by JOONEED KHAN
AS Canada kicked out Brian Mulroney’s Tories and brought back the Liberals under Jean Chrétien in November 1993, the new Foreign Minister, André Ouellet, assembled a national brainstorming event on Canadian Foreign Policy early 1994 in Ottawa.
With more than 15 years (then) as international affairs reporter and analyst at the Montreal daily ‘La Presse’, I was invited to participate. I accepted. Canada had plucked me out of Mauritius in 1964 with a Commonwealth scholarship for university studies. I came back as an immigrant in 1970, and became a citizen in 1987 when I was already the proud father of Canadian-born children.
The Cold war had ended in 1989-1990 in the most negative way for me – a native of Mauritius moulded over the 50-year struggle of the Global South for decolonisation, sovereignty, dignity, peace and development.
My teenage years were marked by a struggle against our own Apartheid (Mauritius got one person, one vote only in 1958) – while Algeria fought its war of liberation, and South Africa and Palestine were fighting their very own brands of Apartheid.
Mauritius became independent in 1968, but it remains under ‘Economic Apartheid’. The same is true for South Africa – where only ‘Political Apartheid’ was terminated in 1994. In Palestine, the full-spectrum struggle continues…
GLOBAL SOUTH TRAPPED BY THE COLD WAR
The Cold War had locked the Global South for half a century in the horrible trap of the brutal Est-West conflict – with genocidal wars in South East Asia, the MidEast, Southern Africa, Central and South America. This was compounded by economic domination of the Global North, the Centre, over the Global South, the Periphery. For the South, It was full-fledged ‘under-development’ in progress…
The Global South then, i.e. the overwhelming majority of humanity, looked forward to the end of the Cold War, and to the ‘Peace Dividends’ that would ensue with an earnest pivot to the long-delayed North-South Dialogue – which gained momentum in the context of East-West ‘Détente’ of the 1970s with a series of UN and other reports on global economic disparities.
In tune with Canada’s claim as a ‘peace-keeper’ nation, and a ‘Middle Power’ linked to the Global South through both the Commonwealth and the Francophonie, Prime minister Pierre Trudeau tried a North-South dialogue of his own in the 1980s, as well as an East-West détente ‘Peace Tour’.
TRUDEAU’S ‘CALIBRATED AMBIGUITY’ BREAKOUT
The dynamics culminated with the North-South Summit of Oct 22-23, 1981, in Cancun, Mexico, with Trudeau as co-chair, partnering with Jose Lopez Portillo, President of Mexico.
It was the only North-South Summit ever held. Trudeau kept good relations with Cuba, and he recognized the People’s Republic of China in 1970, nine years before the US. But he kept Canada in NATO, and allowed US cruise missile testing – though he reduced military participation in the alliance.
Trudeau’s other projects bore the same stamp of ‘calibrated ambiguity’.
His 1982 Constitution enhanced Canada’s sovereignty, but kept the British monarch, who came to sign the document, as the country’s Head of State. He rallied the English provinces around the new Constitution – but he alienated Quebec with its French majority.
His Charter of Rights and Liberties increased the power of the (federal) Supreme Court – but it ignored the demands of First Nations for repeal of the 1876 colonialist, racist and apartheidist Indian Act, and for a return to the Treaties their forbears signed with the Crown, and which preserve their sovereign rights over and under land and water.
COLD WAR ENDS, US HEGEMON RESHAPES THE WORLD
Pierre Trudeau resigned in 1984, leaving the field to Brian Mulroney’s Tories who, over two terms, threw Canada’s weight behind ending political Apartheid in South Africa – and behind bringing Quebec back into the Constitution. Trudeau kept silent over South Africa – but he actively helped defeat Mulroney’s Meech Lake Accord.
Trudeau died in 2000, a whole decade after the end of the Cold War. So he saw the US Hegemon, emerging as ‘victor of the Cold War’ and ‘Sole Superpower’, swiftly moved to reshape the World Order.
As early as 1989-1990, the US attacked Panama, entrapped Iraq in Kuwait, started to break up Yugoslavia, and backed the Tutsi 15% minority’s military drive to set up a ‘Black Apartheid’ regime in Rwanda – to better control and loot the fabulous wealth of the martyr nation of DRC-Congo.
The Global South’s hopes of ‘Peace Dividends’ went down the drains, together with one half-century of a World Order founded on the UN Charter, the Human Rights Declaration, the supremacy of Diplomacy over War, and the Conventions intertwined into the architecture of International Law. Both Trudeau and Mulroney, lawyers by profession, kept silent.
GLOBO-COP US ‘KICKS VIETNAM SYNDROME’
Addressing a joint session of Congress on the ‘Gulf Crisis’ on Sept 11, 1990 (while Canada was going through the Oka Golf Crisis), US President George HW Bush Sr said: ‘Out of these troubled times, a new world order can emerge…, a new era of prosperity and peace.’
That was one 9/11, under Bush Sr. Another would follow 11 years later, under Bush Jr.
Iraq insisted it was ready to negotiate and withdraw, but Bush Sr adamantly refused. He was bent on war, which he declared on Feb 23, 1991, and ended on Feb 28, after 100 hours of full-spectrum destruction and massacre, including some 30.000 Iraqi soldiers, civilians, and families from many nations, destroyed on the ‘Highway of Death’ as they were leaving Kuwait AFTER the war had ended!
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