Choosing Sides
Interesting how being everyone's friend turns into no one's interests. Canada, that nice friendly country, cosy with those whose direction, orientation and governance mostly closely reflects her own (hardly surprising) and delicately diplomatic with those whose abuses of governance and human rights places them in quite another sphere of influence and condemnation.Condemned by those states whose recognition of the vital importance of observing and complying with the basic elements of human rights in a participatory humanistic democracy cannot be denied. Influence, nonetheless on other rogue states whose casual denial of the fragility of human rights as an absolute human right places them comfortably among others of their ilk. It seems so often that never the twain shall meet, but in the atmosphere of togetherness of the United Nations they do.
Canada goes out of her way to give support to marginal governments which it hopes to assist out of the mire of human want and degradation, in the process subtly encouraging them to embrace the larger interests of democracy and development toward becoming fairer entities, stretching toward prosperity for its populations. As an instance, Canada's long record of voting against the U.S. embargo on Cuba. Its willingness to trade with China and give it economic support without insisting on improvements on their human-rights record. Until recently.
China, a country which has demonized a sizeable proportion of its population for practising a humanisticly innocuous religion; hounding, jailing, and even murdering its practitioners. This is also a country which has recently admitted that it sells human organs for transplant and profit, those same organs whose origins are the cadavers of political prisoners put to death by the state - including Falon Gong practitioners.
Other instances, that of financial support given directly to corrupt governments in Africa and elsewhere for the purpose of aiding their people in want, hoping that the level of corruption will eventually fall to an acceptable compromise between a dictator's sense of entitlement and the need for the country to prosper, its people's basic human needs looked to. It's a long, sad and sorry haul.
Canada is a prosperous country, blessed with wide open spaces, arable land, beautiful and intensely varied geography, a great abundance of natural mineral resources, corporate and business acumen, an enterprising and hard-working population who share a common vision of fairness, sharing, pride in country. Its government and its people demand no less of themselves that they lend themselves to assisting less blessed countries. Though we could do more, and should.
So when Canada is sufficiently outraged at the lethal force used by another state which holds itself unaccountable to the outside world, even within the precincts of the United Nations fora - for its egregious assaults against basic human rights one might assume it does so with a modicum of confidence in its outcome. Recognition from the world body that no country should be immune to a finger of shame when it destroys peoples' hopes and in the process murders citizens.
Canada's censure of Iran for the incarceration, torture and murder of a Canadian citizen, Zahra Kazemi, did pass the motion for censure. Sufficiently so to rankle the country's "honour" to the point where it launched its own tit-for-tat censure of Canada. The government in Tehran called for the UN to censure Canada over its treatment of aboriginals and immigrants. Although the motion ultimately failed, it's immensely instructive to evaluate Iran's supporters and those who chose to abstain from voting.
Condemning Canada for poor treatment of immigrants would be hilarious if it weren't so frivolously errant as a device for accountability. This is a country of immigrants, people whose desperate search for security of person, improved opportunities and more assured futures for themselves and their children, brought them to Canada as refugees from failed countries.
Much of Canada's attention on an ongoing basis is focused on the seemingly-insolvable needs and problems facing our first nations peoples. It is not for lack of trying that Canada should be censured, and Canada requires no outside interventions to persuade her that there is an intractible internal problem. It is most definitely not a problem of deliberate state-sponsored human rights abuse.
Yet this is all well known, both at home and abroad. The nations voting against the trivial, unsubstantive motion brought forward by a vexed nation whose abuses condemn it unequivocally, were, unsurprisingly, from Western democracies. The European Union, Australia and New Zealand going further by putting it on official record that Iran's anti-Canada draft was clear retaliation as a counter-motion against Canada's successful condemnation of Iran.
Cuba, North Korea, Syria, Myanmar and Belarus supported Iran's draft motion. What an illustrious group of highly respected regimes; dictatorial human-rights abusers, all. Cuba! whom Canada continues to provide political and economic support to, and where Canadians leave hundreds of millions of dollars in tourism revenues. A clique of the outcast countries of the world, condemning Canada for abusive treatment of immigrants and aboriginals.
And there was China, Thailand, Singapore, Barbados, Costa Rica and South Africa, all recipients at one time or another, some on an ongoing basis, of Canadian assistance in politicial, social and economic development.
Like with like.
posted by Pieface @ Sunday, November 26, 2006
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