Mission debate

>> A colloquium on Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan draws fire from peace activists

TROUBLE IN THE SOUTH:
Afghanistan’s Kandahar province

by PATRICK LEJTENYI

In a province as almost palpably averse to armed conflicts as Quebec, it’s no surprise that a major colloquium on Canada and Afghanistan, featuring a pro-interventionist government minister delivering the keynote speech, would attract some controversy. So when Maxime Bernier, Stephen Harper’s new-ish Foreign Affairs Minister, spoke at Université de Montréal’s Centre d’Études et recherches internationales (CÉRIUM) on Wednesday, Sept. 19, Raymond Legault, perhaps the province’s best-known anti-war activist, manned a small picket line against the proceedings.

“Obviously, the first reason for the protest is to oppose his presentation and justification” for Canada’s continued presence in Afghanistan, he said on Monday. Legault has been a consistent opponent of the war since it began in October 2001. Since then, Canada’s role has expanded from running operations from the relatively safe confines of the Afghan capital Kabul to the much more perilous job of fighting the resurgent Taliban in Kandahar province, in the country’s south. To date, 70 Canadian soldiers and one diplomat have been killed. Thousands of Afghans—Taliban fighters, official Afghan policemen and soldiers and civilians—have also been killed. While the country’s shattered economy has been growing at a remarkably impressive 25 per cent a year, official development in the south is still languishing badly.

To Legault, there are no good reasons to stay. “We’re not saying get out because we can’t win,” he says. “We’re saying get out because this is an unjust military intervention in a foreign country. I don’t think this war was legitimate in the first place.”

But what Legault finds especially disturbing about the forum is the participation of on-the-ground decision-makers, military leaders and academics, many of whom are pro-mission. “Why didn’t they invite anyone from the Senlis Council?” he asks, referring to the international think-tank that has voiced criticism of the operation’s reconstruction and drug eradication record.

He also takes issue with some of the colloquium’s sponsors, which include military contractors like Bell Helicopter, General Dynamics and Rheinmetall Defence. “A university research institution should be more independent in its funding,” he says. He believes companies with a financial stake in an issue as potentially lucrative as this shouldn’t be sponsoring a pro-intervention discussion in an academic setting.

This last charge is unfair, says Jean-François Lisée, CÉRIUM’s executive director. He says the Centre retains “complete control over who speaks, for how long, and who asks the questions. We will never compromise over that.” He points out that when the institute hosted a colloquium last March on Latin America’s New Left, one of the sponsors was the Confédération des syndicats nationaux, the province’s biggest union. And both La Presse and Le Devoir, hardly vociferous government supporters, are also sponsors.

Nor are all the speakers uniformly in favour of continuing the mission. Among the expected speakers and vocal critics of Canada’s presence in the country are McGill historian Desmond Morton, UQÀM professor Francis Dupuis-Deri, whose sister is currently serving in Afghanistan, and the University of Ottawa’s Claire Turenne-Sjolander. “Of course, when you speak to people on the ground, they’ll believe in what they’re doing,” says Lisée. But the purpose of the colloquium is to have a “heated but civil discussion” with decision-makers and on-the-ground participants that will be open to pointed questions, he says.

For more info on the colloquium, visit www.cerium.ca. The CBC is hosting its own free, public forum, “Mission Afghanistan,” today, Sept. 20, at the Centre Mont-Royal (2200 Mansfield), at 6 p.m. Call 1-866-717-6177 to register.