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Good morning, everybody. I would like to thank the committee for inviting me and Oxfam to come to talk to you today.
As you know, Oxfam has many years of experience in working in conflict situations alongside international peace operations and missions, as well as alongside the Canadian military in conflict and in disasters. Just some of the examples are Sri Lanka post-tsunami, for disasters; Pakistan, after the earthquake in 2005; Haiti now; but also the big conflicts in the Balkans, and so on.
I currently work as the manager of humanitarian programs for Oxfam Canada. I have 20 years of experience in humanitarian work. I started doing it in the country I originally came from, Croatia, where I witnessed the work of the Canadian military in 1992-93 to 1995.
I hope my presence here will be valuable to the topic you're looking into, but I think it's important that I state that my presentation and my opinions are coming from a particular perspective, which is the perspective of a humanitarian development organization and the issues we are looking into. My presentation, and probably the answers I'll be able to give to your questions, will be closely related to my experiences.
In the introductory statement, I would like to address basically two issues, which are provision of humanitarian assistance by military in general and by the Canadian military, and protection of civilians in conflict.
It will not come as a surprise to you that Oxfam Canada as a humanitarian NGO believes that the military, including the Canadian military, should have a limited role in provision of humanitarian assistance outside Canada.
We believe the Canadian military should be engaging in providing humanitarian assistance only as a matter of last resort, and that's because that's how it is defined in international humanitarian law, because of differences in the missions that militaries have, because of cost efficiency—because there are huge differences in how costly humanitarian assistance provided by military organizations is— effectiveness, understanding of local culture, and so on.
I will not stay longer on any of these. If you have questions about them, I'm happy to provide examples and elaborate.
I think Canadian military should be engaging in providing humanitarian assistance by using its unique capability strategically. When I say this, I mean such things as that, instead of providing parcels to displaced people, the Canadian military has capacities that no other civilian organization has, such as heavy lifting, infrastructure repairs, logistical capacities, and so on; that provision of humanitarian assistance by Canadian military should be done with clear humanitarian direction and in coordination with other humanitarian actors, rather than on its own; and that it should be time-limited. As soon as civilian actors, primarily and preferably the local government, are able to provide humanitarian assistance, the Canadian military should reduce its engagement. This should also stand the case for international humanitarian agencies, of course.
As I said, I think Canada should develop its logistical lift, search and rescue, and similar capacities to supplement capacities of Canadian NGOs and other Canadian government departments and in such a way maximize Canada's contribution to humanitarian efforts around the world in the most cost-efficient and effective way.
On protection, as a humanitarian organization Oxfam believes that all civilian men and women caught in humanitarian crises, regardless whether it is a conflict or humanitarian disaster, should be assured both assistance and protection. Those are two axes of humanitarianism globally: assistance and protection regardless of who they are, regardless of their political belief, what side they are on in conflict, and so on—as long as they're civilians.
Protection of civilians, however, has been an area that has been eluding the diplomatic missions, the international community in general, UN peacekeeping missions, humanitarian organizations—everybody. We have not performed really well in terms of providing protection of civilians historically.
To this day, while assistance is being provided now with reasonable speed and quality, protection is still a major issue. Just look at the Democratic Republic of Congo, camps in Darfur, Haiti, and so on.
Traditional peacekeeping operations, for example, up until the late nineties didn't even have protection of civilians in their mandate. Only starting in 1999 have most of them had protection of civilians as a part of their mandate. But even when they do, there are all sorts of caveats to it in terms of what they can do and the different terms they use to limit it and restrict it.
The traditional peacekeeping missions with a UN mandate are still highly improvised, basically tools for conflict management. We do it when we don't know what else to do and when it seems as though it may work. But then we don't provide sufficient resources, tools, and skills for people who are doing peacekeeping operations, and then—especially for them—in terms of protecting civilians in those operations.
The UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations has made efforts to improve, to provide better tools, more clarity, sufficient resources, etc. While progress has been made, there is still a long way to go. Ultimately, United Nations peacekeeping operations still represent a uniquely legitimate international mechanism for protection of all civilians in a polarized world. While they're not perfect, Oxfam believes they're still the best we have.
We believe that UN peace operations that focus on the protection of civilians should be considered as an option for engagement of the Canadian military after 2011, and I would like to stress “United Nations peace operations” in that regard.
Peacekeeping can still be a vital tool, one among many, alongside diplomacy, pressure, sanctions, assistance, and so on, for making sure that civilians are safe in conflict. To be effective in this, Canadian soldiers will need to be sent to the right places at the right time with the right missions and the right tools, and they'll have to work closely with humanitarians and local communities, each bringing its distinct competencies.
As UN peace operations require further rethinking and reinvestment, and the UN is currently undergoing the process of doing so—I'm not sure whether you're aware of the “New Horizon” project that the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations is undertaking—the Government of Canada should engage with this process to ensure that the system has improved by the end of 2011.
We believe that with Canada's history in peacekeeping and its reputation internationally as an impartial and credible player in all sorts of conflict, Canada can influence the current process whereby the United Nations is trying to reform the way they do peacekeeping operations and make them more effective, more efficient, more strategic, and so on, so that the Canadian military can then be engaged with fewer failed operations.
We believe that the focus on protection of civilians will enable the Canadian military to focus on its distinct competencies and get away from competing with humanitarian agencies in distributing food and water. Rather, it will complement what civilian agencies are able to do in terms of protection of civilians—but that's very limited—and it could be playing on its strengths in that regard.
I would just like to end by saying that my first contact with the Canadian military was in September 1993 in Croatia, in Medak Pocket. I'm not sure how many of you know of that operation. I went in there as an interpreter for the European Union, to where Canadians, in spite of the terrible mission given to them by the United Nations—a lack of resources, inappropriate tools, an inappropriate decision-making mechanism and everything, were able to do the right thing and try to protect civilians.
These are the kinds of examples in which I think we can make a huge difference.
Thank you.
I think I'm on the wrong channel. I'm hearing French from it; I apologize—also for not speaking French. I take being an immigrant and a new Canadian as an excuse. I'm working on it.
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Thank you for your question, a highly pertinent question I was hoping to avoid.
Situations like Afghanistan are really hard for us, as I believe they are for the Canadian military. I believe the militaries are not necessarily the best placed nor do they have the required skills and capacities on their own to build peace. While I think they have a role to play in building the peace, I think there are distinct capacities--peacekeeping, peacemaking. And as I'm not a military expert, you can discard my opinion. But I think the militaries have a role to play in peacebuilding efforts, Afghanistan being one of the hardest environments. There are other examples of situations where the peace operations and peace missions have worked really well by combining the efforts of humanitarian organizations, national governments, national civil society, development efforts, institutional support to the government to build peace jointly.
I think with the way conflict has been developing--with fewer and fewer international conflicts and more conflicts within the countries where one group of people has as legitimate a right to that country as the other group of people in that country, and they are fighting between themselves, it becomes even harder for us to do development, as it does for the Canadian military to build peace in those circumstances.
So to sum up, the way I see it, it should be a much broader effort than the military's effort, and I think the role of the military in terms of peacebuilding should be to provide a secure environment so other players can perform the roles for which they have the distinct competencies. When the Canadian military says NGOs wouldn't be able to provide assistance if it wasn't for the military, the usual NGO response is that if they were able to secure the environment, we wouldn't have a problem providing assistance. This is the circular argument we get into in the field all the time.
I hope that answers your question.
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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 have no problem with that. The scale of the crisis in Haiti was so great that it was clear that the Government of Haiti, United Nations, and all of the NGOs that were already there didn't have the capacity to respond quickly enough and at the scale that was required immediately. However, where we had a problem with the engagement of the militaries, especially the army of the United States, is in the form of their engagement. I will elaborate and then compare it to Sri Lanka and Pakistan.
Instead of using the military, the only one that has a capacity to potentially fix the airport, on day one the airport got clogged by the U.S. military, for weeks. Oxfam had three planes that were supposed to land. There were a number of them over a number of days. They were diverted from landing on the Saturday after the earthquake as they were approaching Port-au-Prince airport and they were sent to Santo Domingo. I know we were not the only ones. I know MSF was the same, and so on.
The airport was basically useless for the usual humanitarian actors, who were prevented from doing their work for about two weeks, while the same United States army, which has fantastic capacities, could have used those same people and the same capacity to fix the airport. They did eventually expand the airport, create the things that the Government of Haiti didn't have capacity for--the United Nations on the ground were decimated--and NGOs never have the capacity for.
The lift brings staff in, the way that the ships were used post-tsunami in Indonesia--helicopters as well. In Pakistan, the Pakistani army was doing most of the lifting capacities, and then some of the other governments provided helicopters and lifting equipment.
In terms of Canadian engagement, I haven't been to Haiti yet--I'm going on Tuesday--so I only know what I have been told by colleagues on the ground. But given the scale and my experiences from elsewhere, I would say that water purification was justifiably needed. Oxfam is heavily involved in provision of water in emergencies. For example, the DART team coordination following the Pakistan earthquake was excellent. Because the civilian organizations, the government, and all of the NGOs didn't have capacity to provide water for everybody immediately, DART was providing water in one town, while Oxfam was fixing the water system and providing emergency water in another one. Then as DART had to leave after 40 days, there was an orderly handover. It was all coordinated really well.
I would say that using certain rescue operations like lift capacity and so on.... For example, no country in itself has enough capacity to do search and rescue at the speed that's required after a crisis like Haiti, and no civilian organizations do. Those are the areas where I think strategically using the military capacities and developing them in that way is very justified.
I have also heard that as the DART team arrived in either Jacmel or Léogâne, there was a news report that there was a shortage of medical assistance. There was only a small MSF clinic, and because there was a news report that went around the world, the next week there were five health clinics in a small town. The militaries and the governments of the donor countries behaved very much in the way that NGOs have a reputation for: running after the media's attention. They all flocked there and then MSF picked up on that. There was no need for five hospitals.
I'm saying there are instances when it's needed, and it should be very strategic, not led by the media pressures but the needs and using the advantages the military has.
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 the Balkans. Initially, the only organizations that had protection of civilians as a distinct mandate in their organizations were the United Nations High Commission for Refugees--that has protection as a mandate--and the International Committee of the Red Cross. That's it.
Even the NGOs who speak about protection are very limited in what we can do. We can make sure that our activities don't endanger the people, and sometimes they do. We can use our presence as a deterrence, especially in terms of criminal activities and attacks on people in camps and so on, when we are there. When international NGOs are there, it is less likely to happen. And we can expose the perpetrators. But that's basically what we can do.
I think having an International Criminal Court has helped, because there is now an understanding that if you attack civilians, perpetrate war crimes and so on, you may end up being prosecuted for it. So that has been helpful, but it needs to be strengthened, because as good as ICC is, there are no mechanisms for finding those people and ensuring they actually end up being in court. There are still elements missing in that respect.
The sovereignty issue is a big, big problem, because it centres everything on the state, and the state is responsible for protecting its civilians. But in more and more cases where we have internal conflicts, the state is the perpetrator. The state itself is allowing the violation of human rights and war crimes, or the state itself is perpetrating crimes. And because of the nature of the conflict as internal within the states, you have non-state actors that basically are not bound by international norms, international humanitarian law, and cannot have sanctions put on them by the United Nations Security Council, or be even engaged by the international community very often.
The United Nations mission in Croatia in 1991 was called the United Nations protection force. They had no protection mandate. They were not allowed to intervene. In 1995, when Croatian forces entered the area that was held by the Serbs, I think it was a Canadian general who allowed civilians to enter the UN barracks, against the rules of the United Nations and against what New York was telling them.
So the people who maybe had the power to protect civilians didn't have the mandate and still don't have the tools and resources and so on to do so. This is why we think you think the military, like the Canadian military, which does have respect.... In the Balkans, you would always trust a Canadian soldier more than you would a local policeman. There was no question about that. You think that for them to distribute food parcels is a waste of credibility, experience, expertise, and capabilities.
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The Haiti one is easy. It's coordination, coordination, coordination. If we coordinate really well, we will have the information and we won't be falling prey to fake tent cities and so on. Coordination in general has been a big problem in Haiti, partly because there are too many organizations, partly because of the weaknesses in the UN and the Government of Haiti. But I think with good coordination, things like that can be avoided. So even if they put up a tent city, they wouldn't receive any assistance if we--humanitarian agencies, local government, the military presence there, and journalists, and so on, everybody on the ground--had properly coordinated. There are enough people in Haiti to know and to be able to see through those.
While the case in Haiti is corruption, I don't think it is necessarily systemic corruption. It is poor people trying to take advantage of an abundance of stuff. So you prevent it, but I don't think it's as big an issue as is the systemic corruption. It exists in Haitian society, but I think the tent city probably wasn't a good example.
The Bosnia case is a more complicated one and a harder one to deal with, because it was corruption and there was also probably intent--the military aims or whatever--because it's possible that different military factions were stockpiling things so they could sell them in case the war broke out again, or whatever. Some people there still think it's possible.
The way we deal with that one is through direct distributions, making proper lists, and proper assessments to start with. So we do not rush out to distribute things. We register people, which the UN was doing in Bosnia, and we do direct distributions to individuals rather than to centres or communities where you off-load the truck of things in one community and so on.
Bosnia was one of the places where lots of assistance came not through the United Nations systems and big NGOs but rather through small efforts of people's goodwill across Europe. So a family in Germany would collect a truck of goods, bring it there and just give it to town authorities, and there's no way to control that. This again is where coordination is really important.
I think much less of that is happening now with the coordination efforts, because the humanitarian community has worked on it a lot. It is still happening, though. But where the coordination is good, there is much less of that happening.
I don't think it's a big concern when a person gets ten kilograms of something and goes and sells five kilograms so she can buy five kilograms of something else. If it's on a small scale, it's not actually an issue. It's a coping mechanism; that's how people deal with the crisis. But if it starts piling up in warehouses in big quantities, that is a big issue.
There are a number of quality and accountability initiatives that NGOs in the UN have started, which rely on good data management, sharing the databases, comparing the names, issuing IDs, and so on to avoid that and to make aid individual.
I'm interested in Canada post-2011, so I don't really want to talk about Afghanistan right now.
You told us about how Canada was effective in Croatia, despite the inadequate mandate. You told us how the reputation of the Canadian military was very positive in this conflict situation and more respected than the local police. So Canada has some international reputation.
What I am intrigued by is the fact that Canada hasn't really participated in UN missions at all in latter years. There have now been, by some measures, 15 or 18 military operations, involving, from what I've seen here, some 84,000 troops. Canada contributes 5,500 of those and contributes about $5 million a year. In other words, we're not really participating in UN missions at all.
Given the fact that Resolution 1265 was passed by the Security Council in 1999, talking about the responsibility to protect civilians, and this work on the New Horizons project, first of all, do you know whether Canada is engaged in this New Horizons concept of trying to rebuild a peacekeeping mission and further develop the protection of civilians mandate that you say is part of all their mandates now? Is this something Canada should be considering getting more involved in after 2011, or should we continue getting involved in American projects or NATO projects outside the UN altogether--in other words, continuing down the road we're going? Or is there a sufficient or do you think there could be a sufficient enough change in the UN approach to peacekeeping to engage Canadians where Canada's effectiveness and reputation can be of significant value?