OP-ED -- Does the Canadian government really care about stopping genocide?

By Fareed Khan

Aug. 25, 2020 

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/khan-does-the-canadian-government-really-care-about-stopping-genocide

https://www.thesudburystar.com/opinion/khan-does-the-canadian-government-really-care-about-stopping-genocide 

 

The international legal order and the human rights of vulnerable minorities around the world are under assault by autocratic regimes like never before as two foundational documents of the United Nations go ignored: the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. As we mark the third anniversary this week of the atrocities which commenced the final phase of the Rohingya genocide by Myanmar, we have to question whether Canada truly believes in standing behind these two instruments which it signed, and whether it cares about stopping genocide.

Canada was intimately involved in drafting both of these documents, so it follows that as a democratic nation committed to the rule of law, Canada would be one of the nations that would ensure their enforcement. In fact, Canadians have often heard Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former foreign affairs minister Chrystia Freeland state that Canada is a rule of law nation, supports the international legal order, and is a defender of human rights.

But such political rhetoric is meaningless without actions to back it up. 

In the fall of 2017 when the scale of atrocities committed by Myanmar against the Rohingya was front page news, many Canadians implored our government to designate the crimes as genocide and invoke the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: 

a)    Killing members of the group. 

b)    Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group. 

c)     Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. 

d)    Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group. 

e)    Forcibly transferring children of one group to another group. 

However, instead of taking action, the government waited two months before it appointed a “special envoy” to study the matter. Five months later when he issued his recommendations, the government proceeded to ignore most of them. 

When Canada did finally become the first nation to officially recognize the genocide by unanimous resolutions of both houses of our Parliament – a full year after the atrocities began – it did nothing more to hold Myanmar accountable, despite repeated calls by parliamentarians, human rights scholars, activists, and members of the Canadian Rohingya community. Arguably, as a state party to the Genocide Convention that recognized the Rohingya genocide, Canada is now duty bound to act to try to stop it and help prevent its recurrence. 

Rather than Canada, it was the tiny West African nation of Gambia that became the white knight for the long suffering Rohingya when it filed a complaint under the Genocide Convention at the International Court of Justice on Nov. 11, 2019. 

Canada’s lack of action in living up to its treaty obligations to defend the international legal order isn’t new. Canada failed to act in the case of the Rwandan genocide and in the Balkans genocide in the 1990s (despite the presence of Canadian troops on the ground in both instances). It was silent, along with the rest of the world, as the Darfur genocide unfolded and as Myanmar’s genocide agenda came to light in the 2000s. It has done nothing to respond to the genocide of the Uyghurs in China, and what appears to be the start of a genocide in India-occupied Kashmir. 

As it fails to live up to its obligations, the Canadian government also refuses to admit its hypocrisy of claiming to be a defender of human rights and the international legal order while doing little to nothing to defend it. It adds to that hypocrisy every year by intoning the mantra “never again” on Holocaust Remembrance Day marking the death of millions at the hands of the Nazis. Such hypocrisy is not lost on the international community and arguably contributed to Canada’s failed attempt to gain a seat on the UN Security Council. 

 

During a year which marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, the 25th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, and the 75th anniversary of the UN itself, it is time for the Justin Trudeau government to finally put actions behind its rhetoric. Because as it is, his government is losing all credibility on the international stage by claiming to be a defender of the international legal order and of human rights while its manifest failure to act demonstrates otherwise. 

 

Fareed Khan is the director of advocacy and media relations at the Rohingya Human Rights Network. 

 

© 2020 Ottawa Citizen. A division of Postmedia Network Inc. All rights reserved.

© 2020 The View From Here.  © 2020 Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved.

 

On August 5, 2019 Indian PM Narendra Modi made the world more dangerous with his lunacy in Kashmir, a year later things are worse

By Fareed Khan

A year ago this week the world became a more dangerous place.  The cause of that heightened danger was what India did in the autonomous Muslim majority state of Kashmir.  On that day Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi stripped the state of its legal and constitutional autonomy, and through his actions said to Kashmiris that they had no say in the way they were to be governed.  The actions elicited outrage from Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and from the streets across the country.

For more than 70 years Kashmir has been a flashpoint for India and Pakistan.  It is a conflict that has largely been ignored by the rest of the world except occasionally when the conflict flares up and it catches the world’s attention.

Canadian journalist and author Eric Margolis said in his 2002 book about Kashmir War At the Top of the World, that this is the most dangerous region in the world.  He wrote that if nuclear war was going to break out anywhere in the world it would be in Kashmir between India and Pakistan, who both have tactical nuclear weapons in the region pointed at each other.

On August 5, 2019 Narendra Modi’s fascist BJP government poured gasoline on the fire in Kashmir when it unilaterally rescinded Article 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution, thereby revoking the sovereignty of a people who never accepted Indian control of their nation in the first place.

These two provisions were the foundations on which Kashmir acceded to join India after colonial India was partitioned by the British between Pakistan and India, and it gave Kashmir’s legislative assembly the power to define who were "permanent residents" of the state.  As the only Muslim majority state in India these two constitutional provisions were key to preserving the identity and culture of the Kashmiri people.

The decision by the Modi government was labeled as illegal because it was done unilaterally without consultations with the state government of Kashmir.  In addition, it was illegal under Indian law which requires more than just executive authority to change the Indian constitution.  Along with these unprecedented actions India also imprisoned the leaders of Kashmir without charge, disarmed the state security forces and police of Kashmir, imposed a communications lock down of the phone system, internet and social media, instituted a state-wide curfew thereby making Kashmiris prisoners in their own homes, and started arresting Muslim activists and politicians.  In addition, there have been reports of the torture of Kashmiri Muslims imprisoned by India’s security forces for many years, something which is likely to continue as India increases its stranglehold on the Muslim majority state. 

 

A year later, there are approximately 600,000 Indian soldiers and security personnel in Kashmir to control the population of 12 million Kashmiris.  That is a ratio of one soldier for every 20 civilians, and it describes what is a defacto police state in Kashmir where human rights don’t exist, where people are arrested and disappeared, and where torture of prisoners is routine.  These are clearly the actions of a criminal government that cares little about the welfare of the people of Kashmir despite what Modi has said about wanting to improve the lives and economic opportunities for Kashmiris. 

 

What Modi did in Kashmir should not be surprising given the record of his government and its campaign of persecution and brutality targeting India’s Muslims since he first came to power.  In truth, what he did was an exercise in authoritarian power and demonstrated that democracy and the rule of law in India is now a complete sham as demonstrated by the escalation of state violence and terror against India’s only Muslim majority state. 

 

But Modi’s actions shouldn’t be surprising given the history of India’s occupation of Kashmir, and the brutality they have inflicted on the Muslim population of that region for many decades.  This decision was the culmination of seven decades of oppression, persecution and political manipulation by India.  It was also another slap to the face of the United Nations which has passed multiple resolutions concerning Kashmir, including Security Council Resolution 47 which was adopted on April 21, 1948 and called for the Kashmiris to determine their own future in a plebiscite. 

By undertaking this action India has set the stage for creating facts on the ground in Kashmir that will make it near impossible for Kashmiris to determine their own future short of some type of outside intervention to force a peaceful solution.  The strategy that India has adopted is in fact very similar to what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for over 70 years, and it isn’t surprising given the close ties that have developed between the fascist governments in India and Israel since Modi became prime minister. 

 

However, there may be a small avenue of hope to put pressure the Indian government, and it lies in the hands of any that chooses to invest in justice for the people of Kashmir.  That hope lies in the UN’s Genocide Convention, to which both Pakistan and India are state parties.  Pakistan or any other nation could use this seminal UN treaty to bring India before the International Court of Justice in The Hague.  If successfully prosecuted a case under the Genocide Convention would not only shame India and force it pay reparations to Kashmir, it could also force India to allow Kashmiris to determine their own future, as India agreed to do in 1948 under Security Council Resolution 47. 

 

Under Article 2 of the Genocide Convention “genocide” is defined as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.  An offending party need only commit one of the following acts to be guilty of committing genocide.  These acts include: 

(a)  Killing members of the group; 

(b)  Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; 

(c)  Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical 

         destruction in whole or in part; 

(d)  Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; and 

(e)  Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The likelihood of genocide taking place in India was so high that the organization Genocide Watch issued an alert about Kashmir in the days that followed India's rescining of Articles 370 and 35A.  However, there are those human rights scholars and jurists who assert that India has already committed genocide by violating Articles 2a, 2b and 2c of the Genocide Convention.  Consequently, there would be justification for filing a motion under the Convention by any state party to the treaty if there was political will to do so.

Clearly a military solution to resolving the Kashmir dispute is out of the question given conservative estimates that any sort of military conflict between India and Pakistan could easily escalate into a nuclear exchange, which would end up killing more than 20 million people in the immediate aftermath a nuclear attack, and up to 125 million around the world in the months and years that followed as a nuclear shroud encircled the earth and caused a nuclear winter.

So a different course of action needs to be taken from what has been done over the last 70 years to confront India’s illegal actions, its violations of multiple UN Security Council resolutions, its violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and parts of the Geneva Conventions.  That different option is available via the Genocide Convention.  Because for the sake of Kashmir something different needs to be done if the people of Kashmir are ever to see peace, justice and freedom.

 

© 2020 The View From Here.  © 2020 Fareed Khan.  All Rights Reserved.