Johnny Htoo, left, a 12-year-old ethnic Karen boy, watches as his twin brother Luther smoke recently. The two boys are leaders of the Myanmar insurgent group God's Army.

20/Dec/2000 Faint hopes in Burma

Monday, January 24, 2000

RATCHABURI, Thailand (CP) - Myanmar rebels armed with guns and grenades crossed into Thailand and seized a hospital Monday, taking an estimated 800 people hostage and demanding doctors treat their injured soldiers.

The rebels, believed to be from God's Army, a Myanmar insurgent group led by 12-year-old twin boys, have been under sustained attack by Myanmar troops for a week at their mountain base near the Thai border. The violence has driven at least 1,000 minority Karen refugees into Thailand.

Interior Minister Sanan Kachornprasart, directing negotiations to end the siege in the western town of Ratchaburi, said the rebels were demanding Thai doctors treat their wounded. They also wanted Thailand to give refuge to their estimated 200 fighters, and stop shelling across the border into Myanmar.

No one was reported to have been harmed, but the rebels, believed to number about 10, tied explosives to the hospital gates and laid mines around the area.

Kachornprasart and Thai army commander Surayud Chulanond both identified the captors as belonging to a rebel group called God's Army, but the rebels did not identify themselves in a statement of demands.

8 August 1996 Myanmar: Human Rights Violations Against Ethnic Minorities

Saturday 27 February 1999

Is Allmand right for the job?
At 66, Warren Allmand, former MP and president of a federal human-rights group, has the enthusiasm, even the idealism, that are often associated with the young. But there are doubts.

MARK ABLEY

Warren Allmand is an activist. He is frustrated by the amount of managing he has been forced to do. It's not his strength.

There have been times, Warren Allmand ruefully admits, when he wondered if he'd made the right decision - the decision, in 1997, to quit politics and take over the presidency of the Montreal-based International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development. Times when he was bogged down in administration. Times when he was taking work home every night and weekends too.

Not to mention the time when, thanks to budget cuts imposed by the Liberal government of which he used to be a member, he used an economy-class ticket to fly from Montreal to Peru and found himself trapped beside an oversized man in the adjacent seat.

But Allmand doesn't stay rueful for long. At 66, he has the enthusiasm, even the idealism, that are often associated with the young. Once he'd landed in Peru, he was taken on a tour of the massive shantytowns that ring the capital, Lima.

"Little kids barefoot in the garbage," Allmand recalls, his voice growing passionate, "picking things out to eat. Rats running around. I couldn't believe it! You wonder how people live in that kind of situation. Talk about human rights!"

The experience left its mark. Allmand is committed to a definition of human rights that extends beyond the merely political. Economic and social rights are also crucial, he insists, even if Western governments - including Canada's - like to say otherwise.

Allmand has, with some regrets, left Parliament behind. But don't imagine for a moment that he's in genteel semi-retirement. His job is one that gives free rein to his crusading impulses. It's also one that comes with a welter of problems - problems that Allmand may not be the ideal person to solve.

Yet what exactly is the centre he runs?

Its staff of 25 (down from 30 three years ago) have several overlapping roles. They are advocates for human rights, often in corners of the world where such campaigns are fraught with danger. They act as witnesses, organizers, grant-givers and publishers. Most important, perhaps, they help more than 100 other groups, mainly in developing countries. What they do not do is give out food, medicine or other traditional forms of foreign aid.

Founded in 1988 as a somewhat unlikely initiative of the Mulroney government, the centre got off its feet in 1990. From the start, its position was anomalous: a creature of the federal government, funded by the government, yet operating at arm's length from Ottawa's demands.

From the start, too, the centre was cursed by an unwieldy name and an equally unwieldy acronym (ICHRDD in English, CIDPDD in French). Its unofficial title quickly became "the Broadbent Centre."

The first president, Ed Broadbent, enjoyed some crucial strengths. Not only had he been a highly respected leader of the NDP; he also held a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and had taught for three years at York University. His activism had a strong intellectual grounding.

The centre was well placed, then, to stand at the forefront of a wider movement in the mid-'90s: to connect its two dominant missions, human rights and democratic development. (The latter term, by the way, implies not only fair elections but also the creation of a vibrant civil society with free association, free speech and the like.) Larger groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as well as the Canadian International Development Agency, began to make structural links of the kind the Montreal centre already stood for.

After a somewhat scattershot approach in the first few years, Broadbent focused the centre's attention on key countries and key themes. Since 1993, it has sought partners and influence in 13 nations (five in Africa, four in Asia, four in the Americas). When a newly elected government in Haiti was creating a truth and justice commission, it was natural for President Jean-Bertrand Aristide to call on the centre's expertise.

Broadbent's strengths, unfortunately, did not include management. When he left in 1996 to pursue research interests of his own, the centre's employees were in the throes of setting up a union. Several of them were exhausted. For months the chairman of the board, Maureen O'Neil, doubled as acting president; from all accounts, she hoped the job would become permanent.

But in the winter of 1997, the Liberal government decided otherwise. To replace Broadbent, a veteran politician long on advocacy skills but short on managerial knowhow, it chose Allmand - a veteran politician long on advocacy skills but even shorter on managerial knowhow.

Allmand had been an MP for 32 years. A cabinet minister in the '70s, he seemed to move left over the years, becoming a rare voice of independence within the Liberal Party - a gadfly in critics' eyes, but a man of singular principle to his many admirers.

By naming Allmand to the Montreal job, the government succeeded both in freeing up a safe Liberal seat for a political newcomer, Marlene Jennings, and in ridding itself of one of its most vocal critics. "In my later years," Allmand says with unusual tact, "I felt less responsible to the party than to the people." He had voted against Paul Martin's 1995 budget because of the cuts it made to social programs.

In retrospect, Allmand assumed control of the centre at the worst possible moment. Having been denied the presidency, O'Neil soon quit as chairman. Budget cuts of 8.3 per cent in successive years left the centre reeling; its $5-million budget was already thinly stretched. The centre lacked a vice-president or office manager.

Allmand found himself having to eliminate staff, scale back publications, make a deal with the newly certified union, reorganize the office - and, in what little time was left, do what he really wanted to do: advocacy work for human rights.

"They told me the job would be 80 per cent advocacy and 20 per cent management," he says now. "In my first year it was exactly the opposite."

Even so, Allmand still found time to engage in a little of the rabble-rousing he is known for. Last spring he served as a judge at a "people's tribunal" in Point St. Charles, when anti-poverty activists took their elected officials to court for "impoverishing the population and undermining the fundamental rights of the individual."

When Allmand did speak out, he sometimes surprised his own staff by the vehemence of his message. Unlike Broadbent, who believed the centre's mandate touched only rarely on domestic issues, Allmand has freely used his role to question the economic and social policies of Canada. His justification is Canada's signature on the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

"I feel it's part of my mandate," Allmand explains, "if Canada is not respecting international human-rights covenants, to criticize Canada as much as any other country.

"I wouldn't get involved in details. I wouldn't say anything, for example, if they were ripping down housing in Old Montreal. But if Canada cuts its budget for public housing and people are living on the streets, then I would say Canada is not living up to its obligations."

Even when Allmand lauds the government, he does so in a revealing way. Remarking that Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy and his department "have done an outstanding job on land mines and on the International Criminal Court," he goes on to say that "the government was like another NGO." For Allmand, that's high praise.

Nor has he toned down his language of condemnation. In a speech last April in Santiago, Chile, Allmand was even blunter and more radical than usual. He described work-force programs for welfare recipients as "akin to slavery." The idea that Western nations can no longer afford generous social programs, he called "total nonsense and pure political rhetoric." The cutbacks in public spending, in a time of economic growth, he termed "disgustingly significant."

Allmand writes his own speeches and revises them up to the last minute. Sometimes his own staff - even, perhaps, Allmand himself - are left to ponder the meaning of what he's said after he has said it. Sometimes his own staff, too, wonder where exactly the centre is heading. Two years into his presidency, nobody has been heard to speak of "the Allmand Centre."

The centre now concentrates on four key themes (women's rights, indigenous rights, justice, globalization). But except for those themes, it still works mainly in the 13 countries that were identified back in the Broadbent era. That means - to Allmand's frustration - that it has partners and programs in Togo, but not in larger, more tumultuous nations like Algeria, Turkey and Colombia. Human-rights groups in those and other countries have asked Allmand for help but, for sheer lack of resources, he has been forced to say "no."

For all its problems, the centre has some prominent backers. Roger Clark, secretary-general of Amnesty International's English-Canadian section, says that it is "active and visible" on several fronts. In Rwanda and Ethiopia - not just Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto - Clark has run into staff members from the centre. He also considers Allmand to be doing an informed and effective job.

Yet Nancy Gordon, deputy executive director of CARE Canada, frankly states, "I'm not aware of what the centre is doing. I think its outreach has been international rather than Canadian. One can defend this quite legitimately - it is, I suppose, noble - but it does mean that Canadians are less informed about the centre's work than they should be."

The centre makes a point of working hand-in-hand with foreign partners: the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, the Andean Commission of Jurists, the Kenyan Centre for Governance and Development, and so on. The aim is not so much advocacy as capacity-building: strengthening such groups to fight their own battles. But Gordon suggests that for maximum impact, the centre should also be willing to forge more partnerships with Canadian groups, hers included.

Lois Wilson, chairman of the centre's board in 1997-8 until she was appointed to the Senate, insists that "the work the centre does is very good. Especially the programming stuff."

But Wilson also notes, with a small chuckle, that "administration is not Warren Allmand's forte." She agrees that the last three years "have been a very rocky time" for the centre. And, like Gordon, she deplores the fact that the centre "is not known across the country. Nobody west of Montreal knows about it, except for a small circle in Ottawa."

The fate of its most recent initiative seems to symbolize both the strengths and weaknesses of the centre. Last fall, after publishing a pair of well-researched studies about ethics and global trade, the centre tried to organize an ambitious two-day symposium on "Human Rights and Ethical Business Practices." It sent out about 1,200 invitations to Canadian companies.

Only 11 agreed to come. "We were going to lose our shirt on it," Allmand says. The meeting was canceled. Yet the centre persevered. It went ahead with a scaled-down, one-day version of the event, which took place Thursday in a downtown Ottawa hotel. "Commerce With Conscience: Options for Business in the Global Economy" had a registration of 100, and a strong list of international speakers. Simon Zadek, who founded the hugely successful Ethical Trade Initiative in Britain, was there; so was Kevin Sweeney, of the Apparel Industry Partnership in the U.S.; so was Magaly Pineda, a well-known activist from the Dominican Republic.

"It's important," says one of the participants, Sharon Maloney, vice-president of the Retail Council of Canada, "to have a forum where different stakeholders get an opportunity to hear and exchange some views. And to do it in a constructive fashion. The challenge a lot of our members are facing - if they have hundreds of suppliers around the world - is to hear what has worked and not worked in the international arena."

Fair enough. But as it turned out, Maloney was virtually alone in representing Canadian business. The Body Shop and Nike Canada sent representatives; other companies stayed away, once again. Most of the 100 participants came from the federal government, unions and NGOs.

"That's indicative of the constituency the centre works with," says Wilson. "But if businesses aren't there, what's the point of a conference like that? It gets to be very one-sided. You've got to cultivate relationships and build up trust."

Yet another challenge for Warren Allmand. Luckily, it's the kind he relishes: anything, it appears, that gives him a forum to voice his heartfelt concerns - and gets him out of the office.

Aung San Suu Kyi, Daw