Lloyd Axworthy: My Life in Politics, is a forthcoming book by Canada’s most liberal foreign affairs minister. The Nobel Peace Prize nominee was a militarist, pro-US, imperialist, as I laid out to an individual who recently contacted me seeking a critical perspective before interviewing the 84-year-old. In charge of Canada’s diplomatic apparatus from the start of 1996 to the end of 2000, Axworthy supported weapons sales to Indonesian general Suharto, the US bombing Sudan and NATO’s war on Yugoslavia.
Worried about protests by the East Timor Action Network and other anti-imperialist groups General Suharto considered cancelling his attendance at the 1997 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Vancouver. Axworthy sent a letter to the long-time dictator making it clear that Canadian authorities would do their utmost to block protesters from embarrassing him. Throughout Indonesia’s brutal occupation of East Timor, which left a quarter million dead, Ottawa let Canadian weapons makers sell their wares to the Indonesian army. Even as protests grew in Canada Axworthy okayed arms permits.
Axworthy defended the US’ illegal bombing of the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical facility in August 1998, which was supposed to be producing chemical weapons. It wasn’t. Echoing US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s statement that “we have a legal right to self-defence,” Axworthy said “when you come into this very murky and very dangerous area of dealing with terrorism, nations have a right to defend themselves.” The bombing left millions of people without medicines and is thought to have caused many unnecessary deaths.
Just after Ottawa supported the US bombing of Sudan, Calgary-based Talisman Oil was heavily criticized for exacerbating southern Sudan’s civil war. To mollify growing protests Axworthy sent a senior foreign policy advisor on Africa, John Harker, to investigate “the alleged link between oil development and human rights violations, particularly with respect to the forced removal of populations around oilfields and oil related development.” The October 1999 federal government-sponsored investigation found that “Talisman was clearly adding to the suffering of the Sudanese people.” The government report continued: “there has been and probably still is, major displacement of civilian populations related to oil extraction. Sudan is a place of extraordinary suffering and continuing human rights violations, even though some forward progress can be recorded, and the oil operations in which a Canadian company is involved add more suffering.” Talisman and other oil companies built an airstrip owned by the Sudanese government, which was used as a base for bombing raids on the southern Sudanese. Talisman also serviced broken military trucks, provided electricity lines to the army’s barracks and piped water to army camps. Beyond providing direct support to the Sudanese government’s military campaign Talisman officials justified the army’s actions. After the government bombed a Norwegian relief agency in the south, the head of Talisman claimed, “the SPLA [Southern guerrillas] puts its camps next to Norwegian hospitals.”
Even after the Harker report found Talisman guilty of supporting the Sudanese government’s brutal tactics, Axworthy described Talisman as “a positive force for change in Sudan.”
Axworthy also backed NATO’s 78 day bombing of Yugoslavia. According to Osgoode Hall Law Professor Michael Mandel, “the first thing to note about NATO’s war against Yugoslavia is that it was flatly illegal both in the fact that it was ever undertaken and in the way it was carried out. It was a gross and deliberate violation of international law and the charter of the United Nations.” Axworthy justified the bombing of Serbia as a humanitarian intervention to save Kosovars, claiming “NATO is engaged in Kosovo to restore human security to the Kosovars.”
Contrary to this characterization of the campaign, NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia spurred the ethnic cleansing they claimed to be curbing. Noam Chomsky writes: “The State Department’s analysis showed that ‘the crimes of Milosevic’s willing executioners’ were not a motive for the bombing: the crimes followed the bombing, according to the State Department’s definitive case against Milosevic, and were precipitated by it, it is only rational to assume.” One of the few scholarly studies that tried to quantify and analyze those killed in Kosovo in the year before the bombing found that Serbs were to blame for 500 of 2000 killed. Robert Hayden, director of the Center for Russian and East European studies at the University of Pittsburgh, noted that “the casualties among Serb civilians in the first three weeks of the war were higher than all of the casualties on both sides in Kosovo in the three months that led up to this war, and yet those three months were supposed to be a humanitarian catastrophe.” Even former Canadian ambassador to Yugoslavia, James Bissett, noted that fewer than 2,000 were killed due to skirmishes in Kosovo between the Serbian army and Kosovo Liberation Army prior to the March 24 bombing. NATO leaders claimed humanitarian motives for bombing Serbia, but their actions were largely driven by frustration with Yugoslavia’s failure to follow US and Western European imposed economic and political changes.
Since leaving office Axworthy has challenged some of Canada’s most egregious foreign policy crimes. He has criticized Israeli violence in Gaza, for instance. But he’s also advocated for a UN trusteeship of Gaza and promoted NATO’s 2011 invasion of Libya.
Axworthy is an important figure in Canadian foreign policy. At the left end of official policy, he highlights the work ahead for those who want an internationalist and humanist minded international policy.
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