In February 2020, as prime ministers and presidents across Israel, Europe, and the North Atlantic commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz, faculty and students at the University of Toronto’s Trinity College focused their attention on events closer to home: Canada’s contemporary and historic responses to genocide in Asia. Hosted by the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History, this provocative roundtable featured three of Canada’s leading experts on questions of engagement, responsibility and complicity: David Webster from Bishop’s University; Laura Madokoro from Carleton University; and the Honourable Bob Rae (Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Special Representative for Myanmar). It was moderated by Canada’s former UN ambassador Rosemary McCarney, the Pearson-Sabia Distinguished Visitor at Trinity College.
Webster kicked off the evening, reflecting on the misleading claims of Canada’s foreign ministry, Global Affairs Canada, that Ottawa has long been a consistent voice for global human rights. This, he insisted, was at best an “unintentional lie.” He backed his claims with evidence drawn from his new publication, Challenge the Strong Wind: Canada and East Timor, 1975-99. Part activist-memoir, part scholarly study, the book explores Canada’s willingness to acquiesce in the Indonesian takeover of East Timor in December 1975 and the genocide that followed.
It’s simply not accurate, Webster insisted, to say that the Indonesian takeover over of East Timor surprised Canada. We were informed in advance by Indonesian officials of three options under consideration: East Timorese independence, dismissed as unworkable for such a small country; continued Portuguese colonial control, judged unacceptable in a decolonizing world; or incorporation into Indonesia. Canada’s diplomats and politicians supported the takeover as inevitable, shaping subsequent policy according to “Lipset’s law,” haplessly trying to advance human rights and democracy through engagement and investment that aimed to build a strong middle class in Indonesia.
It was only in 1998, under sustained pressure from civil society and with a sympathetic foreign minister in Lloyd Axworthy, that Canada turned to supporting the cause of East Timorese independence, culminating in the 1999 independence vote. Webster concluded with the disquieting observation that much of Canada’s reputation for human rights promotion owes itself to the work of activists outside government, not official policy.
Carleton University historian Laura Madokoro tackled another genocide, this time in war-torn Cambodia in the mid-1970s. Between 1975 and 1979, revolutionary Khmer Rouge forces caused the deaths of an estimated 2 to 3 million Cambodians. Yet reliable news of the “killing fields” within this profoundly closed society, Madokoro explained, was hard to come by. Suspicions about the reliability of first-person accounts, combined with the lingering effects of the American War in Vietnam (including a bombing campaign in Cambodia) made a Canadian response that much slower and tougher to develop.
What ultimately engaged Canadian parliamentarians was the chance to advance a human rights agenda around the genocide unfolding in Cambodia. After a rather ambivalent start to the question of
human rights in 1948, by the late 1970s, Canadian politicians and diplomats sought to position the country as a prominent human rights advocate. Officials used the Cambodian genocide to do so, gathering refugee testimonies as evidence that egregious human rights violations were taking place. While the surviving testimonies are a treasure trove for historians of refugee movements, the interviews raise their own disturbing questions of whose interests the testimonies served.
In the case of the Rohingya in Myanmar, the international community has plenty of evidence of persecution. Not long after Burmese troops drove the country’s Rohingya minority into refugee camps in Bangladesh, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau asked former Ontario premier and Liberal Party leader, Bob Rae to serve as his Special Representative for Myanmar (former Burma). His account of events in Myanmar drew upon his visits to the camps where thousands of Rohingyan refugees face an uncertain future, and where he confront the history of the decolonization of the British empire. In contrast to Gandhi’s non-violent campaign in British India, Myanmar’s independence was achieved through armed struggle with the army later triumphing as the central national institution. The nationalist slogan, “Burma for the Burmese,” he went on, applied to the Bama (ethnic Bumese Buddhist) majority, not the population as a whole, and emphatically excluded the Muslim Rohingya minority. Myanmar, he concluded, was an example of “majoritarian democracy gone wrong.” You do what you can do, the veteran politician insisted realistically, bearing witness, documenting atrocities.
The theme of the evening was sobering, but hardly hopeless. Genocide is too important an issue to be left to states alone. Citizen engagement matters. As Webster insisted, it did so in East Timor, where citizen-activists, East Timorese and others abroad, clung to an imagined alternative reality until it materialized. It did so in Cambodia too, where the accounts of survivors defined the genocide and brought it into focus. And it does so today in Myanmar, where the watchful eyes of citizen-diplomats like Bob Rae exert a powerful hindering effect.
Perhaps most important, the Graham Centre roundtable was a potent reminder of the importance of balancing the prospects for action against the dangers of despair and apathy.