An official from Sudan's National Elections Commission (left) helps a voter at a polling station in Juba, Sudan, Apr. 12, 2010. (UN Photo / Tim McKulka)

CTV.ca

In less than six months, Sudan will hold a referendum that experts say could produce a new country or spark a regional war. And as they prepare for the crucial vote, politicians from Africa’s largest country are seeking lessons from Canada.

Eight members of President Omar al Bashir’s ruling National Congress Party and three members of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which governs the country’s semi-autonomous south, visited Canada this week to learn how Ottawa conducts plebiscites.

Those two parties represent opposing sides of a now quiet civil war, which was fought mainly in the south of the country and claimed more than two million lives. (Another war in the western Darfur region has killed several hundred thousand more.)

Southern Sudan sits atop the country’s vital oil resources, and followers of Christianity and traditional African faiths there have resisted attempts to impose Islamic customs and beliefs on them by the Muslim north.

A 2005 peace agreement helped quell decades of fighting between the two sides. Under its terms, Sudanese authorities must hold a referendum by Jan. 9, 2011, to determine whether the south will secede.

Ottawa hosted the Sudanese delegation as part of an offer of “technical support” for the referendum, Foreign Affairs spokesperson Lisa Monette told CTV.ca in an email.

Over five days, the group stopped in Quebec City, Montreal and Ottawa. They heard presentations from a number of organizations including Elections Canada.

Nelson Wiseman, a politics professor at the University of Toronto, said Elections Canada is often asked to provide advice on democratic processes abroad. Canada is seen as having “a lot of expertise in electoral administration,” he said, and has participated in several hundred electoral missions overseas.

In the case of south Sudan, Ottawa hopes the delegation’s visit will make the outcome of the pending referendum “more likely to be accepted by all parties involved, to produce legitimate outcomes, and thus avoid unnecessary violence,” Monette said.

EJ Hogendoorn, the International Crisis Group’s project director for the Horn of Africa, applauded Ottawa’s offer to share its expertise on secession referendums (Quebec has held two votes on sovereignty).

“Any attempt to try to make this vote as transparent as possible — meaning that the people believe the results are in fact the will of the voters — the better it will be for stability in the country,” Hogendoorn said by phone from Nairobi, Kenya.

Sudan was the largest recipient of Canada’s humanitarian aid in 2008-2009. Ottawa has spent at least $760 million there over the past four years. That represents a “significant” financial footprint in the East African country, Hogendoorn said.

A few dozen members of the Canadian military are stationed across the south, the western region of Darfur and the northern capital of Khartoum as part of United Nations and African Union peacekeeping missions. Eighteen Canadian police officers are training local authorities, and troops deployed from nearby African states drive 105 armoured vehicles borrowed from the Canadian military.

About 60 countries are involved in humanitarian and security work in Sudan, under the auspices of the UN and the African Union. But Hogendoorn said the international community is still doing too little to help the country avoid another war.

“This is the largest threat to regional stability in Africa at the present time,” Hogendoorn said. “And if you were to compare the assistance going to Sudan to the assistance that’s gone to other war-torn countries, such as Bosnia and Cambodia, it’s not nearly as much.”

A months-old national election may hold clues about what to expect from the referendum. Bashir’s National Congress Party won the April vote — a process that election monitors from the Carter Center deemed “chaotic, non-transparent and vulnerable to electoral manipulation.”

More recently, a July report by rights group Global Witness warned that Sudan remains “alarmingly unprepared” for the referendum. Government authorities have yet to pinpoint where the new country’s borders would lie if the south opts for independence. No agreements have been reached on how to divide Sudan’s debt or share its natural resources. Meanwhile the Sudanese armed forces and the Southern People’s Liberation Army are said to be rearming.

www.ctv.ca/CTVNews/TopStories/20100806/sudan-comes-to-canada-100808

A group advocating for Tibetan rights protests the Toronto visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao at Queen's Park on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

A multitude of groups gathered at Queen’s Park early Saturday afternoon, from Greenpeace, who said they mustered close to 200 members, to a collection of Tibetans protesting the Toronto visit of Chinese President Hu Jintao.

When the anti-G20 Peoples First march set off, the mood was festive, even family-friendly. The main concern for thousands in attendance seemed to be how to stay dry in the rain, rather than how to stay safe.

Toronto resident Kathryn Charm, who brought her seven-year-old son Joe along, said she came to protest issues such as global poverty and environmental degradation.

“In the short-term, I’m also enormously pissed off about the expenditure of $1 billion that could have been used for so many other things,” she added. “That was what really sent me here today.”

Riot police line the demonstration route in Toronto's Queen Street West shopping district on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

The demonstrators got their first view of statuesque police in black riot gear as they passed by the heavily guarded U.S. Consulate. By the time the crowd turned west down Queen Street, the atmosphere grew more tense. Riot police were lined up down side streets and protesters began chanting “no G20 on stolen native land.”

Moments later, a group broke off from the main march and charged south through a line of police, towards the security fence and the summit. A brief stampede stopped just short of a second row of police, these ones in riot gear.

Black-clad protesters appeared at the front and tried to smash through the police line. But after a brief skirmish they were forced to retreat to the approved demonstration route on Queen Street and continued west.

Masked protesters clad in black attempt to push through a line of riot police in the direction of the G20 summit on Saturday, June 26, 2010.

Several people were injured in the altercation, according to a paramedic who declined to give his name because he was treating demonstrators without the consent of his employer.

While most of the protesters turned north at the next main intersection and returned to Queen’s Park, several hundred people attempted again to break through police lines to the south, the direction in which the summit was being held.

Jamie Getgood was resting steps from the second standoff with riot police, wearing black and carrying a gas mask. The 21-year-old University of Toronto student said he came to the demonstration because he wanted to see what the government was spending $1 billion on.

“I don’t plan on looting or rioting or anything like that. It’s just if I’m tear-gassed,” he said, explaining that his clothes were made of synthetic fibre that could help keep his skin from becoming irritated if police deployed tear gas.

Around the corner, police on bicycles had formed a circle edged by a cruiser with several broken windows, after the protesters in black backtracked quickly east down Queen Street, smashing windows as they went. (They had used the crowd and the police confrontations as a diversion to help launch their rampage elsewhere.)

Riot police surround a damaged police cruiser in downtown Toronto, Saturday, June 26, 2010.

“Get in position, they’re coming!” one of the officers yelled. Riot police soon arrived on the scene to keep people back from the damaged vehicle.

By early evening, riot police marched on Queen’s Park. The designated protest site had been declared a riot zone, barring ambulances from entering as armoured police on foot and on horseback charged through the crowd.

Sunday

The streets were eerily quiet Sunday morning. More businesses had boarded up their windows in the city’s Queen Street West shopping district. Many had posted signs saying that they were closed for the day. And there were very few pedestrians on the streets.

Police were trying to conduct “investigative searches” on as many suspected protesters as possible, roaming the downtown in vehicles or on bikes, or standing in groups on street corners in the hope of confiscating anything a person could use to cause further damage.

A woman is searched by police in downtown Toronto on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

A small group of demonstrators and reporters were waiting outside the temporary detention centre where those taken in mass arrests were being held. An hour earlier, police had used tear gas to disperse a group that had gathered to hold a vigil outside the centre.

Bridie Wyrock, a 20-year-old student from Cleveland, Ohio in a tie-dye t-shirt, had just been released and was waiting for a friend she was staying with to come through the gates.

Wyrock had been arrested Saturday evening at a demonstration in the city’s financial district and was held for 19 hours, she said. During her detention, someone came around with cheese and butter sandwiches once, and she was given water three times.

“It was like a hamster cage,” she said.

Wyrock was placed under arrest, charged with breach of the peace, mischief and obstruction of traffic, she said. But police dropped the charges before she was released.

Later Sunday afternoon, a man who gave his name as Dionysos Savopoulos was travelling on foot to the Toronto Community Mobilization Network’s “convergence space,” a hub for protesters during the anti-G20 demonstrations on the city’s west end.

He was wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt with a red bandana around his neck, and a pink bracelet around his wrist indicating he had been detained by police.

Anti-G20 protester Dionysos Savopoulos is detained for a second time by police in Toronto on Sunday, June 26, 2010.

Savopoulos said he was taken into custody with dozens of others at a protest in front of a Novotel hotel on Saturday night. His cell contained bystanders as well as protesters, he said. He was held in handcuffs for 17 hours and given three butter and cheese sandwiches and a cup of water.

“I don’t like the fear that’s been invested into the security,” he said. “I feel very intimidated.”

“There were people with the agenda to cause destruction but they were a very small minority,” he recalled, before being detained by police again minutes later.

Neighbourhood reaction

Across the street, police on bicycles had penned in a number of people who had gathered near the protesters’ headquarters to watch what was going on.

Police "kettle" or surround and detain a group of bystanders in downtown Toronto on Sunday, June 27, 2010.

One of them was Riali Johannesson, a criminal defence lawyer with blonde hair and wearing a baby blue dress, who had agreed to represent a woman taken in the Novotel police sweep.

“I’ve been speaking with the officers at the processing centre pretty much non-stop since around 11 o’clock last night, and they’re not able to give me any information as to where she is,” Johannesson said.

Another of her clients was arrested on Thursday while taking photographs downtown and was charged with assault.

“It sounds to me as though the charges won’t stand up in a criminal court” in that case, she said. “We’ll certainly be pursuing civil action.”

Further down the street, people began chanting at the 50 or so police on the street: “Leave our neighbourhood.”

Officers were subjected to a steady stream of colourful insults from less well-mannered demonstrators from the time they blocked the march from moving to the G20 security fence on Saturday afternoon.

But after the mass arrests began, the most common word hollered at police on Sunday was “shame.”

John Clarke, an organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, speaks at a press conference about next month's G20 summit protests in Toronto on Thursday, May 20, 2010.

CTV.ca

On Wednesday, five organizers involved with planning the upcoming G20 protests were visited at home or at work by security officials in Toronto.

The officials identified themselves as Canadian Security and Intelligence Service agents, according to Syed Hussan, an organizer with the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which is coordinating next month’s protests.

“It’s random targeting,” Hussan said. “We’re talking about young students, we’re talking about people who are retired.”

Each was asked about “their political work and affiliations” and their views on protest tactics, said Macdonald Scott, a member of the network’s legal team.

A spokesperson for CSIS said that the agency could not comment on anything to do with its intelligence gathering operations. But the questioning sessions appear to represent the latest episode in a game of cat and mouse between security officers and protesters in the lead up to the G20 summit on June 26-27.

For months, Toronto police have been trying with mixed results to speak with protest organizers. The network maintains that CSIS, the agency responsible for rooting out threats to Canada’s national security, is now also approaching them.

Rights issues

The network calls such encounters “police harassment,” and Hussan said the group plans to publish a list of at least 27 documented instances of them next week.

The unannounced police visits have also caught the attention of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, a legal agency that promotes respect for “fundamental freedoms.”

On Friday, the CCLA met in a private law office with the Integrated Security Unit, a hybrid of police and military forces that’s planning the enormous security operation for the international summit.

In a statement released hours later, the CCLA said it was concerned about the “unprecedented” security arrangements being planned for the G20, including “pre-summit interactions with potential protesters.”

“There are powers of the police that should not be used to undermine a legitimate and peaceful protest,” said Nathalie Des Rosiers, a CCLA spokesperson.

The CCLA is also concerned with how sonic weapons will be used during the demonstrations, and under what conditions protesters could be arrested en mass. It’s also worried about the size of the security perimeter around the summit and the creation of a “designated demonstration area.”

“The role of the police is also to protect the right of freedom of assembly, not to see this right as an impediment to the meeting or an impediment to security,” Des Rosiers said. “It’s like the Santa Clause Parade. It causes some inconvenience, but it’s a good thing.”

Meaghan Gray, a spokesperson for the Security Intelligence Unit, said that Toronto police are working on guidelines about the use of sonic weapons, which can blast audio messages or emit a painful sound that can immobilize a crowd.

Focus on causes

While many details about the summit’s security have yet to be released, protest organizers held a press conference on Thursday to outline why they want to hold demonstrations.

“After many months of planning, this is sort of our coming out party,” said Claudia Calabro, a spokesperson for the the network.

Nine independent groups who are planning to join in the protests spoke about a range of issues.

Anna Willats, an organizer with Gender Justice for All, criticized the exclusion of abortion funding from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s maternal and child health agenda for the G8.

A spokesperson for an environmental group noted that Ottawa has refused a request by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to address climate change at the G20 meeting.

Organizers were then asked about the recent firebombing of a Royal Bank branch in Ottawa. But they declined to comment on the incident.

“We’re not here to talk about what happened in another city,” said Lesley Wood, who answered questions on behalf of the network.

That firebombing took place overnight on Monday and caused $500,000 in damages. A group identifying itself as “FFFC – Ottawa” posted a video online of the bank in flames, and claimed responsibility. RBC’s funding of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games and of the oilsands prompted the attack, the group said, adding that it plans to visit Toronto in June.

But the groups involved with planning the G20 demonstrations have a peaceful reputation, according to Janet Conway, the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice at Brock University.

“They have absolutely no history of this kind, and nobody in any activist circle that I know is aware of who this group is in Ottawa,” she told CTV.ca on Friday. “If there’s some window-breaking, or some kind of violent encounter with police, this will be the work of a tiny minority if it happens at all.”

Whatever uneasiness there is among protest groups about the firebombing, organizers of mass demonstrations often agree not to publicly criticize the tactics that other activists use, Conway said, in the hopes of pushing issues they’re concerned with to the forefront.

“That’s not the main story from the point of view of the organizers,” she said. “There’s a sense that national parliaments are not reflective of popular will, and even less so at these gatherings.”

“The growing protests over the last decade reflect that all over the world.”

Demonstrators stand behind a line of riot police in Vancouver during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. (Kris Krüg)

CTV.ca

While the opening ceremonies of the 20three10 Winter Olympic Games unfolded at BC Place on Feb. 12, about 1,500 people marched through Vancouver’s streets, ushering in days of demonstrations.

Those events are largely remembered with fondness among Canadian protesters because they helped push community issues, such as homelessness and unsettled indigenous land claims, onto the international stage during the Games.

“It was not just to protest the Olympics, it was about tying them to local concerns,” said Harsha Walia, who was an organizer with the Olympic Resistance Network.

“We saw a convergence of social movements,” she said. “The same thing is happening in Toronto.”

Walia added that she and and 50 to 100 other Vancouver residents plan to travel to Toronto for demonstrations against the G20 summit, which is due to be held there on June 26-27.

Activists in Toronto have been meeting for more than a year to plan mass protests aimed at the international meeting. And they say they’ve learned from Vancouver’s anti-Olympics demonstrations.

“There’s a lot of inspiration we’re sharing from there,” said Syed Hussan, an organizer with the 200-member Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which is coordinating the G20 protests. “That was a very successful model.”

Organizers created the TCMN in December to help recruit like-minded groups for the upcoming demonstrations, which are expected to draw protesters from across Canada and the United States. They’re organizing meeting places, booking transportation, setting up lines of communication and gathering food to keep demonstrators energized while they’re on the streets.

As with Vancouver’s Olympics protests, their plan is to “do the local and the global,” Hussan said. Organizers hope to connect popular causes in Toronto’s activist scene, such as poverty and migrants’ rights, with decisions being made by the world’s 20 largest economies.

“The G20 is now a mode for everyone to come together and work towards a concrete point,” Hussan said. “We’re all joining forces, and it’s going to be a major turning point for the city.”

Security concerns

Like the Olympics, a special police unit is heading up security for the G20. It’s staffed by municipal officers, Ontario Provincial Police, RCMP and the Canadian Forces. And it’s responsible for staging what’s being described as the largest security operation in Canada since the Second World War.

For two weeks in June, most of Toronto’s financial district will sit behind kilometres of fence as police work to bolster security around the Metro Convention Centre, where the summit will be held.

“An event of that international size and scope lends itself to a very significant security presence,” said Meaghan Gray, a spokesperson for the Toronto Police Service’s G20 planning team.

“We anticipate that most of the groups that want to protest will do so in a peaceful and responsible way,” she said. “We’re planning of course for any eventuality.”

Police have been trying to talk to protest organizers for the past few months, Gray said. They hope to learn more about what they’re planning, so that the demonstrations and the security operation can work together “seamlessly.”

But many organizers have refused to speak to police, and complain that they’re being harassed.

“Sometimes when you give in to intimidation, it encourages further intimidation,” said Macdonald Scott, an immigration consultant and a member of the protesters’ legal team. “Nobody in Canada is under obligation to speak to the police, unless under arrest.”

Scott travelled to Vancouver during the Olympics to provide legal support during the demonstrations there. In Toronto, he said 40 to 60 “legal observers” will be on the streets to protect protesters. At least six other legal staff will work in an office away from the security zone, and there will be two-dozen lawyers on call.

The job of the legal team will be “to monitor police misconduct,” but also to provide “proper defence” to those who are arrested, and to bail protesters out of jail if need be, he said.

Organizers are also concerned that the scale of the security operations could discourage people from attending planned rallies.

“It’s a fear tactic — people are being scared to shut up,” Hussan said. “And I think the only way to organize in that is to have hope, share, and build community.”

Changing tactics

The expansive security operation being staged for the G20 summit is part of an international trend, according to Lesley Wood, a professor at York University who studies globalization and social movements.

“At any of these demonstrations, the vast majority of people are not arrested or hurt in any way,” she said. “But the optics of it are that it’s going to be a war.”

“The tactics of the protesters are not really radicalizing, and yet you’re seeing this constant militarization of the policing.”

The focus of mass protests in North America has evolved too, she said. During the height of anti-globalization demonstrations from 1999 to 2001, activists took aim at multinational corporations, and the idea of “summit-hopping” was in vogue.

Today, big protests tend to be more concerned with attacking governments for failing to deal with local problems, and with building networks of groups that want to address those problems.

Since the 1960s, social movements have come in waves that typically last a few years, she said. The fallout from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks largely quashed the protest movement that had been on an upswing on the continent since 1999.

“I think that may have worn off,” she said. “There hasn’t been a lot of mobilization against the economic crisis. Looking at history, one would expect much more outrage.”

“Perhaps this is going to be the time when it emerges.”

A boy sits on a piece of rubble somewhere in or near Gaza City, February 2009. (Andreas H. Lunde)

CTV.ca

After flying to Cairo and bussing a few hundred kilometers eastward, Montreal engineer Ehab Lotayef will try to enter the Gaza Strip from a border crossing at Rafah, Egypt, on Dec. 28.

For months, the 52-year-old Canadian-Egyptian has been helping to organize a massive trip to the Palestinian territory that will include some 1,300 people from 42 countries.

The trip, which is the brainchild of American peace group Code Pink, has won celebrity endorsements from the likes of Alice Walker, Oliver Stone, Gore Vidal, Naomi Klein and Alexandre Trudeau.

Organizers hope to hold a demonstration in Gaza City on Dec. 31, alongside thousands of local residents, to commemorate the war last year and to demand Israel lift a blockade against the movement of goods in and out of the territory.

“It’s an accumulated problem,” Lotayef said by phone. “No one is really supporting the Palestinians’ rights as they should be, to guarantee peace for both sides.”

Lotayef’s concern has been echoed by a number of rights groups and United Nations agencies over the past year, which have called attention to worsening living conditions inside the 10-by-40-kilometre strip.

In September, the UN Environment Programme issued a report warning that the aquifer that 1.5 million Gazans drink from, and grow crops with, is failing. Overuse is making the water supply saltier, it said, and pollution from sewage and fertilizers is high enough to put young children in jeopardy of nitrate poisoning.

Last year’s fighting — in addition to killing 1,300, injuring 5,300 and creating 600,000 tons of rubble – “exacerbated environmental degradation that has been years in the making,” the report stated. Repairing the water system will require US$1.5 billion over two decades, the agency estimates.

According to Joe Stork, deputy director of Human Rights Watch for Middle East and North Africa, such difficulties are made worse by the Israeli blockade because it keeps vital goods such as cooking oil and diesel fuel from reaching Gazans.

Stork said the blockade represents a violation of international law because it punishes Palestinian civilians as well as militants.

“There’s been next to no allowance for construction materials to get in,” he added. “So you have people in some cases still living out in the open, in the sense of not being in any kind of permanent shelter.”

The Red Cross has been equally critical of Israel keeping humanitarian and reconstruction supplies out. In a June report, it said neighbourhoods in Gaza that were badly damaged in the war, “will continue to look like the epicenter of a massive earthquake unless vast quantities of cement, steel and other building materials are allowed into the territory.”

Canada’s role

Last January, Ottawa pledged $4 million to help rebuild Gaza, and issued several statements expressing concern about the war’s effect on people living there.

But New Democrat MP Libby Davies, who travelled to Gaza in August as part of a Parliamentary delegation, told CTV.ca that many people she spoke to during the trip were worried Canada would cut aid to the Palestinians this year.

Women and children in a Gaza Strip refugee camp named Karama (Dignity), February, 2009. (ISM)

“When we spoke to various representatives in the West Bank, they were very concerned that Canada is going to in effect default on its spending commitment to UNRWA,” Davies said, referring to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which assists refugees in the territories.

An official at the Canadian International Development Agency told CTV.ca in an email that, as of Dec. 14, the agency had approved $20 million for UNRWA in 2009. That’s 28 per cent less compared to the 2008 total of $28 million.

Critics charge that, because the blockade is contributing to harsh living conditions, cutting aid to Gaza would leave Ottawa’s record on human rights open to criticism.

Tom Woodley, who heads a national non-profit group that’s been lobbying Ottawa to change its policies on various Middle East countries, said protecting that record in Gaza and elsewhere is key to protecting Canada’s international influence.

“Diplomatically, Canada needs to firmly support international law,” Woodley said. “It’s not just because we’re nice guys. It’s also because it’s in our best interest. On the world stage we’re a little guy. If someone tries to infringe on Canadian rights in the far north some day, we’re not going to be able to oppose them militarily. We’re going to have to call on international law.”

Similarly, Lotayef sees the trip to Gaza this month as an opportunity to press Ottawa to change its position on the conflict.

“Our government should take a more objective, more balanced position,” Lotayef said. “At this point in time we should increase our funding and at least contribute what we committed to contribute, to the Palestinian people.”

A strip coal mine, location unknown. (Stephen Codrington)

CTV.ca

The Cerro San Pedro mine in central Mexico stopped digging for gold Wednesday, on orders from the country’s environmental enforcement agency.

Earlier this month a federal court ruled that the environmental permit of Minera San Xavier, which operates the mine and is owned by Vancouver-based New Gold Inc., was “null and void.”

The court decided in favour of a Mexican environmental group, which argued Minera had violated local conservation laws and was detonating explosives too close to inhabited buildings.

In a news release, New Gold said it “has been operating in full compliance with required permits and government authorizations. The mine has had excellent operational performance in 2009 and has an enviable record of meeting its environmental and social responsibilities.”

The company is appealing the ruling, and will continue leeching gold from the piles of crushed rock it has stockpiled. But the open-pit mine, which employs some 340 workers and takes its name from a centuries-old village dozens of metres away, has been forced to stop excavating.

Closer to home, a debate is intensifying about whether Ottawa should have a say over how Canadian mining companies operate in developing countries.

At issue is a private members bill that proposes:

• the Department of Foreign Affairs investigate any alleged misdeeds by Canadian mining firms in developing countries and publish what it finds;
• Export Development Canada withdraw financing from mining projects that are found to violate corporate social responsibility standards in poor states;
• mining companies found to breach those standards become ineligible for investment from the Canada Pension Plan.

Bill C-300 passed second reading in April by a slim margin, with the Conservatives voting against it and MPs from the other major parties voting for it, or abstaining. A final vote could happen as early as March, and stakeholders are digging to try to influence whether or not Parliament will make it law.

Contentious issue

Amnesty International has launched an online petition to garner support for the bill, citing concerns over human rights violations by Canadian mining companies operating in other countries. MiningWatch, an industry watchdog, says at any given time it is monitoring several dozen cases of accidental or intentional misconduct by Canadian mining firms working abroad.

“We can’t keep up with them all, is the problem,” said Jamie Kneen, a spokesperson for MiningWatch.

Kneen argues that Bill C-300 would boost government accountability, by placing conditions on federal support to Canadian mining firms that work in developing countries such as Guatemala or the Philippines.

The United Steelworkers Union has also been campaigning in support of the bill. Many of its 250,000 members work in the mining industry. Last week, it sent a delegation to Ottawa to lobby MPs.

“We’re trying to raise the floor for workers in other countries,” said Stephen Hunt, the union’s director for Western and Northern Canada. “They should at least follow basic standards.”

But industry groups and Export Development Canada say that attaching strings to public investment money would make the country’s mining industry less competitive internationally.

The proposed rules “are so out of step with the rest of the world that they would only hurt Canadian companies and take them out of the game,” EDC’s senior vice president, Jim McArdie, told a Parliamentary committee that’s reviewing the bill on Oct. 27.

Tony Andrews, executive director of the Prospectors and Development Association of Canada, told the same committee that the bill amounts to “naive and misguided grandstanding.”

“If our politicians decide to insert themselves uninvited into the internal affairs of developing countries, Canada will do more harm than good,” Andrews said.

Global implications

Both sides of the debate say that mining companies should aim for international standards of corporate social responsibility, and avoid causing undue environmental damage or harming anyone who lives near mines in poor countries. But they disagree on how to do that.

“The real solution is to build the capacity within developing-country governments to manage their environmental regulations to protect the environment, and to strengthen their legal processes to protect human rights,” Gordon Peeling, president and CEO of the Mining Association of Canada, told CTV.ca.

Liberal MP John McKay, who proposed the bill, said he’s in favour of any measures to help developing countries strengthen their laws. But he would also like to see social responsibility rules that come with repercussions if corporations break them.

He said Bill C-300 would create “a modest set of consequences” for mining corporations that receive support from the federal government, if they violate international standards, McKay said.

“A company can carry on doing whatever it’s doing, however egregious,” he added. “It just can’t ask for the taxpayer, or the pensioners of Canada for financial support.”

Other countries have been known to withdraw public investment from mining projects for environmental or human rights reasons. Last January, Norway’s public pension plan sold the $200-million stake it held in a Papua New Guinea mine owned by Toronto-based Barrick Gold.

“Pollution from the Porgera mine will potentially have serious negative consequences for human life and health,” it said. In particular, it said the risk of polluting the local environment with dangerous heavy metals, such as mercury, was unacceptably high.

Whether or not Ottawa adopts similar guidelines, the fight over the bill is sure to continue until it reaches final reading, which could happen within four months.

In the meantime mining industry representatives will descend on Parliament Hill Tuesday to meet with political decision makers, as part of an annual event. And Bill C-300 will likely be a popular conversation topic.

“It needs to be defeated — it’s just a debilitating waste of time,” Peeling said. “We should be getting on with more important issues.”

A "fan photo" from Veterans Affairs' "Canada Remembers" Facebook page.

CTV.ca

Every year, the Department of Veterans Affairs in Ottawa organizes a week of activities to jog peoples’ memories in the days leading up to Nov. 11.

A persistent dilemma for the department, which is responsible for pensions and services for war veterans and retired RCMP officers, is how to capture the attention of young Canadians each Remembrance Day.

Wars may seem remote for children and teenagers, particularly if they have no living relatives who have served in the military on overseas missions. And in an increasingly wired world, capturing the interest of tech-savvy youngsters poses a challenge. But it’s an essential demographic in order to keep alive the tradition of commemorating Canadian soldiers who fought and died in wars far from home.

Previously, Veterans Affairs reached out to younger audiences indirectly by providing learning material to their school teachers. It still publishes background information on historical events, such as the campaign to liberate Italy from the Nazis, which teachers can use to instruct their students.

But in an effort to keep up with young Canadians who are spending more of their time online, the department has added a new strategy to the mix.

“We’re taking the message of remembrance to where youth are: social media,” Heather MacDonald, a spokesperson for Veterans Affairs, told CTV.ca. “It’s a big launch for us.”

The department has set up a webpage called “Canada Remembers” on the popular social networking website Facebook. It’s designed to relay details of events surrounding Nov. 11. It also serves as a venue where people can describe what Remembrance Day means to them.

Messages posted on the "Canada Remembers" Facebook page.

As of Friday evening more than 60,000 people had signed on as members of the webpage, a number that had been rising steadily over the past week.

The page houses more than 400 photos posted by users, and countless comments, the overwhelming majority of which were positive.

“I am an ex-British Royal Military Policeman, and was proud to have served with your country’s forces, proud and honourable soldiers, and now have the fortune to live in your great country,” wrote Shaun Hanson. “Exemplo Ducemus. We will not forget.”

Others paid their respects to soldiers sent more recently to Afghanistan.

“Our son, Myles Mansell, was a reservist and volunteered to go to Afghanistan because he thought it was the right thing to do and that maybe he could make a difference in this world. On April 22, 2006, he and three other soldiers were killed,” wrote Nancy Mansell. “We will always be so proud of him and what he was trying to accomplish.”

‘Report’ button still needed

But not all of the comments were so respectful and eloquent. At one point this week, a user appeared to confuse Nov. 11 with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States. Angry users quickly made light of the mistake in a string of vulgar attacks.

The exchange was later removed from the page. And Veterans Affairs, which administers the site, said it is monitoring comments using internal guidelines, and those set by Facebook.

“We want to maintain the open environment found on social media networks, where people feel comfortable about sharing their thoughts on remembrance without being censored,” MacDonald wrote in an email. “However, inappropriate comments or postings that are offensive to and individual or an organization, rude in tone, or abusive will be removed.”

Alex Brown, a Facebook spokesperson in Toronto, told CTV.ca that the company’s staff also investigates reports of inappropriate comments, in line with its terms of service. The goal is “to strike a very delicate balance” that allows users to express their opinions while making sure everyone feels safe, Brown wrote in an email.

This isn’t the first year that Veterans Affairs has tried new mediums to encourage youth to get into the spirit of Remembrance Day. For the past several years the department has also been making Nov. 11-themed temporary tattoos, hoping that they would make a mark on a younger demographic.

But this is the first time the department has tried to harness the Internet to spread Remembrance Day to youth.

Veterans Affairs is also hosting a multimedia contest on its website. Users are encouraged to download photos, videos and audio clips to create “mashups” they can repost on the department’s website, the official Facebook page or the popular video site YouTube.

On television, Veterans Affairs has partnered with MuchMusic and MusiquePlus to get “modern day” veterans, meaning those who have served since the Korean War, in front of younger viewers on Nov. 11.

The show “VideoFlow,” for example, will be devoted to veterans who wish to request a favourite song or deliver a Remembrance Day message, MacDonald said.

Dutch soldiers on a three-day mission to conduct foot patrols through Afghan villages. (ISAF/John Collins, U.S. Navy)

CTV.ca

Next week in Washington, U.S. President Barack Obama will host a summit of European Union leaders to discuss a number of issues, including what to do next in Afghanistan.

Despite the presence of about 70,000 troops under NATO command, the central Asian country has become increasingly violent and unstable. NATO’s International Security Assistance Force has been looking for more troops in order to reverse course.

But NATO nations have so far come up short on offering troops, and now their alliance’s reputation is on the line.

NATO defence ministers met in Bratisalva, Slovakia, last week to discuss the war. They endorsed a recent assessment by ISAF’s commander, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, that tens of thousands of additional troops are needed or NATO will lose to the Taliban.

However, the gathering of defence ministers stopped short of committing more troops. NATO said that discussing “the resource implications” of endorsing McChrystal’s assessment “will follow at a later stage.”

Growing concerns

While NATO’s 28 member countries grapple with how to improve their chances of beating the Taliban, the alliance is facing growing criticism over how the mission has been conducted and whether it can go on for much longer.

The autobiography of Rick Hillier, a retired Canadian general and former chief of defense staff in Ottawa, landed in book stores this week. In it, he provides a written attack on the alliance’s performance in Afghanistan from his time as commander of ISAF.

The mission’s leadership is “abysmal,” he writes. Staff at NATO’s headquarters in Kabul “had no strategy, no clear articulation of what they wanted to achieve, no political guidance and few forces.”

Afghanistan has shown that the alliance has become “a corpse, decomposing,” Hillier concludes. “Unless the alliance can snatch victory out of feeble efforts, it’s not going to be long in existence in its present form.”

Ret. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie, a Canadian who worked with the alliance in the early 1990s while he was in charge of the United Nations peacekeeping force in Bosnia, has voiced similar concerns.

“Forget about bombing Serbia from the safety of 20,000 feet,” he told CTV.ca earlier this month. “Now that we’re having blood being spilled, we have 28 different opinions as to how things should be done. You just can’t run an alliance that way.”

“It’s proven that it’s incapable,” he added.

Experts south of the border are also cautioning that the alliance may not survive its foray into central Asia.

Charles Kupchan, a senior fellow at an influential American think-tank, warned the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Oct. 22 that NATO is at risk of being seen as ineffective.

“Unity of command has proved elusive, as has co-ordination between NATO and EU efforts,” he said. “Moreover, it will be no easy task maintaining the NATO coalition at current levels, with domestic pressure mounting in several member states for winding down of their national contributions.”

The German question

Counterinsurgency experts say it would take a force of 400,000 to 500,000 to secure all of Afghanistan, a mountainous country larger than France or Ukraine. But keeping enough NATO troops on the ground to provide even scaled-back security in urban areas could be an uphill battle:

• Canada has pledged to stop its military operations there by the end of 2010.
• The Dutch parliament passed a motion earlier this month barring the renewal of its Afghan presence.
• And Denmark’s leader recently said his country’s commitment depends on whether Afghanistan’s Nov. 7 presidential runoff produces a credible leader.

Many European countries may follow whatever Germany decides to do. Europe’s most populous country has had a withdrawal plan in place since April, according to security analyst Sunil Ram. It also has the third-largest contingent of soldiers in Afghanistan.

“It’s a tough slog in Germany,” said Dan Hamilton, a NATO expert at the Center for Transatlantic Relations in Baltimore. “The image of German soldiers killing civilians haunts the debate, given their history.”

German forces have been stationed in a few northwest provinces that were relatively quiet until recently, but they’re now engaged in heavy fighting.

Some NATO and German officials have reportedly said the Taliban is targeting Germany, supposedly as a potential weak link in the alliance. Meanwhile, the Bundestag is scheduled to vote on the mission in December.

Winning votes

Obama is said to be waiting for Afghanistan’s political situation to stabilize, before announcing whether he will grant McChrystal’s request for more troops.

Already the U.S. has about as many soldiers in Afghanistan as the other 41 countries participating in ISAF put together. That proportion could rise much higher if Obama sends in more troops and other NATO choose not to, making the alliance look ineffective.

It’s not clear whether that will happen. But the debate over whether to send in more soldiers is creating growing tensions within the alliance, Ram said.

“You have a lot of NATO countries who don’t want to be there. They went in under the impression they were a stabilization force, similar to what they have done in the Balkans — only problem is, they walked into a war,” he said.

Public opinion is divided across Europe, the U.S. and Afghanistan about whether NATO forces should continue the war.

Poll results released in September by the German Marshall Fund, a non-profit group that has offices on both sides of the Atlantic, found that only 37 per cent of Afghans think NATO should remain in their country. Fifty per cent of Afghans polled said NATO forces should leave immediately.

In Europe, two-thirds of respondents said NATO is incapable of stabilizing the country. Even in the U.S., which initiated the war, the poll found that 56 per cent of Americans were optimistic about the mission.

Regardless of public opinion, if NATO fails to stamp out the Taliban it would raise questions about whether Western countries need the alliance at all, Hamilton said.

“(Afghanistan) is the most acute and direct security threat to Europeans and North Americans that we face in the world today,” he said. “If we aren’t able to master our most direct challenge, then what’s the alliance for?”

Canadian soldiers on a road in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Feb. 20, 2009.

CTV.ca

Last week, U.S. President Barack Obama met with his top advisers on the war to decide how to proceed next. That meeting came days after Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the chief U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, issued a report saying the war will be lost unless 30,000 to 40,000 additional troops are sent there.

“We are going to have to do things dramatically differently, even uncomfortably differently,” McChrystal said during a speech in London, England, a day after his meeting with Obama. “We must redefine our fight.”

The U.S. review of the war is causing political fallout across its NATO countries, particularly in Canada, which has the fifth-largest number of soldiers deployed there.

Politicians on Parliament Hill have been saying they would bring Canadian forces home by the end of 2011, upholding a House of Commons motion from last year. But in recent weeks, Conservative leaders have suggested that Canada’s Afghanistan mission will continue, in some form, into 2012 and beyond.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay said on Tuesday that Ottawa is considering “a number of options” on how to assist Afghans after 2011, including keeping Canada’s provincial reconstruction base in Kandahar.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a similar statement during a press conference with Obama in Washington on Sept. 16.

“Canada is not leaving Afghanistan,” Harper said flatly. Instead the mission will move from a predominantly military one to “a civilian humanitarian development mission,” he said.

Ottawa can expect a range of requests from NATO about extending its mission, retired Maj. Gen. Lewis MacKenzie told CTV.ca. And not all of them will be for development purposes. On top of Canada’s 300-member provincial reconstruction team, the alliance may ask for the 150 infantry soldiers who protect them to stay, he said, as well as a helicopter battalion.

As many as 800 Canadian military personnel could continue serving there past 2011, MacKenzie estimates.

Surveying the damage

Yet there’s growing proof that Canadian soldiers, like the rest of the international force there, aren’t just fighting the Taliban or al Qaeda. They’re tackling problems that appear to be cascading with historic force.

The latest report to Parliament on Afghanistan, which was presented last month and covers April through June of 2009, paints a bleak picture. Security conditions “continued to deteriorate.” The number of insurgent attacks during May and June was greater than at any time since the 2001 invasion toppled the Taliban.

The report said Kandahar province, where most of Canada’s soldiers are stationed, experienced an “exceptionally high” number of security “incidents.” And the number of “incidents” with improvised explosive devices jumped by 108 per cent compared to the same period a year earlier.

Canadian Cpl. Shane Taylor waits as other soldiers speak with a local elder in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, Aug. 26, 2008. (ISAF / Staff Sgt. Jeffrey Duran)

Underpinning the violence is the country’s spectacular narcotics industry, which has flourished since the war began. Hilmand province alone produces more illicit drugs than any other country in the world, according to the United Nations.

Some experts fear Afghanistan is becoming a “narcostate” ruled by its opium industry. Narcotics exports are believed to fund the Taliban, at home and in neighbouring Pakistan. Drug money may also be feeding corruption in the Karzai government, which helped derail the country’s recent presidential election.

“How do you fight a war like that with conventional military forces? You can’t,” said Sunil Ram, an international defence and security analyst. Ram doesn’t believe development efforts have been working either, citing NATO’s own assessment.

“It’s fine to show happy Kabul, but the rest of the country is in chaos,” Ram said. An “out of control” rise in drug use among Afghans, he said, is evidence that international forces have failed to rebuild the country.

Searching for purpose

Over the summer, the U.S. more than tripled the number of troops it has stationed in southern Afghan provinces such as Kandahar.

That has allowed Canadian forces to scale back the territory they cover by about 60 per cent. Now there’s an opportunity to more effectively root out the Taliban, keep them from returning and engage in reconstruction, albeit over a smaller area.

But questions linger about the mission’s overall purpose. Former foreign affairs minister Lloyd Axworthy told CTV.ca that the goal of helping to protect civilians has “been mixed up with ‘we’ve got to defeat the Taliban.”

Axworthy said he went to a fundraiser on Sept. 26 for a Canadian woman whose son died in Afghanistan last year. She still wanted to help, and was collecting money to send over a dog trained to de-mine roads.

“You could just tell the tragedy was so deep in her, but she still felt she could do something constructive,” Axworthy said. “I think there are a lot of Canadians who would like to think that they could do that, but I’m not sure what we’re putting out there right now offers that opportunity.”

Axworthy said he would like to see Parliament take a closer look at what Canada is doing in Afghanistan.

“Not in a partisan way, not in a finger-pointing way. But just say, ‘we’ve stuck it out this far, we’ve got a commitment to pull our troops out. But Afghanistan’s not going away. There are things that we may be able to contribute. Let’s find out what they are.’”

A woman walks through the ancient souk (market) at night in Sana'a, Yemen's capital. (Franco Pecchio)

Yemen is under threat from a wave of crises, forcing affluent Gulf states to consider how best to help a neighbor in need. (TRENDS magazine, June-August 2009)

The remote, mountainous stretch of desert between Yemen and Saudi Arabia seems an unlikely place for a political tug-of-war. But for years now, the Saudi government has been trying, in fits and starts, to fortify the 1,300 kilometers of barren land where the two countries meet.

In 2003, Riyadh began building a 10-foot high security barrier there, as part of a drive to crack down on terrorist attacks at home (after Saudi authorities traced explosives from recent attacks back to its southern neighbor).

But Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh argued the fence violated a three-year-old border agreement, so construction stopped. When building resumed briefly in 2008, it reportedly sparked a standoff between Yemeni border guards and Saudi troops.

The border-security issue is still far from settled. Last month, Riyadh was said to be in talks with the German-based aerospace and defense company EADS about a multibillion-dollar plan to make its southern boundary less porous. Details of the plan remain scarce – but Saudi Arabia has clearly become very worried about security threats arising from the tip of the Arabian peninsula.

“Border security on the Yemeni frontier is one of the kingdom’s greatest concerns,” says Christopher Boucek, an associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington.

He believes that Yemen has become infamous in the region, “as a pathway for bad things; if it’s guns, if it’s drugs, if it’s illegal migration, if it’s cash or bombs – everything.”

In stark contrast to neighboring Gulf states – which have been busy setting up new home industries and buying up overseas investments, experts say that Yemen is in palpable danger of becoming trapped in a downward spiral. As that realization dawns on GCC states, it’s changing the way they engage with the Arabian peninsula’s most troubled country.

Culminating crises.

Since north and south Yemen united in 1990, the government in Sana’a has become accustomed to defusing crises. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, Yemen voted against the United Nations using force to repel Iraqi troops, and promptly had much of its foreign aid cut off. In 1994, a civil war broke out in the south that killed thousands of people. And in 2000, al-Qaeda bombed the USS Cole while it was docked at the port of Aden, killing 17 American sailors and curtailing Yemen’s tourism industry – a key economic driver.

But in 2009, Sana’a is facing what many fear is an overwhelming convergence of problems. “Yemenis will say, ‘we’ve been through bad things before and we’ll deal with this.’ But they haven’t had a series of crises culminating at the same point,” Boucek says. “Now two or three or four are all going to culminate at the same time. That’s what makes the current situation so devastating.”

Poverty is a familiar affliction for the country’s 22 million people, 60 percent of whom live on less than $2 a day. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization has dubbed Yemen the Middle East’s most ‘food insecure’ territory. Yet the population is expected to double before 2030, and major cities like Sana’a are running out of water.

To make matters worse, the economy is fending off collapse. Oil, which funds 70 percent of the national budget, is expected to run dry within a decade. Tourism, a second crucial industry, is shrinking as political instability and isolated terrorist attacks keep foreigners from visiting the country’s ancient walled cities, medieval mountain forts and famous mud skyscrapers.

A boy waits in line for food at a Yemeni refugee camp, where people have fled fighting in Sa'ada province, Oct. 9, 2009. (Paul Stephens / IRIN)

President Saleh’s government is also wrestling with three big political problems. A Shi’a Zaidi sect in the north – that Sana’a has accused of conspiring to replace local elected councils with an Islamic imamate government – has been clashing with state-backed forces. Hundreds of people have been killed there since 2004, and thousands more have been displaced.

In the southern governorates, an increasingly vocal – and violent – secessionist movement has created a national crisis over the past few months. In the largest show of unrest since 2006, several hundred thousand people held protests there in March to commemorate the outbreak of civil war in 1994. Many southerners say the central government has marginalized them economically and politically, and one of President Saleh’s former allies, an influential southern sheikh, recently declared his support for the southern-secessionist cause.

Sana’a is taking the situation seriously enough that it recently sent troops and tanks to southern towns. In May, the Ministry of Information also closed down eight Yemeni newspapers that had been covering the sometimes violent rallies, sparking criticism from press freedom groups. President Saleh has also promised new government reforms to allay southern protesters.

“Yemen, Allah forbid, will not divide into two partitions, south and north, but into villages and small states,” Saleh warned at a rally on Apr. 27, in an attempt to diffuse the crisis. “People will be fighting with each other from door to door and from window to window.”

Last but not least, al-Qaeda announced in January that it’s consolidating regional operations on Yemeni soil. Thanks to Riyadh’s success at banishing al-Qaeda from the kingdom, and stoked by extremist fighters returning from Iraq, Yemen is “becoming terror central on the Arabian peninsula,” says Kamran Bokhari, director of Middle East analysis at Stratfor, a US-based global intelligence firm.

Over the past few months, the group has carried out headline-grabbing attacks on foreign tourists. In May, its leader, Naser Abdel Karim al-Wahishi, broadcast a message stating that he supports the country’s southern separatists, and demanding that Yemenis join forces to topple the government in Sana’a.

New relations.

Next door, GCC countries worry that Yemen’s converging problems will bleed across its borders. “They’re very concerned,” says Nicole Stracke, a researcher in the Security and Terrorism Department at the Gulf Research Center, a Dubai-based think tank. “The problem in Yemen is the government basically fights three conflicts – the south, the north and terrorism – and the resources they have are limited,” she adds. “Now with the oil price going down and the recession, their resources are going to be even more stretched.”

Yemen’s resource gap means President Saleh, who has governed the country since 1978, is unable to crack down on many of the criminals who use the country’s ungoverned areas for nefarious ends. Yet al-Qaeda’s local leadership has not just threatened the government in Sana’a, but Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states. “Yemen’s lack of capacity makes it the problem of the next country down the road. In this case, the GCC,” Boucek says. “The concern is, ‘how do we absorb what’s happening there?’”

One way is by throwing money at Yemen’s problems. At a donors’ conference held three years ago in London, the Gulf states pledged $2.5 billion to help bolster Saleh’s government (with Saudi Arabia making the largest donation promise by far). But Sana’a has only received a $12 million of the promised cash, according to the World Bank, mainly because of rampant corruption. Yemen ranked 141 out of 180 countries on Transparency International’s latest corruption index. So once the money leaves donors’ hands there are no guarantees as to how it will actually be spent.

Regional integration is another approach. But ties between the Gulf countries and their south-Arabian cousin haven’t always been strong. In the case of Saudi Arabia, for example, “there is a history of complicated relations” with Yemen, says Letta Tayler, a researcher on terrorism and counterterrorism with Human Rights Watch. “We hope that doesn’t block genuine efforts at cooperation on what is clearly a regional problem and needs regional solutions.”

Relations seem to be improving though. In August 2008, Qatar helped broker a peace deal between Sana’a and Yemen’s restive northern Shi’a Zaidi sect. When a local terrorist group attacked the US embassy in Sana’a last September, killing 17 people, Saudi King Abdullah invited Yemen’s president to Mecca and reportedly promised him support to combat al-Qaeda-linked groups. More recently, Saudi leaders have said they’re with Sana’a “all the way,” and “without reservation.” In May, Oman also revoked the citizenship of a former Yemeni leader for supporting recent protests and calling for an independent southern state.

Arabian countries are taking baby steps to bring Yemen into the GCC, too. In spite of such efforts though, Stracke says it won’t be Yemen’s resource-rich neighbors that decide how its problems play out, but Yemenis themselves. “It’s whether there’s enough capacity within Sana’a,” she says, “not whether the Arab neighbors are doing enough.”

“At the end of the day, you can only pour so much resources into something that has capacity. Can Yemen hold itself together and use external help from neighboring Arab countries to turn things around? That’s the question.”