Canada has 'defaulted' on its responsibility to protect Syrian civilians, says Irwin Cotler

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Liberal statesman Irwin Cotler says Canada has “defaulted” on the “Responsibility to Protect” principle his party once championed by not backing intervention in Syria to stop the slaughter of civilians at the hands of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

“The Liberal party has always had an internationalist dimension to its foreign policy. But if you look back at R2P, which was very much a Liberal-initiated doctrine, Responsibility to Protect means therefore that we will have to be taking these responsibilities more seriously,” said Cotler, a former justice minister who did not run in the most recent federal election.

“That doctrine says that whenever there is a situation of war crimes and crimes against humanity and, God forbid, genocide, and the country in which it takes place is the author of that criminality, there is a responsibility to intervene and protect the innocent civilians. And I think we have defaulted on that — not just Canada, the international community — with respect to Syria.”

An ongoing civil war in Syria began in 2011 after Assad’s regime responded to peaceful protests with deadly force. Since then, Assad’s security forces have killed tens of thousands of civilians, including with poison gas and the indiscriminate bombing of neighbourhoods. Militias from Lebanon and Iran are also fighting with Assad. And last year Russia joined the war on Assad’s side, mostly through the use of airstrikes.

In total, more than 300,000 Syrians have died in the conflict, some five million have fled the country, and another seven million are internally displaced.

Among the non-government groups controlling chunks of Syrian territory is the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), a jihadist militia that has conducted terrorist attacks in Europe and across the Middle East. A U.S.-led coalition is fighting it in both Iraq and Syria. Western intervention against Assad, on the other hand, is limited to modest American support for some rebel groups.

Responsibility to Protect is a principle that elevates the international community’s duty to prevent and halt genocide and other mass atrocities above a state’s right to sovereignty. It grew out of a Canadian initiative, the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, and was endorsed by United Nations member states at the 2005 World Summit.

In 2014, Justin Trudeau, speaking about Iraq rather than Syria during an address to a Canada 2020 conference, affirmed the Liberal party’s commitment to Responsibility to Protect, adding: “And while that does not require us to take on a combat role, it does require us to help.” Trudeau appears to have made little mention of Responsibility to Protect since.

The Prime Minister has, however, made good on a promise to settle more than 25,000 Syrian refugees in Canada — a project that Canadians have embraced, and that has resulted in much positive international attention. Cotler thinks this is a distraction.

We’ve been dealing with the consequences of the killing fields and not the causes

“While we’ve been focusing — as the Trudeau government has been doing, understandably — on the issue of welcoming and providing sanctuary for the refugees, we’ve been dealing with the consequences of the killing fields and not the causes,” he said in an interview.

Opponents of intervention against Assad’s regime often point to the complexity of the war, Assad’s alliance with Russia, and the Islamist and sectarian nature of many Syrian rebel groups as reasons not to get involved. But Cotler believes it is the absence of intervention against Assad that has worsened Syria’s nightmare.

“Those of us who three years ago were writing about this responsibility to intervene were told that if you intervene, this will lead to civil war, this will lead to sectarian strife, this will lead to jihadists coming in. Everything that we were told would happen if we intervened, happened — in my view, because we didn’t intervene.”

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