the Rwandan genocide and not unlike the Holocaust, is the danger of state-sanctioned cultures of hate and the corresponding responsibility to prevent. Simply put, the Rwandan genocide occurred not only because of the machinery of death, but because of state-sanctioned incitement to hate. Indeed, as the Supreme Court recognized and as echoed by the International Criminal Tribunals for former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the Holocaust did not begin in the gas chambers. It began with words. In particular, the jurisprudence of the Rwandan tribunals demonstrates that these acts of genocide were preceded by, and anchored in, the state-orchestrated demonization and dehumanization of the minority Tutsi population.
I mention this because as we meet there have been troubling news stories reported to UN sources with respect to the use of radio broadcasts in South Sudan encouraging the rape of women from certain ethnic groups, horrific and hateful incitement eerily similar to that which precipitated those kinds of criminality in Rwanda itself.
Simply put, the international community must bear in mind, as the Supreme Court of Canada affirmed in the Mugasera case, that incitement to hate and genocide is a crime in and of itself. Taking action to prevent it, as the genocide convention compels us, is not a policy option; it is an international legal obligation of the highest order, so the responsibility to prevent here is yet another compelling component of R2P. In this regard, we must ensure that hate and inciting speech is prosecuted where appropriate, and that those guilty of such incitement are brought to justice, as occurred with respect to Rwanda.
The third lesson is the danger of indifference and the consequences of inaction and the corresponding responsibility to act. Simply put, while the UN Security Council and the international community dithered and delayed, Rwandans were dying. One only has to read the witness testimony on Rwanda in Philip Gourevitch's book entitled We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families, or Gerry Caplan's searing indictment of indifference in his book on The Preventable Genocide or the testimony of Alison Des Forges, Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda to understand not only the horror of this Rwandan genocide, but the ultimate horror that this genocide was preventable, that it was the indifference, the silence, the acquiescence, indeed the complicity of the international community that made this genocide possible.
In that regard, let there be no mistake about it. We know what is occurring in South Sudan. There is no mystery. What is necessary at this point is action in our regard.
The fourth lesson is that of a danger of a culture of impunity, and the importance therefore of bringing to justice those who are responsible for some of the horrific acts in the 20th century.
