Canada silent as UN mobilizes against massacre

The Globe and Mail:

It has become a grim Christmas ritual: hundreds of innocent civilians massacred in remote corners of Africa by the Lord’s Resistance Army, one of the world’s cruellest and bloodiest guerrilla forces.

Now, fearing a Christmas attack for the third consecutive year, the United Nations is mobilizing 900 peacekeepers to protect villages in Congo, and the United States has promised its own action against the LRA.

But activists are calling for a much stronger response to prevent another wave of gruesome attacks by LRA fighters, who routinely kidnap, rape, torture and mutilate their victims. More than 1,000 adults and children were killed by the LRA in the days around Christmas in 2008 and 2009, while hundreds more were kidnapped and conscripted into the rebel army.

The LRA has emerged as a classic test of the “right to protect” doctrine, championed by former Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy and others. The concept of “right to protect” suggests that the international community has the right to intervene in sovereign states to prevent atrocities and protect civilians. Canada took a leading role in pushing the concept and getting it adopted at a world summit in 2005 after the furor over the UN’s failure to act during massacres in Rwanda and Kosovo in the 1990s. But the concept was dropped when Stephen Harper became prime minister in 2006.

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