As the hagiographies of Stephen Lewis pour in it’s crucial to look at how the famed statesman contributed to Canadian mythology and Jewish supremacist colonialism. From Mark Carney to Charlie Angus, Bob Rae to Steve Paikin, the liberal establishment has praised someone who followed a Marit Styles/Bob Rae career trajectory into a great internationalist. Or as the Globe and Mail obituary blared “Human rights advocate Stephen Lewis fought to alleviate suffering in Africa.”
Until near his end Lewis was deeply anti-Palestinian. As Brian Mulroney’s ambassador to the UN in the mid 1980s Lewis voted against multiple resolutions defending Palestinian rights and as leader of the Ontario NDP he demanded the federal government cancel a major UN conference scheduled for Toronto in 1975 because the Palestine Liberation Organization was granted observer status at the UN the previous year and their representatives might attend (the conference had nothing to do with Palestine). After Canada’s failed bid for a seat on the UN Security Council in 2020 Lewis was still seeking to protect Israel by (absurdly) denying that Canada’s extremist anti-Palestinian voting record at the UN contributed to the country’s defeat.
In my 2018 Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada I devote a section to Lewis, mostly focusing on his contribution to benevolent Canada mythology in Africa. It’s here:
During the tour for my 2015 Canada in Africa: 300 Years of Aid and Exploitation I came across an iPolitics interview with Stephen Lewis on Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s policies in Africa. In it the former UN Special Envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa said Harper’s government was not doing enough to fight the disease in Africa and decried Canada’s withdrawal from the continent. “It’s heartbreaking. You know what Canada could do. You know the difference we could make,” said Canada’s former Permanent Representative to the UN.
But criticizing Harper’s failure to ‘do more’ in Africa was an affront to the victims of Canadian policy on the continent. The Conservatives worked aggressively to increase Canadian mining profits at the expense of local communities and in 2011 they waged an illegal war on Libya, destabilizing that country and surrounding states. Most troubling of all, Harper’s promotion of heavy carbon emitting tar sands and sabotage of international climate change negotiations was tantamount to a death sentence to ever-growing numbers of Africans.
Angered by Lewis’ interview I spent an overnight bus ride from Lethbridge to Nelson researching everything I could find online about someone prominent CBC journalist Paul Kennedy described as a “spokesperson for Africa”. On Africa no Canadian is more revered than Lewis. Though he’s widely viewed as a champion of the continent, the standing of the former Deputy Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reflects the dearth of critical discussion about Canada’s role in Africa. In fact, rather than advancing African liberation, the long-time member of Canadian and UN policy-making circles represents the critical end of an establishment debate oscillating between neo-conservatives who advocate aggressive, nakedly self- interested, policies and those who promote the “Responsibility to Protect”, “do more” worldview.
Recipient of 37 honorary degrees from Canadian universities, Lewis has been dubbed “one of the greatest Canadians ever and certainly one of the greatest, if not the greatest, living today.” Recipient of the Pearson Peace Medal, Lewis has also been described as the preeminent “advocate for international development and the ideal of Canadian traditional values.”
But, “traditional values” don’t seem to include serious criticism of Canadian government policies. Lewis has long bemoaned the lack of “support”for Africa all the while ignoring Ottawa and corporate Canada’s contribution to the continent’s impoverishment. “There’s also a tendency just to discard Africa as no longer of geopolitical value in the world or to engage in the vile slander that Africa is too corrupt to support,” Lewis told a Canadian Club of Toronto lunch in 2006. During his speech the former head of the Ontario NDP called on the business crowd, some of whom led companies extracting the continent’s natural resources, to ‘do more’ for Africa. “The big multinational corporations, whether in Canada or abroad, have been reluctant to make financial contributions [to fight HIV-AIDS],” Lewis said. “The multinational corporations seem to need additional incentives over and above the central prescriptive of corporate social responsibility.”
In Race Against Time, based on his 2005 CBC Massey lectures, Lewis fails to criticize any Canadian policy measure in Africa except for Ottawa’s insufficient aid. Bestowing almost divine like power on Western “aid”, Lewis writes that “if the [aid] promises of the G8 summit fall apart, Africa falls apart with them.”
But the staunch advocate of “aid” appears remarkably uninterested in the often self-interested and harmful character of “aid”. He ignores how Ottawa initially began dispersing aid to African countries as a way to dissuade newly independent countries from following wholly independent paths or falling under the influence of the Communist bloc. A big part of Canada’s early assistance went to train militaries, including the Ghanaian military that overthrew (with Ottawa’s backing) pan-Africanist independence leader Kwame Nkrumah in 1966. Since the 1980s hundreds of millions of dollars in Canadian aid money has gone to support pro-corporate structural adjustment policies and other initiatives benefiting Canada’s rapacious mining industry in Africa.
While only criticizing Canadian policy-makers for not “doing enough” in Africa, Lewis is often withering in his indictment of other countries. Describing South Africa’s poor rollout of AIDS treatments as “obtuse, dilatory and negligent”, Lewis told the New York Times in 2006 “the government has a lot to atone for” and “I’m of the opinion that they can never achieve redemption.”
He levelled even stronger criticism against the Zimbabwean president. In 2009 Lewis described Robert Mugabe as “a man who has sanctioned murder and rape and totalitarianism and economic disintegration; watched a nation haunted by cholera, a country where people living with AIDS now die without access to drugs, more human misery than Shakespearean tragedy could summon, and we tell him, Repent or leave, and you’re off the hook?” While Mugabe was a repressive autocrat, he was re-elected in 2013 and, notwithstanding the Western media uproar, Zimbabwe’s early 2000s land reform broadly succeeded in overturning a historical injustice.
Lewis also aggressively criticized Chinese policy in Africa, claiming its investments fuelled corruption and rights violations. “There is no justification in the world for Darfur continuing as it has been”, Lewis proclaimed in 2008. “It’s just beyond the pale. The critical thing here is to go after the government of China and to make sure that they understand that this is going to be the Genocide Olympics, as it has been termed. What China is doing is sustaining the government of Sudan in an unholy alliance, wrecking the lives of the people in Darfur.” (As part of Israeli lobby group Hillel’s 2004 Holocaust Education Week, Lewis delivered a lecture at the University of Toronto titled “Never Again: The Crisis in Sudan”.)
While Beijing backed a regime in Khartoum responsible for substantial human rights violations (though less than some claim), I searched in vain for a similar comment from Lewis about US/Britain/Canada support for Paul Kagame in Rwanda. More dependent on Washington/London/Ottawa than Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir was on Beijing, Kagame’s invasions of the Congo triggered several times more deaths than the highest estimates of those killed in Darfur.
Lewis’ tendency to fire rhetorical bombs at geopolitical competitors and verbal pellets at Canadian policymakers reflects the long-time politician’s deference to the Ottawa/ West perspective. So does his claim that Ottawa led the charge against apartheid South Africa. Compared to whom? African countries? Asian states? Latin America? When Nelson Mandela died in 2013 Lewis was widely quoted as saying South Africa’s first democratically elected president was struck by “the intensity of our opposition to apartheid” and “the extraordinary role that Canada had played in fighting apartheid.”
But African countries began calling for the isolation of apartheid South Africa in the late 1950s, with many Canadians adding their voice to these calls through the 1960s, 70s and early 80s. Yet, the Brian Mulroney government only brought in (partial) economic sanctions against South Africa in 1986. From October 1986 to September 1993, the period in which economic sanctions were in effect, Canada’s two-way trade with South Africa totalled $1.6 billion — 44 percent of the comparable period before sanctions (1979-1985). Ottawa never cut off diplomatic relations as did Norway, Denmark, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, etc. To the extent the federal government deserves praise it is that it took a more principled position towards the apartheid regime than erstwhile allies London, Israel and Washington. Or, to put it differently, it was the best of a bad lot.
His response to Mandela’s death is but one example of Lewis celebrating Canadian foreign policy. Race Against Time is peppered with praise for Canadian diplomats, lauding Canada’s role in fighting for gender equality at the UN, dubbing businessman-turned diplomat Maurice Strong “the ultimate ubiquitous internationalist” and exalting in “our own Lester Pearson … who negotiated with other Western governments the benchmark of 0.7% of GNP as the legitimate level of foreign aid for all industrial countries.”
Asked “who was the best on African AIDS policy?” by the National Review of Medicine in 2008 Lewis responded: “Paul Martin, overwhelmingly. Chrétien, I got the impression he felt for Africa but I don’t think it was around AIDS more than a pro forma commitment, but Paul Martin had a very genuine and intense commitment and, had he had more time, I think that commitment would have continued to show itself. I don’t get any sense from Harper — none whatsoever. The prime minister who cared most about Africa and did the most in development systems and foreign aid was unquestionably Brian Mulroney and he gets insufficient credit for his very real commitment to the continent.”
Surely Lewis knows that the Mulroney government, which he represented as Canadian ambassador to the UN for four years, pressed African countries to follow neoliberal economic prescriptions and spent tens of millions of dollars in “aid” to promote International Monetary Fund/World Bank structural adjustment programs across the continent. As Lewis correctly points out in Race Against Time structural adjustment policies devastated the health and education sectors of many African countries. But, Ottawa’s extensive support for structural adjustment is ignored in Lewis’ book.
Lewis endorsed the Canadian promoted Responsibility to Protect doctrine used to justify the 2011 NATO war in Libya, which he publicly backed, and the 2004 overthrow of Haiti’s elected government. In Race Against Time Lewis describes R2P as a “particularly Canadian contract”, claiming that if it had been in place in the 1990s there “might not have been a genocide” in Rwanda. In another speech Lewis describes R2P thusly: “It simply means that when a government is unable or unwilling to protect its citizens from egregious violations of human rights, then the international community has the responsibility to protect. That responsibility can be exercised through diplomatic or political pressure, or economic boycott or, in extreme cases, military intervention. But something has to trigger. It would be a great boon if the United States were to insist on the implementation of R2P in instances like the Congo and Zimbabwe.”
Lewis expressed trust in US military interventions on other occasions. When criticizing Washington for not intervening in Rwanda he highlighted “the moral legitimacy of the United States … at many times in its history.”
While Lewis generally crafts his positions to fit the dominant discourse, a 2000 Globe and Mail opinion piece provides a strikingly direct sop to a major media outlet’s anti- Africanism. Responding to the Globe editors’ criticism of a report they published on Rwanda, Lewis and his “close friend and alter ego of nearly 50 years”, Gerald Caplan, write: “We agree that Africa too often and too blithely has blamed its problems on external factors.”
If Africans are too quick to blame others for their problems Lewis is guilty of a much worse offense — overlooking his own country’s role in subjugating the continent. I failed to find any comment on the many thousands of Canadian soldiers and missionaries who helped conquer the continent or undermine African cultural ways at the turn of the 19th century. Nor does Lewis seem to have mentioned official Ottawa’s multi- faceted support for European colonial rule or Canada’s role in overthrowing progressive post-independence leaders Patrice Lumumba, Milton Obote and Kwame Nkrumah.
While ignoring his own country’s destructive role on the continent, he portrays himself as challenging power. “I am a Canadian speaking in my own country, delivering the Massey lectures,” Lewis declares towards the end of Race Against Time. “I’m putting the self-imposed muzzle aside.”
Lewis’ effort to “muzzle” any question of the official version of the Rwanda genocide and ideological support for Paul Kagame’s regime is what history will judge most harshly (in 2009 a Rwandan media outlet described Lewis as “a very close friend to President Paul Kagame.”). In 2014 he signed an open letter condemning the BBC 2 documentary Rwanda’s Untold Story. The 1,266 word public letter refers to the BBC’s “genocide denial”, “genocide deniers” or “deniers” at least 13 times. Notwithstanding Lewis and his co-signers’ smears, which gave Kagame cover to ban the BBC’s Kinyarwanda station, Rwanda the Untold Story includes interviews with a former chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), a former high-ranking member of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda and a number of former Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) associates of Paul Kagame. In “The Kagame-Power Lobby’s Dishonest Attack on the BBC 2’s Documentary on Rwanda”, Edward S. Herman and David Peterson write: “[Lewis, Gerald Caplan, Romeo Dallaire et al.’s] cry of the immorality of ‘genocide denial’ provides a dishonest cover for Paul Kagame’s crimes in 1994 and for his even larger crimes in Zaire-DRC [Congo]. … [The letter signees are] apologists for Kagame Power, who now and in years past have served as intellectual enforcers of an RPF and U.S.-U.K.-Canadian party line.”
As Deputy Executive Director of UNICEF in the late 1990s Lewis was appointed to a Panel of Eminent Personalities to Investigate the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda and the Surrounding Events. Reportedly instigated by US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and partly funded by Canada, the Organization of African Unity’s 2000 report, “The Preventable Genocide”, was largely written by Lewis recruit Gerald Caplan.
While paying lip service to the complex interplay of ethnic, class and regional politics, as well as international pressures, that spurred the Rwandan Genocide, the 300-page report is premised on the unsubstantiated claim there was a high level plan by the Hutu government to kill all Tutsi. It ignores the overwhelming logic and evidence pointing to the RPF as the most likely culprit in shooting down the plane carrying Rwandan Hutu President Juvénal Habyarimana and much of the army high command. This event sparked the mass killings of spring 1994.
The report also rationalizes Rwanda’s repeated invasions of the Congo, including a 1,500 km march to topple the Mobutu regime in Kinshasa and subsequent re-invasion after the government it installed expelled Rwandan troops. That led to millions of deaths during an eight-country war between 1998 and 2003.
In a Democracy Now interview concerning the 2000 Eminent Personalities report Lewis mentioned “evidence of major human rights violations on the part of the present [Kagame] government of Rwanda, particularly post-genocide in the Kivus and in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.” But, he immediately justified the slaughter, which surpassed Rwanda’s 1994 casualty toll. “Now, let me say that the [Eminent Personalities] panel understands that until Rwanda’s borders are secure, there will always be these depredations. And another terrible failure of the international community was the failure to disarm the refugee camps in the then-Zaire, because it was an invitation to the génocidaires to continue to attack Rwanda from the base within the now- Congo. So we know that has to be resolved. That’s still what’s plaguing the whole Great Lakes region.”
An alternative explanation of “what’s plaguing the whole Great Lakes region” is US/UK/Canada backed Ugandan/RPF belligerence, which began with their invasion of Rwanda in 1990 and continued with their 1996, 1998 and subsequent invasions of the Congo. “An unprecedented 600-page investigation by the UN high commissioner for human rights”, reported a 2010 Guardian story, found Rwanda responsible for “crimes against humanity, war crimes, or even genocide” in the Congo.
Fifteen years after the mass killing in Rwanda in 1994 Lewis was still repeating Kagame’s rationale for unleashing mayhem in the Congo. In 2009 he told a Washington D.C. audience that “just yesterday morning up to two thousand Rwandan troops crossed into the Eastern Region of the Congo to hunt down, it is said, the Hutu génocidaires.”
A year earlier Lewis blamed Rwandan Hutu militias for the violence in Eastern Congo. “What’s happening in eastern Congo is the continuation of the genocide in Rwanda … The Hutu militias that sought refuge in Congo in 1994, attracted by its wealth, are perpetrating rape, mutilation, cannibalism with impunity from world opinion.”
If, according to Lewis, the South African government “can never achieve redemption” for its AIDS policies in the mid-2000s the same must be said of his ideological support for Kagame whose repeated invasions of the Congo have left millions dead.
Contrasting the ‘left’ reputation of Lewis in international affairs with his contentious history inside the domestic left reveals a great deal about the state of foreign policy discussion. As head of the Ontario NDP, Lewis purged the Waffle (or Movement for an Independent Socialist Canada) from the provincial party in 1972. At the time many leftists criticized his role in expelling the Waffle from the party and some activists remain critical of Lewis for doing so to this day. In an article titled “On the 40th anniversary of the expulsion of the Waffle” Michael Laxer eviscerates Lewis for driving activists from the NDP. While his move to expel the Waffle continues to be debated, criticism of Lewis largely dried up as he shifted towards the international scene (as Canada’s ambassador to the UN, UNICEF Deputy Executive Director and UN Special Envoy for HIV-AIDS in Africa). Yet, I believe most progressives, if they understood the implication of his positions on Africa, would find more common ground with Lewis’ domestic positions. On domestic policy Lewis has at times forthrightly criticized Canada’s power structures, broadly supports labour against capital and would largely reject charity as a model of social service delivery/poverty alleviation. But, there’s at least some culture of holding politicians/ public commentators accountable for their concessions to the dominant order on domestic issues so Lewis has faced some criticism. On Africa the situation is quite different. When it comes to the ‘dark continent’ any prominent person’s charitable endeavour, call for increased “aid” or criticism of a geopolitical competitor is sufficient to win accolades.
In an article titled “Africa in the Canadian media: The Globe and Mail’s coverage of Africa from 2003 to 2012” Tokunbo Ojo provides an informative assessment of the paper’s coverage of Lewis. Ojo writes, “built into this moralising media gaze is the ‘white man’s burden’ imagery, and the voice of Canadian Stephen Lewis, a campaigner against HIV/ AIDS, effectively symbolised this imagery in the coverage. Metaphorically, Lewis was framed as the iconic [19th century liberal missionary] ‘David Livingstone’ in campaigns against HIV/AIDS in Africa. About 20 per cent of the 109 HIV/ AIDS stories published between 2003 and 2008 featured quotes from him or featured him as the subject of the story.” (The Globe and Mail’s Stephanie Nolen won the 2004 National Newspaper Award for international reporting in recognition of her coverage of Lewis’ campaign against HIV/AIDS in Africa.)
I found only one other comment critical of Lewis’ role in Africa. In the rather tame book Canada and Africa in the New Millennium: The Politics of Consistent Inconsistency Dalhousie professor David R. Black writes, “in so far as Lewis continues to attract and hold the support of those who might otherwise be inclined toward a more radical challenge to their own government, and to the global order it contributes to and benefits from, he can perhaps be seen to alleviate the possibility of such a challenge and in this sense contribute, paradoxically, to the persistence of the very order he is so elegantly critical of.”
While I don’t share Black’s characterization of Lewis’ criticisms of the dominant “order”, the broader point is correct. Lewis’ positions are generally an obstacle to those who believe Canadians have a responsibility to challenge their institutions contribution to African subjugation. They also hinder people’s understanding of Canadian policy on the continent.
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