National Defence committee  I don't know. I don't know that I can answer that question. I would say from the point of view of protecting civilians, they would be more justified to be in the DRC than in any other place.

National Defence committee  As I said, it was used perfectly in Pakistan. It was there really quickly.

National Defence committee  Extreme emergencies where the capacity is exceeded with very specific, strategically chosen elements of assistance. So rather than dishing out the parcels, which any of the civilian organizations can do, strategically using them in coordination. If the UN is coordinating, they co

National Defence committee  There are no perfect answers. As NGOs, we've often been accused of having portions of humanitarian assistance end up in the wrong hands or not reaching the people. We sometimes make really difficult choices. Even putting aside current places like Afghanistan, I can give you the

National Defence committee  I think for most disasters there is no need for a military presence, other than in exceptional cases. For me, the exceptional ones since Hurricane Mitch would be the tsunami--where DART came in too late--the Pakistan earthquake, and Haiti. The rest can be handled by local governm

National Defence committee  --for me to say. There is currently a big debate within the Department of Peacekeeping Operations, and there was a paper issued recently about preventative peacekeeping. Traditionally it meant dividing the roles, observation missions, and so on. The peacekeeping is definitely ea

National Defence committee  I'm not sure that I'm really qualified. I would say they should shoot to protect civilians, but there should be very clear rules so that you don't have the abuses, if you know what I mean. There are peacekeepers from all sorts of countries and all sorts of places. I don't think

National Defence committee  They shouldn't directly. If you protect the civilians, and if you secure the environment, it should be safe enough for us to work. That's our premise. That's how we think we can function. That's how we functioned for a long time until recently.

National Defence committee  What we say to our military colleagues on the ground in an environment other than Afghanistan and Iraq is to coordinate through the coordination mechanism, and then they will know where the humanitarian operation is happening. We will know where their operations are, and we won't

National Defence committee  Some of them have been addressed. And they are currently working on trying to address some of the other ones. Even if they address all of them, there is still a problem of politics, because the UN missions are mandated by the United Nations Security Council, which is all about po

National Defence committee  Afghanistan, and I would say Iraq. They're highly politicized environments. There isn't enough evidence, actually, of what the effects are of these operations. I've just spoken with Peter Walker, who is from Tufts University, and they've recently done research where $1.2 billion

National Defence committee  I can try. There are several reasons, of course. I think one of the reasons is that protection of civilians has often been left to the United Nations civilian organizations and humanitarian organizations, which are not equipped in many of those cases to do so. A good example is

National Defence committee  I'll start with Haiti, but I would also like to reflect on Sri Lanka, for example, and Pakistan, because those are the three cases I know of. The Haiti earthquake is exactly the situation where involvement of militaries other than the host country military can be justified. We h

National Defence committee  I think over the years we did get much better in terms of communicating and coordinating at the headquarters level. At the field level, it's very different, depending on the situation. In environments that you call “hostile”, I don't think that actually happens, because while we

National Defence committee  Afghanistan in particular, and I would say Iraq, may be the only two places where that's the case, because we have seen a deterioration of the security situation for our personnel, both international and national, since the engagement of the NATO forces and intervention in 2001.