Canada Finds Starring on World Stage No Easy Role

When Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien announced earlier this month that Canada would lead an international relief effort in Central Africa, he won applause at home and around the world.

But that humanitarian gesture has increasingly become mired in a diplomatic struggle to hold together a skeptical international coalition--a struggle that could undermine Canada’s emerging resolve to enlarge its role on the world stage.

Instead of the swift delivery of food, medicine, supplies and military protection to hundreds of thousands of needy Rwandan refugees, there are endless rounds of meetings, repeated telephone conferences from capital to capital and diplomatic tete-a-tetes at the United Nations.

The United States has already reduced its troop commitment, and other countries are considering the same course as coalition members debate what kind of intervention, if any, is still needed in Rwanda and eastern Zaire.

Meanwhile, Canadian officials continue to plan--while searching for a consensus among the nations offering assistance and trying to hold public attention here and in the United States and Europe.

Canada’s bid to raise its global profile got underway earlier this year. Over the last 10 months, Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy has been looking for issues on which the nation can assert leadership.

He has tried to persuade the Commonwealth countries and the United States to toughen trade sanctions on the dictatorial regime in Nigeria. He hosted an international conference on banning land mines. And Canada has taken the lead in organizing world opposition to the United States’ Helms-Burton law, a controversial measure that seeks to punish foreign companies that do business in Cuba.

Then Chretien stepped forward and offered to lead the multinational mission in Africa.

This assertiveness comes after a period in which, as Axworthy put it in an interview, “everybody’s been groping a little bit to find their feet and see where they’re going in the post-Cold War era.”

For Canada, this has meant a downsizing of overseas commitments and foreign aid, a near-withdrawal from the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and severe shrinkage of its military budget.

In 1994 and ‘95, the first two years of Chretien’s government, foreign policy was directed by Andre Ouellet, a low-profile Cabinet minister who also spent a lot of his energy politicking to keep his native province of Quebec from seceding from Canada.

Under Ouellet, foreign policy shifted heavily toward trade promotion.

Canada was suffering from high unemployment and huge government deficits, and exports were the only fast-growing part of the economy. A country that had always portrayed itself as an international Boy Scout suddenly was stepping up arms sales to Third World dictatorships. Chretien was criticized at home for embarking on extravagant trade missions to Asian nations with spotty human rights records.

In January, Ouellet was dumped in favor of the 56-year-old Axworthy, born in the prairie province of Saskatchewan and educated at Princeton. Axworthy long had been identified with the left wing of the Liberal Party but, along with Chretien, has moved sharply toward the center.

Almost immediately, Axworthy began charting a more activist agenda. One of his first decisions was to initiate a program seeking to identify countries that export products made with child labor--a direct result of one of the controversies that emerged from a Chretien trade mission to the Far East.

At the United Nations, Axworthy has volunteered Canadians for a standby military force to carry out Security Council initiatives and has campaigned for a program in which Canadian civil servants and other volunteers would help emerging democracies run elections; train police officers, judges and journalists; draw up laws and regulations; and develop other democratic institutions.

But the Central Africa mission--if it comes off--is the most ambitious project yet.

Canada is well-suited to the job, Axworthy noted, because it is trusted by African nations as a non-colonial power that has invested millions of dollars in foreign aid in the region. Canada is looking to use its position as a “middle power” that can act as trusted intermediary between the United States and developing nations.

In addition to raising Canada’s esteem in world capitals, the mission is intended to rebuild public confidence in the military.

Canadian forces have participated in virtually every U.N. peacekeeping mission since 1956, but that tradition has been threatened by scandals in which Canadian soldiers have been accused of murder, torture, assault and profiteering on U.N. missions in Somalia and the Balkans. An ongoing public inquiry into the incidents has also implicated top-level officials in the Defense Department in an attempted cover-up.

One Canadian official said the high risks--for Canada as well as the refugees--of a mistake in judgment explains why the government has been patient about the delays.

“I think there’s a real sense of wanting to do the right thing,” the official said Friday. “There’s a lot at stake because of all the complexities of the political situation in the region and the real questions about the situation of the refugees. . . . We’re certainly getting a lesson in the complexities of putting one of these missions together.”