Help for Darfur
Gerry Caplan’s article (“The Genocide Problem,” October) is intelligent, moving, and superbly written. It does not simplify a complex reality; it relates a profoundly human dilemma to the author’s own lived experience. Social ideas and social practices, whose extremes can result in genocide, are slow to change on their own. The challenge lies in making them change faster. The ongoing work of many ngos is to intervene in that long-term process, while also pressing the international community to act when atrocities occur.

The Canadian government also has a role to play. It can support the United Nations and the African Union to help deal with instances of crisis, like those in Burundi, Sudan, and Liberia, building on recent commitments of African leaders to accept responsibility for their individual and collective role in creating an “enabling environment.” Our government can back up that encouragement with money for logistics, civilian protection, disarming, or peacekeeping, in addition to food, water, and shelter for refugees.

Our government ought to make Caplan’s trenchant observations central to its thinking about Canada’s role in the world — not only the “what,” but the “how.” Silence and apathy have built a world in which genocides can still happen. We can and must change that.

Rieky Stuart, Executive Director
Oxfam Canada
Ottawa, Ontario

Frontlines of Terror
I read Stephen Handelman’s article (“The First Responders,” Field Notes, October) with bemusement and concern. Even after 9/11, the image of a “cloak and dagger” confab has a comic ring to it. However, public safety is almost always a moral cause of the highest order. And such causes are often as perilous to pursue obsessively as to blithely ignore.

If one starts from the premise that there is likely a terrorist in every town, it’s hard to picture many safety-driven professionals achieving significant success at operating from within the “state of relaxed tension” called for by Russian special forces’ Major Komarov. As a civil rights lawyer, I for one would feel a little more relaxed in this all-too-interesting age if North Americans banded together and pressured our governments to provide us with regular and credible information about the ongoing multi-billion-dollar deployment of vast and, in many cases, new security powers. What are the authorities doing to both prevent terrorism and protect fundamental freedoms? The recent Independent Commission Report on 9 /11 and the secrecy-stalled Arar Inquiry hint at how sorely the public continues to be served on either count. Therein, I dare say, lies the premise for a walrus-sized “Colorado” conference. Sign me up.

Stephen McCammon
Canadian Civil Liberties Association
Toronto, Ontario