The
world of refugee affairs is needed in
large part on account of armed conflicts
which produce the majority of refugees.
Since 1992 the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees has included
"prevention" on the list of goals for
refugee affairs. Military intervention
as a solution to armed conflict has to
be considered. Yet I say this is no time
to rush into more war. Rather, it's time
to set the war on terror behind and
renew the quest for alternatives to war,
help others build their societies, and
reclaim the enjoyment of rights and
freedoms in our own society.
There is talk of military intervention
in Syria. Meanwhile, a war of
increasingly questionable utility drags
on in Afghanistan. Samantha Nutt’s
recent book Damned
Nations is a devastating
description of the failure of over a
decade of wars and military
interventions in Somalia, Iraq and
Afghanistan to resolve political
situations deemed in need of change.
Nutt shows how the use of war was a
disaster from the point of view of
progressive civilians in the societies
attacked, and how war is invariably a
disaster for civilians at large.
Civilians bear the brunt of the shock
and awe, the chaos, the killing and the
swill of weapons sold in huge numbers to
all political factions.In
Africa, the legacy of war includes war
children and unemployment for young men
released from militia. The big need is
for alternatives to war in the appetite
for doing something in the face of
political disasters overseas: a need for
alternatives to both major interventions
and for alternatives to fuelling
simmering civil wars.Nutt’s
experience is that the seemingly lame
older idea of a package of aid and
development - education, health care and
the like – especially for women - mostly
helps.This is despite her withering
critique of the NGOs which deliver these
packages. Beyond such packages, she
wants enforceable treaties to limit
weapon supplies. That would help stifle
residual simmering civil conflicts.
International controls on the legitimacy
of minerals exported would make it
harder for mining corporations to
overlook the way exports fund gangs of
marauding rebel or mercenary soldiers.
Refugee prevention and facilitating
refugee return are important
international concerns.In
2004, I thought that the UN endorsed
NATO intervention in Afghanistan might
at least allow large populations of
Afghan refugees to return. The
previous Taliban Afghanistan was a
human rights disaster.Certainly,
the UN endorsed intervention in
Afghanistan by NATO was better than a
US led group of willing nations in a
preventative war in Iraq – a war
justified by misinformation about
Iraqi nuclear weapons.But
a just war must be winnable.An
aggressive military intervention into
a complex cultural and political
situation in Afghanistan and
neighbouring Pakistan could hardly
result in a stable society to which
massive numbers of refugees could
return for the long term.By
2007, I was reading articles from
Europe about the re-emergence of the
Taliban in Afghanistan and the need
for a negotiated solution.Ahmed
Rashid’s 2012 book Pakistan
on the Brink: The Future of America,
Pakistan, and Afghanistan
confirmed the unstable situation in
Afghanistan and inter
alia reported that Pakistan, a
nuclear power, has harboured extremist
Jihadi fighters belonging to various
groups and the Afghan Taliban factions
and their leaders on its territory for
years. Pakistan hosts a simmering
civil war of its own. Rashid said:
“Undeniably the military and political
situation in both Afghanistan and
Pakistan has deteriorated considerably
during Obama’s tenure in Office.” This
makes the use of warfare in
Afghanistan and the use of drone
aircraft to target supposed terrorist
leaders in Pakistan now highly
questionable as an appropriate
international response in this world
region.It seems there has been only
destabilizing of the nation states in
the region. As Nutt suggested from
experience on the ground in several
conflicts, the usefulness of
intervention and humanitarian
intervention need to be re-examined.
May 23rd US
President Obama declared the global
war on terrorism was over, but added
that focus remained for targeted
networks. The same day the head of the
American Civil Liberties Union said"President
Obama is right to say that we cannot
be on a war footing forever, but the
time to take our country off the
global warpath and fully restore the
rule of law is now, not at some
indeterminate future point. “The
Guardian
newspaper, UK, felt the speech could
be read many ways. Yet Obama spoke to
US public concerns which question the
need for war, for drones into Pakistan
and for a whole lot of rights
restricting measures designed in the
more uncertain conditions of late
2001.
Over the August 4 holiday weekend the
August 6 Globe & Mail reported the
US “closed nearly two dozen diplomatic
missions” and issued a worldwide travel
alert resulting from intercepted
electronic communications between
Al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Yemen. Canada
closed its embassy in Bangladesh.It
got our attention about a continuing war
on terror “out there” and it told us
very little concrete.“Trade
Freedom
for ‘Security’? That's a Raw Deal,
Canada” said Adam Kingsmith in the
Huffington Post on 7 July. The risk of
extremism in Canada is the lowest among
Western countries and a lower risk than
the chance of winning the 629 lottery.He
lamented the repeated government reports
of risk and the reports of police
thwarting plans to commit terrorism
which create an impression of need for
the “war.”The vague “security” promised
comes at the price of concrete rights
and freedoms which we are expected to
sacrifice. He is not saying that all
precautions and measures should be
thrown out.A
reflection on the kind and scale of
measures should be rethought for a
democracy and the rule of law.
In the US, despite the President’s
renewed commitment to close it, there
is still a detention camp in
Guantanamo for alleged terrorists who
do not get a fair trial.In
Canada, emergency legislation which
had been allowed to die 10 years after
2001, as foreseen when it was enacted,
was resurrected in 2012 after an
uneventful short lapse.On
August 20th, the editor of the
Guardian UK newspaper wrote that
security officials came after his
paper’s hard drive data on account of
publishing Wikileaks. The hard drives
were trashed. The partner of the
Guardian journalist writing on US
government electronic snoop
information leaked by Snowden was
detained in transit in London’s
Heathrow airport for 9 hours under UK
anti-terror detention provisions. His
computer and data were seized.Freedom
of the press is at issue when one’s
partner can be detained and robbed in
transit. Freedom is at issue when an
airplane carrying the President of
Bolivia can be grounded in European
airspace because Snowden might have
been on board.In
both cases, it did not seem that an
urgent need to prevent acts of
terrorism was the central motive.If
laws are there, they will be used –
and not always as intended.Kingsmith
got it right. We lose concrete rights
for nebulous security. The ACLU got it
right. The time to fully restore the
rule of law is now.
I am left hearing increasingly hollow
calls about the risk of terrorists when
a risk was always there in Western
societies from anarchists or someone.
The risk remains.In
the meantime laws have been changed and
they continue to rob citizens and
non-citizens alike of important rights
such as protection from arbitrary
arrest, to peaceful protest, to freedom
of the press and the right to a home,
privacy and family life. Some have no
protection from torture or cruel
treatment. Some lack a fair trial.Scare
tactics are losing their potency.
I agree with Samantha Nutt that the
decade of war has not paid dividends
for the civilians involved on any side
of the conflict - and not for refugee
prevention.The
slower cheaper less dramatic ways of
development with education and health
need to be pushed again. There should
be work towards international small
arms control treaties and controls on
sources of important minerals being
mined in central Africa.
And I agree with Adam Kingsmith:
“After
all,
while we cannot say for certain how
much safer all this ‘security’ has
made us, we can say how much less free
it has made us -- and that right there
should serve as a stark reminder that
those willing to trade freedoms for
‘security’ will end up with neither.”
