Canada in the World: Canadian International Policy

Video Interview Christopher Cushing Subscribe to eNewsletter and/or Email Alerts and Podcasts

Background	14 minutes	Quicktime
Difficulties	3 minutes	Quicktime
Using experience to inform policy	2 minutes	Quicktime
Broad approaches to security	3 minutes	Quicktime
Security and Canada	3 minutes	Quicktime

It was quite difficult. When the genocide started in Rwanda, in April of '94, I got a call to go into Kigali to rescue the two MSF houses that were held up in town. It took a day to get over to Amsterdam, and then by that point, MSF had decided that it was probably best to leave the teams in their houses, the two houses in Kigali, because it was quite dangerous to try to get across to the houses and bring them out to the airport and evacuate them. As well, and in particular, we had national staff who were hiding in the attics, in the roof of the houses. If you were seen to be moving out, you couldn’t take them with you, they’d be killed. And so it was best to leave them in place and hopefully they wouldn’t be interfered with too much.

MSF decided to send three exploratory teams into Rwanda during the genocide to see what was exactly going on, trying to monitor the situation. Along with a doctor, I led a team from Uganda coming in from the North. There was another team from the East in Tanzania trying to get across the border, and then a team in Burundi, trying to get north into Southern Rwanda. Of the three teams, my team was the only team that was able to negotiate our access into the northern part of the country. Kigami’s headquarters were actually just near the border area. So it took between a week and 10 days, to negotiate with him and his people to allow us into their territory. We spent the next three months, as the frontline advanced south towards Kigali, then around Kigali, then finally when the country fell, we were working on the frontline back and forth as the towns were falling, as the people were moving into displacement camps inside the country. We were monitoring all of that, assessing what the water, sanitation, health facilities were like, what the town hospitals were like. That way, MSF could set up teams on the Ugandan border so as soon as the fighting stopped, I think twelve or fifteen teams just came right across the border. Within three or six hours, they arrived at their location, knew exactly what they had to do to fix it up, to get the water pumps working, to fix the roof on the hospital, whatever it may be. After that they could start working with the local population trying to bring health, medical attention, and that sort of thing.

It was quite difficult, because we were right on the frontline with the genocide, all the way through it. It was probably as hard as the two trips into Bosnia which I had done previously. The first one being in Sarajevo in 93, which was six months working in Sarajevo Town and then across on the Serb side, trying to get viable access into the other enclaves, Gorazde, Srebrenica and Zepa. That was quite difficult, to say the least. Then I went to Georgia, Tajikistan, all across the “stans”, doing emergency work in Georgia and Southern Russia. I was called back in January to go to Banuluka, which is the Serb military headquarters on the North – Northwest. There the team was under constant attack and harassment and they needed somebody to come in and “babysit” the office for a bit. Within a week or two we got the program going up again, which was supporting medical supplies, fuel, clothing, and food too, to about 96 orphanages, child psychiatric hospitals and adult psychiatric hospitals on the frontlines from Behaj to Tuzla – so quite a long frontline. A few weeks later the doctor returned back in and we were able to keep up some of the supplies going to these hospitals, psychiatric hospitals and orphanages. We had quite a few children frozen to death every night in the winter; it was quite a cold winter in '94, January and February. That program eventually did an emergency evacuation over about 18 hours, with some deaths. This is when the market bomb went off in Sarajevo, and the Serbs were being blamed for it. They were going to hold us hostage if NATO decided to have a meeting. NATO had a meeting; they were going to hold us hostage... It all went sort of went... interesting after that.

So then I went to Rwanda and did the genocide. Then came out and was approached by Cornelio Sommaruga, who was head of ICRC, the International Committee of the Red Cross. He was at a dinner in Ottawa, I was invited to the dinner, and he asked me if I would come to ICRC to work as a delegate in Sri Lanka. I got to spend maybe three or six months in Ottawa, helping support the Canadian Red Cross’ national office in Ottawa for Medevacs out of Bosnia, the Rwanda, Zaire, Uganda, Congo situation, after the war and the genocide, as well as some work in Angola and Mozambique. So I ended up about almost a year working with the Red Cross. Then CARE Canada was looking to set up an emergency team. So I joined CARE and spent the next three years or so working mostly the Great Lakes, as country director in Zaire, security coordinator in Burundi, working all the camps in Eastern Zaire, with the 1.2 - 1.5 million Hutu refugees from Rwanda. That would be in for six months working on that situation, then out again, then in again for another three or four months, then out again. In between there were three years during which I also went out to Liberia, Sierra Leone, in spring and summer of 96, where Liberia had fallen and I went into Monrovia to negotiate with Charles Taylor and Alhaji Kromah to get CARE access into Cape Mount and Lofa counties in Western Liberia. That was quite difficult to get in there, the city was completely collapsed, child soldiers fighting throughout the city, UN was under siege at River Mount – their compound out on the river on the outskirts of town. And we were also trying to go through the ‘RUF territories,’ the RUF [Revolutionary United Front] territory on the eastern Sierra Leone, which was pretty much a no-go area. But we managed to get in and talk to them and trying to look at cross-border access through Sierra Leone. So that was about six months of that. 

I finished with CARE by going back to Zaire during the fall of '96, when Kabila had his civil war and took Zaire from Mobutu. I was sent in originally in August when the Banyamulenge insurrection started in Uvira – the Banyamulenge are the people of Mulenge, which is a little village just north of Uvira on the escarpment across from Bujumbura and Burundi. In August they started fighting with the Zaire military. I was sent in as the emergency country director in Zaire, and within a month or so, it was obvious that there was going to be a major civil war in Congo – Zaire - so CARE decided to set up a regional coordination structure. I was appointed the regional coordinator with an American, a Brit and an Australian coordinator working with me. We were operating in nine countries during the entire civil war, providing access and humanitarian assistance into Zaire, but you have to deal with all the countries on the perimeter as well. We had about 180 ex-paths working with a rear-operations base in Nairobi, and a forward operation centre in Kigali, and then negotiating access into Bukavu and Goma and everything else.

From there, I had been spending that year also talking to the UN about coming to Italy. In 1997 the UN was launching UN reform, and part of that was to create a UN staff college in Italy. I was approached in '96 to ask if I would come in as a head of department. So in ‘97, I left CARE and in January/February, went to Turin, Italy, where the UN has a huge training establishment. I was the program manager for international peace and security as part of UN reform for the UN. I spent two years there, running about 17 programmes on humanitarian assistance, human rights, peacekeeping operations, everything to do with peace and security for the UN reform. Part of that was also looking at strategic interventions and strategic frameworks. In '96-'97, the OECD, the World Bank and the UN all came up with strategic interventions and strategic frameworks for the international community to work in a new way in countries emerging from conflict. One of the programs we ran was about a 19-month pilot program in Afghanistan, with all the UN agencies, all the donors, all the NGOs, Talibans, civil society, exile groups, trying to look at how to reform UN interventions in Afghanistan. That was quite interesting - a variety of political and practical work, all through '97 and '98.  

In '98, Canada was going to be elected to the UN Security Council – we’re elected about once every 10 years – and Foreign Affairs was looking at bringing in one or two external people as specialists or subject matter experts on humanitarian, human security, field operations, as well as a bit of UN and how the UN works. I was approached by Foreign Affairs to come in as a senior policy advisor, and spent the two years at the Security Council, as a member of the Foreign Affairs / Security Council team. We were responsible for facilitating issue management within Foreign Affairs for responses back to New York to the Security Council. I then stayed a third year in 2001 – and during those three years I was also working on the G8-G7, OECD/DAC, EU presidencies, anything on human security, and trying to develop human security from a concept into an actual foreign policy framework. In particular, looking at conflict prevention, conflict management, crisis management, trying to get these issues worked out from the theoretical academic aspect that it’s mostly distributed as, and trying to look at it as a hard policy and how the Canadian government can further develop its ability to project human security as a foreign policy. That was quite interesting, a variety of work and different venues, different fora.

I was then approached by a French NGO which had set up a chapter in England and they were looking for a new executive director to come in because after two years, it wasn’t going too well setting up this organization in England. So I came in for a year to redirect it, reorganize it and get it back on track.

I had a girlfriend in England – which was very convenient that she was here – so I stayed in England, working as a consultant and got married about two years ago. Just living up north, working in the Philippines and Sri Lanka as a consultant, working as a peace and conflict advisor to either the Canadian government or private sector or whoever, to look at five-year governance programs, or evaluations of international programs and how they are affecting the peace and conflict in countries. I just came back in September and a bit of October, working in Sri Lanka as part of an assessment of UNICEF’s program in Sri Lanka to see how UNICEF’s programs has/have a negative or positive impact on the conflict with the Tamil Tigers and other conflicts in the country. Also how the conflict in Sri Lanka impacts on UNICEF’s programs. And then I just started in September at Bradford, in the Department of Peace Studies as their principal Research Fellow to help manage the broad range of research programs we have in security and cooperation.


Difficulties

All this has been at a cost as well. For everybody who goes into these situations from overseas, it can be quite difficult. You can be kidnapped; it’s what we’re seeing in Iraq and Afghanistan with international workers being held hostage. You're brutalized at check points. Your stuff is robbed; your people can get killed, people can get raped. That happened to all of my staff in different ways and at different times. So that can be quite difficult to deal with on a personal level, but most people just become more professional and focus on the work.

You lose a bit of the human side of these things, and this is one reason why I thought in 1996 it was a good time to get out of the field. In November of ‘96, Kabila had attacked the camps up in Goma, and you had about a million Hutus, or refugees, coming back into Rwanda. I had been there during the genocide, I had been working in the camps with them for the three years in between, and then I was there on that Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday when they came back. They literally just walked back from Zaire into Rwanda. It’s such a small distance that within five days, or within a week, they’re all home in their villages. I found that coming down that hill into Gysenyi, into Goma on that Friday-Saturday, that I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for the refugees, in a way. And I thought this was a bad thing to have. If I’m working with them, no matter who they are or what they are, you have to have some sort of empathy for their suffering, and there’s a lot of suffering going on in those camps. Only 5 or 10% of the camps were hard-line military during the genocide years. 95% of the camps were the women and children, or the men who were following or who were trapped in the evacuations, or the conflict as it was. And so 90% of the people were just caught in it and had no choice of where they were, or what was happening to them.

I found that after three or four years of Central Africa, that I probably wasn’t in the right frame of mind to be working with them as much in a direct way. So it was time for a break, just to take a few years off, maybe work on the policy side, and have a larger view of the larger context for a while.


Using experience to inform

I think that to understand the policy and programming work, you have to understand the field work. I started off doing acute emergency work with NGOs and I’ve worked, I think, 13 wars in the frontlines so far. And that was fine. But it comes to a point where you’re providing the response - you’re working in the country or region, doing humanitarian assistance, human rights or peace-building work, whatever the programming is – but to understand the programming, you also have to understand the larger political context and the policy framework that all of this operates in.

I worked with the United Nations in a policy and programming role for UN reform, focusing on peace and security, and then later at Foreign Affairs, helping to develop a foreign policy for Canada based on human security concepts, trying to operationalize that and make it concrete. A very good learning experience is trying to understand this larger framework of peace and security and how it really operates in the world. To do well at managing programmes in the field or programmes overseas, you have to understand the policy context, and you can’t really develop a policy context in a correct way unless you understand the realities on the field.

One of my jobs at Foreign Affairs was helping to advise on the intergovernmental taskforce that would be created every time Kosovo, East Timor, Albania, whatever international crisis came up. The government would form an intergovernmental taskforce. Maybe one or two people in the room had experience working on the frontlines of these kinds of situations. Generally, nobody did. It was very much the Ministry point of view, the political point of view, without clear understandings of the reality in the field. They are getting that information from embassies and from representatives on the ground, from NGOs and the news, but if you have someone in the room who actually has tried to get a mini cease-fire to cross a frontline, to do assessments of the situation where a genocide is taking place, or ethnic cleansing is taking place, and who has had 10 or 15 years experience in negotiating with warlords - what warlords, how do they act, how do you deal with child soldiers, small arms, light weapons, all these kinds of issues – it makes a different to the quality of the foreign policy that is developed or the decisions that are made.


Broad approaces to security

Human security is a very complex term; it’s being redefined all the time. Human security in the last 10 or 15 years has had about two or three periods of growth where it’s been very popular, being used by the UN or the Canadian government, or now by a whole range of other actors after Canada who have championed it as a theme for foreign policy.

It’s a very turbulent time in global security issues and global security affairs. Not only do we have the last 10 or 15 years of the post-Cold War period, where the old security paradigm evaporated and disappeared, but we’re now in a period of instability where we have a lot of humanitarian interventions, but also a lot of blow back from that. After Somalia in 1993, the Americans didn’t want to get involved in peacekeeping operations, and that had a direct impact on the genocide in ‘94. This time period of 10 or 15 years is compressing into a “test tube” a lot of these issues. Conflict diamonds, small arms and light weapons, child soldiers, landmines, all of these sort of issues are getting very high profile attention by the international community, civil society, NGOs, and by the people affected by these conflicts. Yet it isn’t too well organized; the international community still doesn’t have much of a coherent approach to these crises, it’s very much ad hoc; it depends on the geopolitical interests of the great powers. And since 9/11, that whole paradigm has taken on another level of complexity, where now almost everything is seen through the lens of the global war on terrorism, and what does that mean?

The last two or three years are quite worrying because there is a huge debate on what the global war on terrorism should be about, and particularly on how it should be followed. It’s important to understand that these are inherently political, social problems and crises, and that if you just try to apply military solutions to these political problems, that it’s a mismatch and it’s not going to work.

Where does human security apply in these kinds of context? Well it isn’t being applied at all. And countries like Canada or others who would be trying to espouse these views or trying to influence the global debate on these issues, are marginalized. In the very start it was “you are with us or against us; and if you’re with us, you have to follow this very narrow hard-line military view of what is actually going to be effective in the long term to bring peace and stability to these countries.” It’s a point of view that misunderstands what peace is, and misunderstands the conflict. You don’t have to go to the historical root causes of conflict; you just have to look at what are the major drivers of these conflicts and try to reduce their impact as much as possible. Of course all of these conflicts are feeding into each other. The Middle East as a region writ large has go two or three or four conflicts all simmering or boiling over, and each one is like a virus infecting the other. It’s the same sort of thing in Africa with the Horn of Africa, where you have a series of conflicts in countries which are infecting each other and exacerbating the situation. Those have connections to Central Africa, where again you have long standing chronic conflicts that are being influenced by war economies, small arms and light weapons, child soldiers, all of these things and they all interact. All it becomes is a breading ground for violence. Higher societies and cultures are destroyed, and the only way that they think that they can cope, or they’ve shown that they can cope, is by using violence and conflict as a way to manage their own conflicts. This is important because it’s really the mindset that’s critical here.

If people in a country which is experiencing some sort of crisis or tension think that the only possible solution for managing the conflict is to resort to violence, then you know that it’s going to war and people are going to die and suffer and everything else. What you really have to try to focus on is not just the disarmament and the elites talking to each other and trying to come up with some political compromise, but you have to look at the culture of violence in these societies and try to bring it down so that people see that there are alternatives to violence as a way to settle their disputes.


Security and Canada

[Canada’s role] is very limited; the resources we have, the weight we have internationally. We’re at best a middle power. Sometimes, with the lack of resources and capacity that we have, we’re marginalized even further. Canada’s role is very much at the multilateral level, trying to influence institutions like G7/G8, the EU, the OECD, ASEAN, the OAS, maybe the OAU to a degree, and within the General Assembly, within the UN. We’re trying to come up with the smart solutions, to use our knowledge and experience to say “here’s an alternative, here’s something else”; and trying to look for the entry points in the policy debates or in the international debates where Canada can say “what about this? What about that?”.

It’s not as bleak as it can appear sometimes. If you look at peacekeeping, it was invented by the Canadians; it was Lester Pearson when he was foreign minister. He got the Noble Peace Prize for it. This is an example where Canada, as a small to middle power, is able to come up with a brilliant idea which no one had thought of, which is at least a partial solution to try to mitigate these conflicts and to try to help the international community to work together to reduce the level of violence. Unfortunately, you can’t come up with these ideas every year. They come up every once in a while. Certainly, trying to educate and influence the debate in a more positive direction is what we can try to do.

The problem of course is the last few years, certainly since 9/11 - and it looks like another four years at least - the debate gets very polarized. It becomes very black and white and very simplified. This is a major problem. I think there are, like in a lot of conflicts, extremists on both sides who are feeding, exacerbating the situation and making it worst. They are very high profile and get a lot of attention. But I think a lot of countries in the middle, a lot of people in the middle of these conflicts are moderates or are willing to look at other solutions, but then they get caught up and dragged into these extreme positions.

I think what Canada has to do is to continue to work at the margins, or wherever opportunities arise, to try to influence the debate - the public opinion debate but also the political and diplomatic debates in institutions and fora. To say “Wait a minute, is what we’re doing effective? Is it really addressing the key issues involved in these conflicts, on the war on terror or wherever else? And what are the long-term impacts of the strategies that are being followed and implemented?” You can be the prophet in the desert crying out “this is wrong, this is what we have to do”, but prophets usually get ignored, so it’s a very difficult role.

I think certainly Canada has a voice – look at the decision-making in Iraq and the participation there, deciding not to participate there and focusing on Afghanistan where maybe we can do a little more. You always have to come with a priority list of what can you probably do with the very limited resources that we have, and trying not to put everything in one basket, but spread it out a little more - to have a little bit of influence and effect in different crises. It’s a tall order, it’s extremely difficult, especially because the political climate is not really conducive to multilateralism or to to discussion and reflection on what is the best way to deal with these causes. All of the problems in the Middle East, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Philippines - there is a whole range of social and political issues now bubbling up and boiling over. If you just approach these as if military solutions are what is required, not only are you completely missing the point, but you’re actually going to make it worse. That’s not only worse for Canadians, it’s worst for everybody in the world, especially the people affected by these conflicts. That’s what I think what we have to focus on. You mentioned in the beginning what my personal view of security was. My personal view of security is very much the faces and the lives of the men, the women, the kids, that I have seen in the 13 wars I have worked in. Those faces, if they don’t haunt you, they certainly stain your memory.

Last Updated:2006-10-16

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