FAIT Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES ET DU COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, May 2, 2000

• 0937

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Bill Graham (Toronto Centre—Rosedale, Lib.)): We're going to start. We're having trouble getting this power point operation going.

The vice-chair from the Canadian Alliance has been harassing me for starting late, then he's taken three minutes of the opening to chat across the room. What kind of lack of discipline is this in this committee?

An hon. member: Recall.

The Chair: Yes, recall.

We're going to go in a little different order from what we'd originally planned so we can accommodate the setting up of the power point system.

Colleagues, I just want to share a story with you that I think you would find interesting. During the break I happened to be in New York with the minister at the Security Council. While I was there we were discussing sanctions. As you know, the Security Council was negotiating the issue of sanctions, particularly the sanctions on Iraq.

I happened to speak to the Secretary General of the UN, Mr. Kofi Annan, who specifically thanked me for the committee's report on sanctions. He came over to me and, much to the ambassador's total amazement, said, “Mr. Graham, I want to thank you for your committee's report. It was very helpful to us in getting an understanding of where politicians are thinking about these issues. We in the secretariat are very grateful.” He asked me to tell the members of my committee.

I just want to tell you that it's fairly good when the work we do here ends up influencing the thinking of the Secretary General in New York. Some of these things we do are perhaps sometimes worth while.

So congratulations to everybody for the work we did on that. It was a difficult issue to work on, but I think in the end it was very worth while.

• 0940

Secondly, we're continuing our briefings on the Caucasus trip. I want to apologize to all the members about the confusion about this trip. It's been very difficult to organize, believe me. I'd like to say it's the fault of the opposition, but it's not their fault. The problem is that we can only have as many Liberals go as opposition members go. We haven't a Conservative willing to go, we lost our NDP member, and I understand perhaps even Mr. Mills is having some problems. So we're working as hard as we can to make sure we have a balance.

Mr. Grewal has been extremely helpful in trying to help us, so I'm not complaining. And the Bloc has been very helpful. But it has meant that we haven't been able to accommodate as many Liberal members as we'd like, so we may come to the opposition and ask you if you'll at least make sure that if someone like Mr. Mills backs out we can perhaps get somebody to pair so at least we can do something.

Mr. Grewal, did you want to speak to that?

Mr. Gurmant Grewal (Surrey Central, Canadian Alliance): I know your party likes to travel, so you can carry more members from the Liberals. We will still have a seven-member majority in the House, so what is the problem if they can travel more? They can lose more members.

The Chair: I'm sorry you had to introduce the “love to travel” stuff. I don't think this trip is a love trip.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: I was just kidding, Mr. Chairman.

The Chair: The problem is, of course, we're not the only ones. Ministers and others are going to be away. Anyway, the rule is it has to be the same number, so we'll all try to help each other as much as we can.

I think it's going to be an important study, so I appreciate the help that all the members have given. I'm just apologizing to all the individual members about the complexity of getting the visas, of trying to understand who is going. It's not been easy.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: Mr. Chairman, as you know, the problem is that we actually have a leadership race going on.

The Chair: I understand that.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: And there are a few other things going on with the Canadian Alliance, so it becomes difficult for us to take members out for 10 days.

The Chair: I perfectly understand that. I understand that everybody has some other reasons.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai (Calgary East, Canadian Alliance): What will happen in the end? If five opposition members go, would that mean five Liberals would go?

The Chair: We're hoping perhaps you might be willing, and perhaps the NDP might be willing, to pair somebody in the absence, which would allow more people to go. We could work on it that way.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Perhaps if you buy my lunch, we could work on it.

The Chair: Yes, it's worth a lunch. I'll buy you lunch.

So there we are. We're going to start. Our apologies to the witnesses for keeping them waiting.

We have Dr. Carment here, who is with the Norman Paterson School and whom we often have before the committee. Thank you very much for coming and joining us today.

We have Professor Neil MacFarlane, who is actually at Oxford University. Thank you very much for coming so far, Mr. MacFarlane.

We have Dr. Patrick Armstrong, who is with the Department of National Defence but is here in his personal capacity as a lover of central Asia, I guess, or as someone who is knowledgeable about central Asia. He is not speaking on behalf of the department.

So we'll start with Dr. Carment.

Professor David Carment (Country Indicators for Foreign Policy Project, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University): Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I want to thank the committee for inviting me as well as other people who could not be here to participate in this presentation.

What the Country Indicators for Foreign Policy team has done is compile the set of indicators on the economic prosperity, the regional stability and the political viability of the Caucasus and central Asia.

I'm going to take you through about 20 or so slides, time permitting, evaluating the different indicators and looking at the various performances of the countries in question.

The CIFP team has put together a data set that is now available on the website at Carleton University. We've selected a variety of indicators based on that data set.

In addition to that, I've put together the presentation, for those who might be interested, in French as well as in English. If you want a copy of the presentation as well as the methodology involved in the collection of the data and its presentation, I can make those diskettes available to you.

We have gathered data from open-source information. We've presented it, hopefully, in a meaningful fashion so that it can be easily interpreted and it is accessible. The data is collected from reputable statistical sources. It's presented in a quickly assessable fashion, and all indices, for our purposes, are converted to bar graphs or pie charts for ease of interpretation.

• 0945

Today we're going to be examining a subset of indicators from the data set, focusing on the three pillars of Canadian foreign policy, namely, economic prosperity, global stability, and Canadian values.

You see here a more defined version of the data set, including demography, economics, military capability, political climate and internal stability, risk and conflict potential, social development, human security, and the environment. All this data is available for download at the CIFP website.

Today we're going to examine a variety of indicators for Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Before beginning, I should point out that in no way am I an expert on the region. Rather, my purpose here, as I understand it, is to present indicators and interpret them for you. I'm open to questions from the committee regarding the value of these indicators that I present to you.

For comparative purposes, we've added—

The Chair: [Inaudible—Editor]...members of the committee. We're expert at some times, but not at others.

Prof. David Carment: Hopefully they can provide some value-added in their questions.

The Chair: Okay.

Prof. David Carment: I understand you're also visiting Turkey on your trip. The data for Canada and Turkey has been added so that we can make some comparative evaluations.

Let's take a look at the three pillars of Canadian foreign policy: the promotion of prosperity and employment, the protection of our security within a stable global framework, and the projection of Canadian values and culture.

We'll begin with economic prosperity. Our first indicator is really GDP per capita, the methodology for which you should have in front of you. Roughly what we're looking at is the total output of goods and services for final use produced by an economy, by both residents and non-residents, and then converted to U.S. dollars on the basis of the purchasing power parity exchange rate.

In looking at the initial bar graph, we find that by and far Canada has obviously the highest GDP per capita. We also note that since 1994—the data begins roughly in 1994 and it is current to 1999—there has been some modest increase in the last year or so, although GDP per capita has been in decline since 1994. When we look at the evaluation of the data within the region itself, excluding Canada and Turkey, we see that Tajikistan ranks as the poorest country on GDP per capita, whereas Kazakhstan is the wealthiest. And returning back to the previous indicator, we see that Canada has roughly a GDP ranging between $19,000 and $22,000 U.S. and Turkey's GDP per capita is about a third of that.

We now turn to the human development index. The HDI is a simple average of three indicators: longevity, as measured by life expectancy at birth; educational attainment, as measured by a combination of adult literacy, which has a two-thirds weighting, and the combined gross primary, secondary, and tertiary enrolment ratio; as well as the standard of living and a measure of GDP per capita. When we compare Canada and Turkey with the countries within the region, what we know here is that whereas Canada ranks the highest, with an HDI ranking of 1, as you probably know, the countries within the region range between 0.6 and 0.8.

Within the region we can see that Kazakhstan—

The Chair: Can I stop you? Just to give some meaningfulness to that, what would be the lowest ranking in the world of the human development index? How far down does it go?

Prof. David Carment: The lowest ranking would be near zero. I don't have the countries that fit within that ranking.

Ms. Diane Marleau (Sudbury, Lib.): [Inaudible—Editor]... I'm not sure if it's the lowest, but....

The Chair: Oh, really? So there are countries that are way below this.

Ms. Diane Marleau: Yes.

Prof. David Carment: This table provides you with a basis for making that evaluation. Although we don't have the names of the countries in the lowest HDI ranking, there are approximately 35 countries in that category, whereas the countries within the region fit within the medium human development index, and there are 94 countries in that category. Canada ranks highest, and there are an additional 44 countries in that category. Within that mid-range HDI, you can see Kazakhstan ranks the highest and Tajikistan the lowest.

• 0950

Returning to the previous graph, which you should have in front of you, you can see the HDI index has been in modest decline, but there has been recent improvement within the last year or so.

Turning to the next slide, our pillar two is global stability. We have here proximate indicators that tell us something about the regional stability of central Asia and the Caucasus.

We've tried to tap into the effect certain factors have on regional stability, and we included in this category refugee flows. One has to take this category with a grain of salt, of course, because not all refugee flows are associated with instability. Nevertheless we can take from the first indicator, drawn from UNHCR total populations of concern by country of asylum and residence, that most countries in the region have provided refuge to much fewer than 200,000 persons on an annual basis over the course of the last five years, and furthermore that the rate of refugees is decreasing.

However, Azerbaijan, not surprisingly, involved in a regional conflict with Armenia, has been home to the highest number of refugees on an annual basis and also to the highest total number of refugees accepted, followed by Armenia, Georgia, and then Canada.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: That is the number of refugees coming into Canada? Is that what you're talking about?

Prof. David Carment: Seeking asylum or granted asylum and taking up residence in Canada.

Our second indicator is minorities at risk. This is taken from a data set called Minorities at Risk. This tries to evaluate the number and the kinds of groups that are engaged in politically mobilized ethnic rebellion or protest, and occasionally violence as well.

This bar chart is telling us that Kazakhstan, in terms of percentage of total population, has the highest number of minorities at risk, almost 40%. Armenia, on the other hand, has the least number of minorities at risk, in fact fewer than 100,000 by population weight. They don't figure in the Minorities at Risk data set at all. And there's a range of countries between. You can see that Canada, according to the Minorities at Risk data set, ranks around 25% of its total population as having minorities at risk.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Which minorities are you talking about?

Prof. David Carment: As defined by the Minorities at Risk data set, there are three minorities at risk in Canada.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Aboriginal?

Prof. David Carment: I could either go into it or just gloss over it, but for the sake of time, I would ask that we take this up at a later date afterwards.

The Chair: I guess what we'd like to know is, when you say “minorities at risk”.... In a country, for example, that has a lot of minorities but where they are well treated and well protected, would they be defined as minorities at risk just because they're minorities?

Prof. David Carment: No, no.

The Chair: Is this just an indication that there are lots of minorities, or is this an indication that the existence of those minorities is threatened?

Prof. David Carment: The claim of the Minorities at Risk data set is that these peoples are threatened by a variety of actions.

The Chair: Cultural assimilation or something?

Prof. David Carment: Assimilation, integration.

The Chair: Okay.

Prof. David Carment: But it's more important to understand the activity in which the minorities are engaged to achieve their political ends, rather than whether they are considered at risk by the state or from the state.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Let me get this clarification. You're calling assimilation a risk?

Prof. David Carment: It's an activity that can lead to political protest or rebellion.

The Chair: Okay. We'll follow this up later, but at least we understand what you're saying. It's not just the existence of minorities; it's whether or not their survival as a clearly distinct society is—

Prof. David Carment: Since we've sparked some debate here, I will point out that the Minorities at Risk data set is the data set that has been used by the CIA in its development of a state failure report to evaluate the possibility that a state will be affected by ethnic war and cleavage.

• 0955

The Chair: Right, I understand.

Prof. David Carment: But here we are also trying to tap into the divisions within a society and the degree of rebellion and violence based on repression, and here we have a slightly different ranking. All we've done here is taken the number of minority groups and their weighting by the population to come up with a rough indicator of the degree of cleavage within a society.

We see that Azerbaijan ranks highest, with 90%, followed closely by Kazakhstan, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. It should be pointed out that most of these countries have a population exceeding 25% in which their minorities are in a state of rebellion or protest. And I use that word “protest” cautiously, not just rebellion.

Mr. Sarkis Assadourian (Brampton Centre, Lib.): The zero number, has that also to do with your previous chart, where it says “Not at risk”, because it does identify the numbers?

Prof. David Carment: Yes, exactly. But I should point out that if a minority is less than 100,000, then it is not included in the data set. It has to at least exceed 100,000 in population.

Mr. Sarkis Assadourian: Are you talking about total minorities or certain ones?

Prof. David Carment: Minorities at risk.

Mr. Sarkis Assadourian: [Inaudible—Editor].

Prof. David Carment: In Armenia?

Mr. Sarkis Assadourian: Yes.

Prof. David Carment: They would not be included in this particular data set. If you wished to consult the raw figures for which all minorities are included, you would have to go to the CIA intelligence world fact book. They would include all categories regardless of weighting and population.

Mr. Sarkis Assadourian: Thank you.

Prof. David Carment: All right.

I was told I would have only ten minutes. I appreciate questions, and I don't mind taking them, but if it means losing some nuance, I'd rather not do that.

Defence expenditures are a third category of proximate indicator of global stability, and for our purposes regional stability. We've taken data from The Military Balance, a fact book of data on defence expenditures. We're trying to pull from here the comparative expenditures over a five- or six-year period.

On an absolute scale, these expenditures pale beside Canada and Turkey. We can see that Canada, in white, and Turkey, in green, far exceed those of the other countries in question. However, turning to within the region, excluding Canada and Turkey, there has been a small but obvious increase in defence expenditures across the board. No state has declined in relative terms. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, the pale blue and the dark blue respectively, rank the highest on a yearly basis, followed by Armenia. Canada and Turkey are much lower.

To give you some basis for drawing that conclusion, we see here defence expenditures as a percentage of GDP. There has been an overall general trend upwards. The two lowest points on this graph are those of Turkey and Canada.

Pillar three is Canadian values. We were asked to collect data on various international conventions reflecting certain labour standards. We culled the data sets, and we found very few reliable data sets that would tell us something about labour standards. On the other hand, we were able to take a look at the actual conventions themselves and determine the countries within central Asia and the Caucasus that have signed on to these various agreements.

• 1000

So we've collected for you five conventions and indicated whether or not the states you are visiting will have signed on to these specific labour standards. These include the freedom of association and protection of the rights to organize, the rights to organize in collective bargaining, the abolition of forced labour, discrimination, and minimum age.

The important point is obviously that these are conventions. They are non-enforceable, but nevertheless they give us a general sense of which countries are on board and which are not. For our purposes it's important to note that Turkey, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have all signed on to all of these conventions.

Now I'm going to take you through some somewhat complex approximations of whether a state is what we might call democratic or expresses democratic values versus autocratic values. What we did here is we tapped into a data set called Polity III. It tells you something about the range of democratic freedoms within a state as opposed to autocratic indicators within a regime for the last five years.

The democracy scores measure the general openness of political institutions based on competitiveness of participation, executive recruitment, and the number of executive constraints. The autocracy score is based on the same measures in addition to the regulation of participation. The point here is that states can score on both categories. That is, they may reflect both autocratic values and democratic values.

Looking at the three bar charts or graphs, we see that there are three states that have been in flux since 1994. These are what we might call incoherent or shifting democracy-autocracies: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Where you get that crossover point, red reflecting autocracy scores and blue democracy scores, that indicates some shift or major change in regime type for that particular year. These are unstable, incoherent democracies, in other words.

The Chair: Kazakhstan was a consistent autocracy, I do hope.

Prof. David Carment: It shifted over in 1994. I'll leave it to the regional experts to explain why that might be the case. It's most likely associated with war or incoherence during regime change.

Those states reflecting democratic values with low levels of autocracy include Canada, Turkey, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. On the other hand, what we're looking at here are states with extreme autocratic measures. Those would include Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. They have scored high on the autocratic scale and low on the democratic scale for the past six years. Here we see, for comparative purposes, Turkey and Canada scoring high on the democratic scale and low on the autocratic scale.

Finally we come to respect for human rights, political rights, and civil liberties. What we did here was collect a variety of information that allowed us to tap into whether a state was considered to be free, partly free, or not free, using Freedom House data. We also wanted to determine whether these states were expressing civil liberties consistent with Canadian values. Those whose ratings are between 1 and 2.5 are generally considered free; 3 to 5.5 are partly free; and 5.5 to 7 are not free. Each of the two indices we're looking at is measured on a one-to-seven scale, with one representing the highest degree of freedom and seven the lowest.

This chart and the one I'll show in a moment basically confirm what we saw in the previous slides. That is, there are low civil and political rights found in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. Since we have a time series evaluation here, we can see that, for example, Tajikistan scores seven for 1993 to 1997, and Turkmenistan almost entirely sevens, and Uzbekistan. These are states that are considered not free. There seems to be no apparent shift toward greater freedoms in these states, whereas, consistent with our previous finding, there was some incoherence or partial freedom in the other countries—Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, for example.

• 1005

You'll note that Canada scores one on this scale, and Turkey anywhere between three and four.

In regard to civil liberties, similarly, confirming what we found before, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan score the highest in lack of freedoms.

Finally, we have a time series analysis here, and you can see this more clearly. Again, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan are all considered not free by the Freedom House ranking. Kazakhstan follows closely behind.

That brings to a close my very brief presentation. Obviously I couldn't do justice to the data, or to your questions, and I appreciate the time you've given me today. Just for your purposes, if you're interested in following this up, I will reiterate that I have the presentation on diskettes. If you wish to visit the website and sign on, I'd be happy to give you a password and a user name to do so.

The Chair: Thank you very much. I gather that this is a sort of tool that's being used now for analytical purposes in the department, and that there are a lot of other countries we could get data on if the committee wanted it and we had access to your website.

Prof. David Carment: That is correct. Thank you.

The Chair: Members, this is something that is not restricted to this area. It's something we could use for other areas or countries, if we're going there—you know, Jean, with your African issues and things like that. We could presumably get data on other states as well.

Prof. David Carment: We have approximately 80 indicators for all the countries with which Canada has foreign relations. You may find some use there. I ask that you send me an e-mail message when you get a chance. You can receive a password or a user name.

The Chair: The researchers of the various parties can probably get in touch with you directly.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Can we go to questions now?

The Chair: No, we're going to go to the other two, and then we'll come back to questions at the end, if you don't mind. We'll do the questions all at once. This was a kind of overview, and we're going to go to our two experts on the area. We're going to go next to Professor MacFarlane, and then to Dr. Armstrong.

Professor MacFarlane.

Professor Neil MacFarlane (Professor, Oxford University): Thank you.

[Translation]

Mr. Chairman, members of the committee, I will start out in French, not just because it's one of the two official languages, but also because I started out in a French environment in Sainte- Anne-de-Bellevue.

I'm delighted to be here today to discuss Central Asia and the Caucasus. For the past decade, I've been doing research in this region on such issues as policy evolution, civil conflict, peace keeping and humanitarian aid.

I confess that at times, I've been rather frustrated by what I perceived as a lack of Canadian policy regarding this region. Therefore, I'm very encouraged by our meeting here to discuss these issues and by the growing interest on the part of officials, members of parliament and government.

Because time is short, I would like to focus on five issues. These are: Canadian interests in the region; the directions of Western policy; the record of achievement in the region; how one accounts for the success and failure of Western policies; and finally, where we go from here.

• 1010

[English]

With regard to Canadian interests, I should begin by possibly taking issue with what some other witnesses have said. I don't see this region as an energy province, if you will, of global significance. I do not see it as a pivot of global strategic competition à la “great game”.

If you look at the oil sector, for example, with regard to the first point, if all possible oil reserves in this region were included, the region would reach the level of Iran and Kuwait combined—well below the reserves of Saudi Arabia or the Persian Gulf as a whole. Recent exploration results in oil, particularly in offshore Azerbaijan, have been disappointing, and it suggests that the totals are probably close to the proven end than to the possible end on oil, though I stand to be corrected between now and June because it looks like Kazakhstan is going to have a major offshore find in the next couple of months.

Gas is a somewhat different story. Prior to the Shakh Deniz discovery in offshore Azerbaijan last year, the region's proven reserves were around 6% of global natural gas reserves. If all possibles turned out to be proven, the region would probably amount to 12% to 13% of global proven reserves. In other words, the Caspian will be important as an energy province, but it's not that important.

This leads me to a first proposition. In thinking about policy toward the region we shouldn't be carried away by visions of mineralogical bonanzas. Likewise, I think we should be cautious about the “new silk road” rhetoric, which one often hears in Brussels, Beijing, and Tokyo. It strains one's imagination, in my view, to suggest that the centrality of this region as a trading route between Europe and Asia can be resuscitated, returned to its grandeur of the Middle Ages, if you will, given the regional insecurities, decrepit infrastructure, comparative cost advantages of maritime as opposed to land transport, and existence of an intact, secure rail line already through Russia from Europe to north Asia.

Finally, as I said, it's important not to be carried away by analogies to the old “great game” in central Asia in the last century. This had to do essentially with British concerns over the security of India in the context of the southward expansion of the Russian empire. There's no similar dynamic today. The notion that western vital security interests are somehow engaged in the Caspian Basin seems to me to lack merit. The analogy is deeply flawed. I don't believe that NATO or the United States, let alone Canada, would fight for the Caucasus of central Asia. And when we talk about vital interests, we're generally talking about things people will fight for.

All of this said, the region is playing an increasing role in the corporate strategies of Canadian firms in the energy and mineral sectors, and it makes sense for the Canadian government to follow the dollar, if you will. I support strongly an expanded consular and diplomatic presence in the region. Believe me, there were times in the past 10 years, speaking on a personal note, where it would have been a very nice thing to have a friendly Canadian face backing me up.

More broadly, and despite what I just said about the “great game”, it seems to me that central Asia and the Caucasus are one of the most serious potential venues for confrontation between the United States and Russia, and the Russians have already made very clear their sensitivity to increasing American engagement in the region. Beyond this, in terms of Canadian interest, there's a fair amount of evidence that the region is becoming a major transhipment and production centre for illicit drugs, as well as a growth area for terrorism, particularly in central Asia.

There is great concern expressed both in Russia and in the United States and Europe with regard to the apparent rising influence of what some term “fundamentalist Islam”, and Canada, I think, shares an interest with its western allies in containing both forms of intoxicating substance here.

Furthermore, the region's states are members of the OSCE and NATO's Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council, and as central Europe moves toward more complete integration in western European economic and security structures, the shift of security-building in the OSCE community and in NATO is likely to move eastward. To the extent that we, as Canadians, take transatlanticism seriously—and I, for one, do—we are obliged to take the region's problems seriously.

This leads me to a brief consideration of what the major directions of western policy in the Caucasus and central Asia have been. To make a very long story short, what we've wanted in the region resembles my kids' Christmas list, if you will. Both bilaterally and multilaterally, we have sought peace and stability, democracy, human rights, economic liberalization, the rule of law, the enhancement of the political sovereignty of these new states, and their integration into global markets. This is an ambitious and still largely unfulfilled agenda.

• 1015

Although the region is more peaceful than it was in the early 1990s, no major conflict in the region has been fully resolved. There are several potential conflicts coming down the track. There is no obvious progress in the region toward democracy, and I suspect your data, David, suggested that more eloquently than I can.

Only one country, that is to say Georgia, has managed to produce elections that over time have been recognized as essentially free and fair. The rule of law in the region remains an aspiration rather than a reality.

So really, given the amount of money we have spent and the amount of effort—I say “we” in a broad sense, meaning the west—the record really isn't that reassuring.

Why is this so? One set of problems is the fact that our agenda is internally inconsistent. If one focuses on democratization and the rule of law, we shouldn't really be having much to do with Azerbaijan's Aliev, Uzbekistan's Karimov, Turkmenistan's Niyazov, or Kazakhstan's Nazarbaev. But if the focus is on stability in the short term, then it may make sense to underwrite these characters.

Likewise, if the issue is containing Islam, drugs, and terrorism, one can understand the temptation to embrace regional strongmen, as the United States and the European Union have apparently done with regard to both Aliev and Karimov. The danger here, of course, is that in supporting or tolerating authoritarian responses to political opposition, we may be complicit in a process of radicalization that will strengthen the opponents we seek to control.

Again, if the focus is on rapid implementation of a neo-liberal economic agenda in the region, then perhaps one shouldn't be too picky about democratization, since the consequences of rapid liberal economic reform are painful and they affect the voting public negatively, fostering political instability.

I think it's fair to say that as a community of states with liberal democratic values, we have not clearly established our priorities amidst this set of objectives. However, the locals, I think, have concluded that we care more about stability and economic opening than about rights and democracy. They've defined their own approaches to reform accordingly and essentially, in my view, negatively. So that's one reason we haven't done very well.

The second reason is that the regional basis for democratizing and liberalizing reform in central Asia and the Caucasus is weak. In the best of circumstances, the rapid implementation of a massive agenda of political and economic transition in weak states is difficult and problematic. However, it's particularly problematic here because there's no historically rooted tradition in civil society and democratic governance in the region. The Soviet legacy was one of citizen disengagement from rather than engagement in politics.

There's a longstanding tradition throughout the region of deference to authoritarian leadership, and that tradition has probably been strengthened by the instability and uncertainty that characterize the first years after independence. There's no tradition of toleration of alternative perspectives to policy in governance.

Here, by the way, I'm criticizing not merely those in charge. I would suggest that the same is true of their oppositions. They are unlikely to be any more tolerant than the characters who run the shop.

With regard to the rule of law, there's also no tradition and no developed understanding of the role of an independent judiciary in democratic society.

[Translation]

In pre-Soviet times, the law was an instrument in the hands of the autocrat. In Soviet times, it was an instrument in the hands of the party. In both instances, the law was not above the rulers. The law was owned by the rulers. The results are evident in the post- independence period in which those in power have, on the whole, used the law to entrench themselves and to strengthen their political positions at the expense of their opponents.

• 1020

[English]

This leads me finally to the question of what to do. I think we've gone just about as far as we can go in encouraging governments themselves to reform in this region. There's only so far you can go in attempting to convince Giedar Aliev or Islam Karimov to turn into a John A. Macdonald or a George-Étienne Cartier.

What does this mean? I think it means that the focus in assistance programming should be on civil society. In the first place, this means educational opportunity in order to build a more broadly based understanding of what liberal democracy is and what it implies, with regard to the behaviour of both governments and peoples.

Second, effective engagement and effective use of the taxpayers' money, if you will, means investing in democracy, rights, and the rule of law from the bottom up, not the top down. I think this means support of the NGO community and independent media.

The agenda of liberalization and democratization is a long-term one probably everywhere, but I think particularly in this rather curious region. It's best served by efforts to inform and engage the citizenry of the Caucasus in central Asia in the building of their own political and economic futures. To fail to do so is to leave the region's destiny in the hands of superannuated, unrepresentative and generally corrupt elites, who cannot produce stability in the longer term and may indeed be fostering the very instability they claim to be controlling.

I conclude that there is reason to consider these issues to be urgent. Although the region appears to be reasonably stable now by recent standards, it's unlikely to last. A number of the region's states face extremely problematic political successions in the next several years. There's increasing evidence of a growing threat from Islamic radicalism in the northern Caucasus and in the Farghona Valley.

A third point is that while the GDP data Professor Carment showed you suggests there is a turnaround of sorts and some potential, if you disaggregate that according to income differentials and income distribution, you find there is a clear and widening gap between the positions of an elite—which has benefited from reform and privatization by stealing the resources of their countries, to put it crudely—and a mass of the population that has essentially been left out. This too creates fertile ground for political radicalization.

Finally the recent victory of Vladimir Putin in elections in Russia and the reactivation of Russian diplomacy in both the Caucasus and central Asia, which is evident as we speak, raise a number of potentially disturbing questions about the future direction of the only great power, that is to say Russia, in a position to dominate the Caspian Basin and what this might mean for the broader agenda of the west in the Caucasus and central Asia.

[Translation]

Thank you.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. MacFarlane. Very interesting.

Mr. Armstrong.

Dr. Patrick Armstrong (Individual Presentation): Thank you for asking me here today to talk about this important area.

The sole aim of my introductory remarks is to convince you that this part of the world is extraordinarily complicated, more complicated probably than any other part of the world, and that most of what goes on in it is internally generated and not the effect of outside actors. In my opinion, far too much of what is written about this area assumes that the locals are the passive objects of outside actions. I believe this is absolutely wrong.

In order to make my point, I will try to pull on one string in this huge ball of string, to show you that everything is connected to everything else.

There have been many attempts to kill or overthrow Georgia's president, Eduard Shevardnadze. The names of some of the people who have been accused of trying to do this are Cabala, Exebua, Kakubava, Chukhua, Eliava, Lolua and Bokuchava. You will notice that all these names end with a. So my starting question is simply this: why do people whose names end with a want to kill Shevardnadze?

• 1025

Family names in Georgia can tell you where somebody comes from. People whose names end in a come from Mingrelia.

The question now becomes, why do so many Mingrelians want to kill Shevardnadze? There are several reasons. The first and probably the most important one is that the first president of Georgia, who was elected in May 1991, Zviad Gamsakhurdia, was a Mingrelian. He was overthrown in a coup d'etat in January 1992 and replaced eventually by Shevardnadze. So Gamsakhurdia's people blame Shevardnadze for the coup and later death of their man, and they want their revenge.

A second reason is that during the Georgian civil wars and the Abkhazia wars, many Mingrelians were killed or robbed by armed forces from central Georgia.

The third reason is that the Mingrelians do not like rule from central Georgia, from Kartli and Kakheti. Many of them believe they're not actually ethnically Georgians, and until some time in the 1930s they were not considered to be ethnically Georgians.

To continue, Gamsakhurdia and his supporters kept trying to seize power again. In August 1992 his people took some government hostages in western Georgia. Shevardnadze authorized military police action, and some Georgian armed groups took this as a licence to invade Abkhazia, which is on the far left there.

So what is Abkhazia? The Abkhaz are not Georgians. They speak a completely different language. They're mostly Muslims. They've never been happy under the rule of Tbilisi, and historically they have only been under the rule of Tbilisi from 1931 to 1991.

The first thing Gamsakhurdia did when he came to power was take away their autonomous status, which they had had under the Soviets. So they fought back, and their fight attracted the attention of the peoples living on the other side of the mountains in Russia in the north Caucasus.

Back when the Russian empire collapsed in 1917, the peoples of the north Caucasus took the opportunity to try to create their own free mountaineer republic. Abkhazia was part of that attempt, and there was a war between the Georgians and the Abkhazians then too.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the mountaineers tried again. This time the centre of the mountaineer republican-in-being was Chechnya under President Jokhar Dudayev. The mountaineers sent fighters, Chechens and Circassians, and together with Abkhaz fighters they defeated the quarrelling and divided Georgians and drove them out of Abkhazia in 1993. One of the leading fighters in this war, leading a group of Chechens, was Shamil Basayev, of whom we will hear more.

So the simple question of why people whose names ends with a want to kill Shevardnadze has led us to the Georgian civil war and the Georgia-Abkhazia wars, and we now find ourselves in Chechnya talking about the Caucasian mountaineer republic.

So who are these mountaineers? They are the people who live in the mountains of the Caucasus. Although most of them are Russian citizens, they are not Russians.

The Caucasus is the most ethnically varied place in the world. That map gives you an idea of the larger ethnic groups in the area. Speaking only of autochthonous peoples of the Caucasus north and south and dividing them into languages, the Indo-European language family is represented by Ossetians, Kurds, Tats, and Armenians. The Caucasian language family is represented by Georgians, Mingrelians, Svans, Ajarians, Abkhazians, Kabardins, Cherkess, Adygey, Abazins, Chechens, Ingush, Avars, Lezgins, Dargins, Laks, Tabasaranies, Rutulies, Tsakurs, and Aguls. The Ural-Altaic language family is represented by Nogay, Karachay, Balkars, Azerbaijanians, and Kumiks.

I have of course only spoken about the larger peoples in the Caucasus. There are at least 10,000 of each one of these peoples I've mentioned. There are probably another 30 or 40, depending on how you define it. Every one of them is native to the area.

All of these peoples, with mutually incomprehensible languages, different histories, different ambitions, longstanding enmities, and different religions, are crammed into an area that altogether is about the same size as southern Ontario. There is nothing like this place anywhere on the planet.

• 1030

That's the one point I want you to take with you. Anybody who tells you that everything that's going on there is the fault of the Russians or it's the United States, NATO, Turkey, the “great game”, or oil, any of this stuff, is only telling you 5% of what's happening there. There are no simple explanations for anything in the Caucasus.

Getting back to Chechnya, the Chechens historically have been the backbone of the mountaineer wars against Russia and the Soviet Union. The first Russian-Chechen fight occurred in 1722. Sheikh Mansur led a war against the Russians from 1785 to 1791. Chechens were at the core of the great Caucasus war under the Imam Shamyl from 1834 to 1859. They revolted against the empire in 1877. When the Russian empire collapsed, Chechens immediately declared independence and fought against the White army of Denikin and against the Bolsheviks from 1920 to 1921. They revolted against communist power from 1929 to 1930. Another revolt started up at the end of the 1930s. The moment the Soviet Union fell apart, they again declared independence. We are now in the midst of the second Russian-Chechen war since then.

Today there are at least three things going on in Chechnya, and one of them is completely new. First, we have the traditional Chechen desire for national freedom, which has animated most of their wars. Second, there is the desire among many of the fighters there to use Chechnya as the seed crystal around which a mountaineer republic will be built, taking in a great deal of what's on that map, southern Russia, Abkhazia, Georgia, and even parts of Azerbaijan. Third, there's something that is completely new in this part of the world, and that is the desire among some of the fighters, the most active ones at present, to use Chechnya as the base for a Wahhabi Imamate.

This brings us to another strange word, Wahhabis. What are they? Wahhabism is the common name for an Islamic reform movement begun in the 18th century in Arabia by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. He made an alliance with the Saud family that they would support each other.

Wahhabism has two characteristics for our purposes: it is extremely puritan, and it does not shrink from using violence against other Muslims, whom it considers largely to be heretics.

What has that to do with our subject? When the Soviet Union fell apart, Wahhabi missionaries with lots of money moved into the north Caucasus and central Asia. I'll get to that later. Among them was a person called Khattab—which is not his real name but his fighting name—a full-time mujahaddin who has fought in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and in the first Chechen war. Khattab used Chechnya to set up training camps, and he attracted the support of some prominent Chechen field commanders, such as Shamil Basayev, who, you will recall, led the Chechen forces in the Abkhaz wars. That was also the man who pulled off the raid on Budyonnovsk, which turned the first Chechen war around.

To make a very long story short, after having attacked a number of Russian targets—

The Chair: I take it that the Wahhabis who moved in from elsewhere were wealthy because they were Saudi Arabians and had oil revenues or something.

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: They had money from Arabia, quite a bit. Of course, in this area you don't need a great deal of money. Ten million dollars is a fortune, and they had at least that kind of money.

They then tried to take over Chechnya by an attack on the second Chechen city of Gudermes. None of this stuff was reported in the western press. It's too complicated. When they were defeated by the Chechen government forces, they then invaded the Russian republic of Dagestan in August of last year. That is what precipitated the present war.

Wahhabis are hostile to the traditional Islam practised in the north Caucasus.

From Wahhabis in the north Caucasus, we come to Wahhabis in central Asia. A series of bomb explosions in Uzbekistan last year were blamed on Wahhabis. The invasion of the Kyrgyz Republic last year is also connected with Khattab. The central Asian countries are getting quite concerned about this threat, and they are coming together with Russians to defend themselves. Those of you who go to central Asia will hear a lot about this, I think.

• 1035

In conclusion, we have started with the simple question, why do people whose names end with a want to kill Shevardnadze? And that has led us to the Georgian civil war, the Georgia-Abkhazia wars, the Caucasian mountaineer republic. And that has taken us into Chechnya, and from there we've gone to Wahhabism, and from Wahhabism we found ourselves in central Asia.

None of what I've spoken is covered very much in the western press. But very little of what I've spoken has anything to do with Moscow or oil or any outside force other than the Wahhabis themselves.

So again I ask you, when some plausible representative tries to tell you next week that it's all something or other, remember that there are no simple explanations in this area. Every simple explanation like oil or the “great game” or this stuff has some truth in it, some truth. But nothing covers much more than, let's say, 5%. Most of what happens here I am convinced is internally generated.

Thank you.

The Chair: All of which Sarkis has been telling us for years anyway.

We'll go to questions.

Mr. Obhrai.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Are you sure you don't want to hear from the other witness sitting there?

The Chair: Don't worry.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: Just kidding.

Thank you very much. There are two things here. I want to go to the first presentation made by the professor.

Professor, in your presentation you have referred to figures where you have shown the region and Canada. I have a serious concern in reference to what has been said about Canada. And if I have my doubts about the status of what you're talking about on Canada, then it's very difficult for me to put it in the context of the whole other region.

You used a word quite strongly for which perhaps we would require more explanation. It was something about minority rights in Canada, where you had an ethnic cleavage score, and you said violence is based on repression. Canada had a score of 75.3 with three communities. Apparently, when I talked to you, you went back on your three other communities in reference to minorities at risk. I think we need a far better explanation of that issue in Canada in terms of what you're talking about before we can put any credence to this report in reference to the region over there.

I don't know, this may be one point of view from your think-tank, but let's see that. It's creating a problem here for me when you're lumping Canada at such a high level over there.

So perhaps you would like to do that before I put my second question. But let me go for the second question, which is directed to you.

Your presentation and Professor Armstrong's presentation were pretty interesting. I don't know if this committee wants to go there after listening to your presentation and Mr. Armstrong's presentation, but it's their choice.

It's interesting. I see that at the end of all the conclusions, all you came down with was to engage the civil society. You're finding that everything else is not up to standard. This brings me to the point that it will be a very long time before these countries will have a business rule where they can have any hope of joining the WTO or a business sense in the world, that is for globalization, which in the long term would be the beneficiary for that thing.

I guess what you are saying to us is that you can forget all that and start from the very grassroots basic level of engaging the civil society, which would take such a long time. If I was to say in ten years what you are saying.... You're basically saying, based on the Professor David Carment's index here on democracy and the other thing.... Am I reading you right when you say that this region is, for years and years, doomed to ethnic conflicts and rules?

There are two questions here and I think that will take up my time. Is that right, Mr. Chairman? Yes.

• 1040

The Chair: Professor Carment.

Prof. David Carment: I'll take a shot at your first question, although I think to properly answer it we have to put it in perspective. That might be better done with answers from the other two expert witnesses.

Quite frankly, you're right, you can't give detail and nuance to basic structural indicators. One has to interpret them with caution. I would argue, furthermore, that what you've heard today, quite frankly, is a good complementary presentation. I've given you structural data; and you've heard some things about the events ongoing, in particular in the Caucasus with respect to Chechnya. And finally, we have the field reports that give nuance and detail.

But I would also argue that you really need to consider all three together; that any single interpretation of the problem may not give you the big picture that you need to make a proper analysis of the situation. When you do visit the region, I think you're best equipped to go in the region with the structural data that I've given you, along with the field reporting and events analysis as well.

Having said that, I think you're referring to the Minorities at Risk data set. I don't take responsibility for the collection of that data; I'm simply reporting it. But having said that, I would encourage your assistants to locate the data set if they feel so inclined. It is at the University of Maryland under the direction of Ted Gurr. There you will find precise definitions of all the minorities at risk, or those groups that are considered to be minorities at risk. They include ethno-nationalists, indigenous peoples, ethno-classes, communal contenders, and religious sects. Furthermore, a minority is considered to be at risk and worthy of inclusion in the data set if its population exceeds 100,000 persons and that number is greater than 1% of the total population of the country.

For that reason, although we saw reference to, I think, minorities within Armenia, they weren't included in my data set. The reason is that they simply aren't sufficient by the standards established by the Minorities at Risk data set people to merit inclusion.

What you're asking me is what constitutes a minority at risk. There are a variety of definitions attached to that, but the first and foremost criteria would be that they are politically mobilized and have mobilized themselves into political parties to obtain certain benefits for their group. Simply put, a minority at risk is one that is engaged in activity. It doesn't necessarily have to be violent or rebellious behaviour. It could be political protest. It could be political activity of any kind, but it is politically mobilized behaviour.

Using that standard, then, we see there are a host of minorities in that graph that we saw, or the picture of Georgia, far more than were presented in the Minorities at Risk data set. The reason for that is quite simply that many of these groups would not be considered to be politically mobilized. In fact, there are about 5,000 minorities in the world, but only about 268 considered meriting inclusion in the data set.

They're are also at risk of having diminishing populations relative to the total population of the country. If you wish, I can identify for you the groups within Canada that are considered to be at risk. I'm not sure that it advances our understanding of the Caucasus or central Asia in particular, although they are considered to be minorities at risk according to the people down in Maryland because they fit one of the categories of ethno-nationalist, indigenous peoples, ethno-classes, communal contenders, and religious sects.

I should point out that because a minority is at risk and they are politically mobilized, this is not an indicator that a state is necessarily unstable or, as I may have inferred earlier and you interpreted, that they are victims of repression in each and every instance. Their activity may come as a result of a variety of other causes, and the consequences of their behaviour isn't necessarily political instability.

So one has to be cautious about taking that leap of logic from minority at risk to politically unstable societies or societies that are less than democratic. There are minorities at risk in virtually all western developed countries, industrialized countries.

• 1045

The Chair: Any other questions?

Did they do a similar study of the United States to say what minorities were at risk in the United States?

Prof. David Carment: Sure. There are minorities at risk there as well.

The Chair: Yes. But did the Maryland people interest themselves in their own place, or are they just interested in other folks?

Prof. David Carment: They're interested in every country in which a minority at risk exists, and as I said, there are 268. Some countries have many more than others, and what we're trying to tap into here.... I should point out that the cleavage indicator gives a better indication of whether society has a potential for divisions along ethnic lines as opposed to other forms of political organization.

Mr. Deepak Obhrai: It's quite interesting. I think you have stated quite clearly that you're just a bearer of the news; you did not compile this thing. But I think it's quite interesting. Specifically, when you mention Canada in there, I think that arouses our interest. So you bet, we will go to that website and find out what they're talking about.

Prof. David Carment: Along those lines, if I could, you have to take the good with the bad, I suppose, if you want to interpret Minorities at Risk as being something of a bad news indicator. I don't. I've also included Canada in the HDI index as well. It ranks quite high there, and it performs quite well.

What we need is a benchmark. As you say, it's hard to look at these countries in isolation without understanding something about your own country as well as another country outside of the region that you're visiting, Turkey. You need some baseline to evaluate. I think this provides you with some better understanding. If you can draw some conclusions about how your own country is performing, then you're better equipped, I would argue, to make decisions about how Canada should be engaged in the region.

The Chair: We have only a couple of minutes left, Mr. Obhrai, so let's try to get the next question answered.

Mr. MacFarlane.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Thank you very much for your question, for brief comments in response.

First, in my prescriptive end of the remarks I focused on civil society, NGOs, and bottom-up initiatives because I think they are areas where Canadian policy can be relevant. Clearly there's a much broader agenda, you're quite right. It's just that I don't think we're going to be an effective player in other areas, and I think we do stand a chance of making a difference in the area of rights, in the area of civil society building.

In the economics area, for example, and in business engagement there's an awful lot going on, much of which is quite successful from the point of view of the enterprises. And indeed, the major multilateral lenders, the World Bank in particular, have made a real difference through economic conditionality in encouraging neo-liberal economic reform. We can't play directly at that level, because the resources we're likely to commit are going to be rather modest in comparison to those of the EU, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, or the World Bank. Indeed, you can achieve very positive results through conditionality, in getting the governments of the region to behave in predictable ways for businesses. It's not just a question of multilaterals and state agencies, it's also a question that the businesses themselves can elicit this.

I was talking to the country director of the IMF in Azerbaijan two years ago, and he said, you know, a lot of people talk about weak state capacity and the fact that the states can't deliver a reliable economic environment for foreign business. He said, let me tell you, in Azerbaijan when BP Amoco comes in and says “We're going to invest $10 billion here, and these are our conditions, and by the way, you can have a $200 million side payment”, they deliver, and the state works on that.

This is not a ballpark in which we're playing. I guess that's my point. Given the resources that are likely to be available to us through places like CIDA, we should think about how we can best structure what we have in order to push along, in a modest way, things that we consider important.

My final point, Mr. Chairman, concerns ethnic conflict. I would only note that I delivered to the research staff an update report I prepared for the European Commission in January of this year on conflict potential in the Caucasus, which you or your staff can read at your leisure if you want to be further depressed.

• 1050

The Chair: Thank you very much. I think we're going to have to move on to Madame Debien. Maybe we'll get around to those again.

[Translation]

Ms. Maud Debien (Laval East, BQ): Good morning, gentlemen. Thank you for your presentations.

My comments are directed primarily to Professor MacFarlane. In paragraph 13 of your presentation, you refer to the values and interests in the formulation of Canadian foreign policy and note that the distinction is “somewhat problematic and unconstructive”. In fact, you state the following:

We do not support democracy, the rule of law and economic reform simply because these are values that we embrace. They are intrinsic to our interests as well.

Moreover, you advise extreme caution in the face of the new silk road rhetoric and argue that the region's energy reserves have been overestimated. I tie this in with a comment you made elsewhere in your presentation, to the effect that Canada must focus its efforts on strengthening civil society.

I have a very pointed question for you. But first, are you saying that EDC should not encourage Canadian businesses to set up shop in these countries and that the Canadian government should instead be promoting CIDA and its education-information programs to ensure that these countries become true democracies? Should the Canadian government be moving more in this direction rather than encouraging the EDC and Canadian companies to set up operations in this region?

Mr. Neil MacFarlane: Excuse me, but what's the EDC?

Ms. Maud Debien: The Export Development Corporation.

Mr. Neil MacFarlane: I see.

Ms. Maud Debien: It's a Crown corporation that helps Canadian businesses get established in certain countries.

Mr. Neil MacFarlane: Thank you for your excellent question.

I do not think of economic expansion or export initiatives and democratization initiatives as separate actions, but as alternatives. I think of them as complementary initiatives. It's possible to do both. I don't speak for the federal government, but I do know that it would be hard pressed not to have an export development policy in place. I don't see this as running counter to democratization policies. I think both types of policies can be pursued.

I'm not an expert in economic development. I'm a political scientist. I stick to what I know best. However, as I said, I think both policies can be pursued. In my view, the federal government has a responsibility to promote the interests of the country's private sector. I don't see any contradiction in this. Thank you.

[English]

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Ms. Augustine.

Ms. Jean Augustine (Etobicoke—Lakeshore, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank the presenters today for enlightening us and bringing their perspective to the discussion. In looking at the maps and in all the preparation I have been doing, I think this is a really enlightening set of witnesses. The witnesses' presentations are most enlightening.

My question was more or less the same as Madame Debien's. I'll try to see if I can focus it in a way that I can get some answers.

• 1055

I noticed that Professor MacFarlane did mention American policy and the fact that it's almost an irritant or it has negative effects on Russia's relations with the west. I wonder, what are some of those negative implications for us as Canadians as a result of this?

I also want to follow up on the idea of any kind of an agenda for liberalization, for democratization in central Asia within our existing foreign policy framework. How do you see this operating?

Perhaps, Mr. Armstrong, you could reflect on what we can do, again, with CIDA and civil society. How can we march into this mesh of what you have presented to us with some civil society initiatives?

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: With regards to American policy in the first place, a section of the written presentation that I did not refer to orally, my concern here is that, inadvertently or advertently, the way in which the United States has conducted its energy strategy in the Caspian Basin appears in Moscow to be exclusive of Russian interests rather than inclusive. This has raised considerable concern in Moscow as to whether the United States is seeking to replace Russia as the pre-eminent power in the Caucasus and central Asia.

Rightly or wrongly, again, the Russians believe this is their backyard and they don't like it. If you combine the energy diplomacy with the encouragement of bilateral military assistance programming between the United States and these countries, in the spirit of the Partnership for Peace, I hasten to add, and if you add to that the direction taken by PFP, Partnership for Peace, itself in the region in terms of building autonomous military capacity and linking the militaries of the region to NATO, this is actually profoundly disturbing in Moscow. So in that sense you are getting tension as a result.

The other problem that I feel is serious is we are encouraging—we, broadly speaking, the NATO countries—the states of the region to believe that if they get into trouble with the Russians, we will help them. That encourages them perhaps to conduct their relations with the Russian Federation in a less prudent way than they might otherwise do. We will not help them when push comes to shove. We haven't in the past, we wouldn't now, and I don't think we will in the future, despite the economic interests associated with the region.

On my point about how this has implications for Canada, I'd be happy to expand on my view in detail, Mr. Chairman, but I suspect the clock is ticking.

The Chair: Perhaps you can minimalize the detail.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: I'll just lay it out flat, and if you want a clarification, tell me and I'll clarify.

Canada, for all kinds of reasons, has a very strong interest in a stable, productive, cooperative relationship between the United States and the Russian Federation. So when that relationship gets into trouble we are in trouble. It can get into trouble on things like this if the Americans, in particular, are insufficiently prudent in their approach to the region.

Secondly, on the agenda for liberalization and democratization, what can we do and how does this work? I think there are two levels to this. The first concerns intergovernmental relations and also multilateral relationships. As I said in my presentation, I am not terribly optimistic about making good democrats out of the leaders of this region, with one possible exception. I think Shevardnadze shows some potential.

I would note that all of these states are members of the OSCE. The documents with which they have associated themselves in the OSCE context include commitments to human rights norms, to norms regarding democracy, to norms regarding treatment of minorities, and to norms regarding civil-military relations. We should, as other OSCE member states should, hold them accountable to what they have themselves signed through a persistent and patient diplomacy that is normatively based. I would hasten to add in this regard that we should also hold the Russian Federation accountable to its human rights commitments, which it has accepted and which it is systematically violating in Chechnya at the moment.

• 1100

That's one strand. The second strand goes to my comments in the presentation. What does it mean to support society from below? What does it mean to build capacity? What do we mean by educational opportunity? Let me give you just two minor examples.

In my view, the most successful component of American assistance programming in the region has been conducted through the Eurasia foundation. Basically it is targeted in two directions. One is getting promising young people out of the region and educating them in American universities. The second is supporting the development of quasi-modern educational institutions within the region itself. It doesn't cost a lot of money and you are actually creating the cultural basis for change.

With regard to media, as another example, there's a real problem in the region, particularly in the Caucasus. Patrick Armstrong may care to comment on this as well. There is a real problem of what I would refer to bluntly as ethno-chauvinism in the media. Journalists are not professional. They are basically demagogues, many of them. There is—or there was—no professional journalistic class.

A voice: Definitely.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: You need to make one if the media are to do in society what they are supposed to do, which is to provide intelligent, professional criticism of government in order to inform a broad public debate on governance.

The Reuters foundation in this context in London basically pulls 30 or 40 journalists a year out of central Asia and the Caucasus in order to expose them to how things are done on Fleet Street in London. Now, that exposure may not be the best. I hope they don't send them to The Sun. But again, it's a good illustration of the kind of thing we could do too, for which there is a substantial need.

Thank you very much.

The Chair: Mr. Armstrong, did you want to supplement that?

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: It's very easy to look at this place and think it's bad and getting worse, particularly because we don't take a very long perspective on it. Actually, most of the wars that were raging there five or six years ago have stopped.

We need a lot of diplomacy to settle the Karabakh issue. That's going to be a long way coming, but at least people aren't being killed there in large quantities as they were. I think the very bloody civil war in Tajikistan is more or less settled.

For 10 years, westerners have been coming to this area implicitly promising all kinds of magic. I think you will find your reception is a little cooler than it would have been five years ago because frankly the west hasn't delivered much.

When we talk about civil rights, I think the answer you're going to hear.... If you look at that map, these people look at the countries around them and they see the situation of the Uyghurs in Uyghurstan in China. They look at Pakistan. They look at Afghanistan. They look at Iran. They look at Iraq. These guys think stability is probably worth more than anything. So I suspect that when you mention the words “human rights”, you're going to hear the word “stability” back.

As for the American connection, I was very struck last year with the amount of fighting in that part of the world. There's much more than there has been. It's small stuff, all coming out of the same cause. There are jihadists who are also in the drug business operating out of Afghanistan through Tajikistan. A group of gunmen operating out of Tajikistan invaded Kyrgyzstan last summer. The west did not come to their assistance or even know about it. They got assistance from Uzbekistan and Russia.

• 1105

The foreign ministers and defence ministers of these countries have had a lot of meetings this year because they know there will be more of this in the summer. They're going to be collaborating, and that's what you're going to hear about. There's not a thing NATO, pea for pea, is going to be doing about that either.

I entirely agree with Professor MacFarlane's comments. It's a long drag. I personally think you're looking at it in terms of generations. My personal bet is on 15 years for Russia before it settles down and becomes something stable. I believe in working on a small scale with people.

CIDA does in fact offer the kinds of scholarships Neil was talking about. My personal recommendation is we should do much more of it. Invest in the future, and in most of these countries the future is young people. Bring them out here, get them to like Canada, teach them something useful, and so forth. We have to do it in a humble way, though, not in an arrogant way, which there has been far too much of.

Thanks.

The Chair: That's very helpful. Thank you.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Through you, I welcome the gentlemen and thank them for their presentations.

Some of my questions were already asked by Madam Augustine. I would like to follow up on them, but in a different context. We were told about the defence spending in some countries. In light of the nuclear arsenal in some rogue states, I can understand the security concerns to Canada. But perhaps you could highlight in what way Canada's security is affected.

Also, in light of the foreign policy of the European Community and the U.S., I'm not familiar with the reaction of the next door big country, China, to the whole situation. In light of these issues, perhaps you can make some recommendations to the committee. What should our role be and what should we be focusing on? What meaningful role can Canada play in the short term and the medium term?

The other question is a small one. Which country produces the most refugees? You told us which countries accept refugees, but I don't know in detail which countries are producing refugees in the region.

With respect to the risk to minorities, 25% of the population in Canada is shown to be at risk in three minorities. I don't know if they were named or not, but I would like to know the name of those three communities. Which communities were you referring to?

Perhaps I can go back to the first question with respect to Chechnya. I can't understand why the reaction from the international community has been so different compared to conflicts or civil wars in other regions, particularly on humanitarian aspects. For the first one and a half months there was no humanitarian aid available in Chechnya. Was it because of the intensity of the conflict, or was it because the Muslims were involved and the fundamentalists with their radical views? I would like to know that.

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: As a civil servant, I am not going to recommend what the government should do.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: As a witness to the committee, you are an expert, and we would like to seek some advice from you.

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: I'll directly answer on what the story in Chechnya was. I was in Moscow in the embassy during the first Chechnyan war. There was a great deal of humanitarian aid in Chechnya. This came to a stop. Probably the incident you remember is the five Red Cross members who were murdered by somebody. It was just too damned dangerous to work in Chechnya because of the kidnapping. So all the western aid agencies pulled out of Chechnya.

Very few people are prepared to do what Médecins Sans Frontières did in the last war and set up a hospital right in Vedeno. So that's one of the principal reasons why there's been markedly less foreign humanitarian aid to Chechnya this time around. Most of what there has been, as it were, has been advancing with the Russian army.

On Canada's security interests in the area, in a paper a bunch of us did for the government we said “From the perspective of the 1930s, what were Canada's security interests in the Middle East?” In the 1930s I don't think anybody would have said very much, yet we've had troops there for 50 years, etc.

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The Caspian Basin has the oil; it has the interests. There are major powers around it. With these kinds of things, since we still live on this planet, I don't see that we can avoid having connections there.

Professor MacFarlane's point is also very good, that bad relations between Russia and the United States inevitably are going to affect us. This is an area where there has been tension.

Finally, of course, we have businesses operating there. The largest foreign investment in the Kyrgyz Republic is a Canadian company. Canadian companies are involved—you heard this from Mr. Wright—throughout the oil business, and so forth.

So there's a connection there. But I agree with Professor MacFarlane. This is not the biggest thing that's going on in the world. It is big, but it's not huge.

The Chair: Mr. MacFarlane.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Just as a footnote on Chechnya, I think Mr. Armstrong is exactly right in accounting for the lack of humanitarian assistance in Chechnya. I note that he didn't say anything about Russian perspectives on access to Chechnya for humanitarian organizations. The EU, for example, has complained officially about Russian efforts to limit access to field operations inside Chechnya and even in surrounding areas such as Ingushetia and Dagestan.

My understanding of this is that the Russians have been reasonably cooperative on issues of access, it's just that nobody wants to go there. And the reason they don't want to go there was well stated by Mr. Armstrong.

The other point, of course, is that it isn't just the five or six nurses. It's the fact that humanitarian agencies operating in the area after 1996, not only in Chechnya but in Ingushetia and North Ossetia, were subject to repeated kidnapping instances and substantial bills to get people back when eventually they found them.

Even MSF and ICRC, who are generally reasonably willing to operate in difficult places in the world, don't want to go there. The ICRC has a program in Chechnya now. It is managed by locals. It's called—what is it?—aid by remote control. You sit in Nalchik or some place, and you get the guy on the phone and say, do this, do this, do this, and so on, but I don't want to go there myself.

That said, agencies have become more willing to get engaged now. There was a major delivery by the UNHCR, I think last week, to Grozny.

As for the reasons for lack of political response on Chechnya, why we haven't been kicking the Russians harder, given the fact that they have violated.... I did a paper on this last week in Stockholm. There's a list of about 17 major international conventions of one type or another that they're in violation of, and the community has been largely silent or very muted.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: Seventeen violations of what?

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Violations of international conventions. I can go through them.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: No, no, that's okay.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: It's actually harder to name the ones they aren't violating.

But the bottom line here, as an official of the Swedish foreign ministry said at this conference last week, Russia is not Sierra Leone. Russia is a great power. We have other broader interests engaged, and if you pull their nose too hard on the Chechen issue, you're going to pay on things like arms control.

Thank you.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: Could you comment on refugees, Mr. Carment?

Prof. David Carment: Sure. The question you're asking is difficult to answer, partly because the data that's made available to us publicly through the UNHCR, titled Populations of Concern to UNHCR, covering 1995 to 1998, includes, as of December 31 each year, internally displaced peoples as well as returned refugees and refugees taking up asylum. For that reason, you have massive movement of peoples within states, and it would be difficult to determine their country of origin.

Having said that, the obvious answer would be—perhaps I could get verification from the other two experts—that the region in question would be Armenia and Azerbaijan, with Azerbaijan taking up the bulk of refugees precisely because of the internally displaced people. So the region of Nagorno-Karabakh would be home to a massive outflow of refugees from that region within Azerbaijan.

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So the question of where they're coming from has to be muted by the fact that most of these people are moving within the country, not necessarily out. Where would they go?

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: I've done about five years' work on refugee and IDP issues in the Caucasus and central Asia. Just to summarize very quickly, with regard to the major refugee populations, i.e., people having to move out of their country of origin, there was an early exchange of roughly 250,000 Azeris coming out of Armenia, and 300,000 Armenians going back to Armenia from Azerbaijan right at the beginning of the Karabakh war. In fact, someone had the bright idea of setting up an apartment exchange business in this context. So you got this guy's apartment, and he got yours in move-in countries. The other major refugee population was the population of Tajiks who were driven out in the civil war into Afghanistan. They have since returned and been resettled.

With regard to the IDP populations, you're talking 600,000 associated with Nagorno-Karabakh within Azerbaijan, approximately 250,000 associated with the Abkhaz conflict in Georgia, and probably about 80,000 associated with the conflict in South Ossetia in Georgia.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: There are about one million refugees in total.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: If you count refugees and displaced persons, i.e., inside and outside, my count is about 1.5 million in the Caucasus and at the moment probably pretty marginal numbers of refugees in central Asia.

Prof. David Carment: I didn't have a follow-up point. Go ahead.

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: Of course, it depends on how far back you go in history.

Stalin expelled the Meskhetes from Georgia, and they have not yet been allowed back into Georgia. Most of them, as far as I know, are living a miserable existence in Moscow, having been expelled in rioting from the Farghona Valley in 1988 or so. So we have quite a few, if you go layer after layer.

Prof. David Carment: I wanted to take a shot at answering your general question about where we may stake an interest here. Not being an expert in the region but being involved in several projects involving people from the region, Kyrgyzstan in particular, my view is that we could do no worse than train people in the areas of conflict prevention, conflict analysis, and peace-building, focusing on bottom-up approaches integrating NGOs into Canadian practices of peace-building and conflict prevention and working multilaterally with agencies supported through CIDA.

In particular, I am reasonably familiar with an organization called FEWER, Forum for Early Warning and Early Response, located in London, which is affiliated with International Alert. What they do in part is train local analysts in central Asia and the Caucasus to engage them in understanding the kinds of indicators that are responsible for the onset of conflict. I think that working with like-minded individuals from the region to develop a civil society in a way that advances Canadian development interests would be one way to go.

I would also say that one of the reasons we collect data is not just simply to decide for ourselves what this committee or what Canadian foreign policy should be, but also to inform Canadians why they should care. In my view, by making this kind of information public, they're better informed to make a decision about whether or not civil society is the appropriate way to go in this instance. Also I think that the collection of data and the broadcasting of that information in a public forum provides a key monitoring activity, which goes back to what Professor MacFarlane was saying, a “we are watching what you're doing” kind of activity, which would allow us to better understand whether or not these societies are sincere about embracing change.

It may not necessarily place us in a position to do better business with these countries, but at least we could monitor changes over time through the collection of data.

Mr. Gurmant Grewal: What are those three communities that involve 25% of the population in Canada that are at risk? Can you name those?

Prof. David Carment: There are actually four communities: native Canadians, the francophone population outside of Quebec, Québécois, and Inuit.

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The Chair: Thank you.

An hon. member: That's three.

Prof. David Carment: No, I said four.

The Chair: Sorry, but Québécois themselves...?

Prof. David Carment: Yes.

The Chair: I can see Franco-Ontarians—

Ms. Diane Marleau: I'm a francophone from outside—

The Chair: Okay. Well, that's interesting. Thank you.

Maybe I'll just have a couple of wrap-up questions and then we can go.

[Translation]

Do you have any questions, Mr. Rocheleau?

[English]

Oh, sorry. We're going to go over to Madame Marleau and then to Monsieur Rocheleau.

Madam Marleau.

Ms. Diane Marleau: One of the big challenges with CIDA, of course, is that there's very little money. The renaissance program basically does some training and so on.

I happen to agree with you that having people come to university here is the best long-term investment for anything that we do as Canadians. Unfortunately, those amounts of money have been severely cut back, and I think not everybody understands the long-term implications. I hope that we can go back to what we used to do and that we can do more in these areas, but that will come.

Here's what I want to ask you. We always talk about civil society and NGO communities. My experience in some of the other countries of the former U.S.S.R. is that there were very few. I'd like your interpretation of the NGO community, the civil society community, in these particular countries.

Also, where do you start? Where do you start working with these civil society groups? That's the big question, because again, yes, you have to strengthen the communities, but my experience is that they're so used to being centrally run out of Moscow that you're really starting at ground zero for many of them.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Thank you very much for that question. It's not an easy question. I wrote a study three years ago on NGOs in conflict prevention in the Caucasus region, which pointed to all of these problems and, in addition, to the problem that basically there's a flavour-of-the-month quality to NGO activity. With apologies, it's gender one month, then a year later it's conflict prevention, then it's forests and streams, and then it's indigenous rights or whatever. Basically it tends to be the same people, again and again, with different organizational monikers. You ask why is this? They're obviously very—

Ms. Diane Marleau: [Inaudible—Editor].

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Yes, they're very eclectic people, obviously. Well, no, basically they read about what the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the bank, CIDA, and whatever have as their priorities, and then they become the priorities, because this is an income generator. Put it this way: it can be a civil society generator, but it's definitely an income generator. In the early days, there was really nothing to do in these societies in order to eat unless you had access to government circles. So if you spoke English principally, or German or French, and if you had some connections, you parleyed that into a stream of income.

That's not a very good place to start with the kind of initiative I'm talking about. I'm amply aware of this problem.

Also, this leaves aside all of the resource problems. How do you set up an NGO when you don't have a telephone, when you can't afford to rent an office?

My view on this has two things. First, just to be very practical, I think what Professor Carment was mentioning is highly constructive in the sense that you need to try to the extent possible to integrate these groups into broader international networks of similar concern, not least because if you do that you get a pretty good idea pretty quickly of whether they're serious or not, and you can identify the limited number who are serious and help them.

Second is just the question of the resources on the ground. One thing that the UN has done, in Baku, for example, is to provide a central facility with seven or eight computers, a couple of printers, three or four phones, and a couple of fax machines, which can be used by local organizations who can establish their bona fides. That's another selection process, if you will.

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They combine that with capacity-building on the ground, like, how do you do a budget? People don't have any idea. We're really operating from the ground. It's very difficult, but it can be done.

Ms. Diane Marleau: Is there a women's movement there at all? Is there anything that can be tapped in that area?

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Actually, it's one of the more interesting phenomena. That varies very much by country. In Kyrgyzstan, of all places, I think it probably has to do with with the role of women in traditional Kyrgyz society, which is quite different from Uzbek society. The Kyrgyz are marginally Islamic and very close to the ground. They come from village communities where everybody had to work, where responsibility was evenly shared, and where dominance-dependence relationships were not so clearly established. Women in Kyrgyzstan have a habit of taking initiative, which comes from their culture. There's a very powerful and growing women's movement.

I must say that there is the other advantage of this. It may sound cynical, but one advantage of promoting women's organizations is that they tend to be less corrupt. I'm not quite sure why that's so. That sounds like a kind of reverse sexist remark, but I think it's right.

Ms. Diane Marleau: It's the case just about everywhere.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Yes, and I think in central Asia and in the Caucasus it may have something to do with the fact that in these societies, traditionally the male is deemed to be the provider, and if he has access to money coming from outside, he will divert it into his pocket in order to keep the car running or whatever.

The Acting Chair (Ms. Jean Augustine): Professor Carment.

Prof. David Carment: I just wanted to reinforce the previous point. If I were to put my money on a country that could work with Canada on this initiative of conflict prevention, early warning, and peace-building, it would be Kyrgyzstan, precisely for the reasons that Professor MacFarlane has pointed out: the women are engaged and there's a fairly strong and established conflict prevention network in the region.

The Americans have shown some initiative in bringing these people over to work with, like, for example, the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict and the United States Institute of Peace as well as a variety of other organizations working on conflict prevention and conflict resolution.

There is, in fact, an established network, Women Networking for Conflict Prevention, and many of its participants come from Kyrgyzstan. That's an outfit supported by the United Nations University, which also plays host to these visiting scholars. It's something I think we would want to emulate or tap into, for the reasons that Professor MacFarlane pointed out. This is a country that I believe we could work with, or I believe the people in that country are people we could work with.

Ms. Diane Marleau: Were you mentioning just the one country and not the others?

Prof. David Carment: That's my experience. Others might be able to comment on that.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: If I may respond, Madam Chair, what you do depends on what country you're talking about. In the case of Turkmenistan, the graphs that Professor Carment put up were quite eloquent on the democracy-autocracy thing. There are elements of the data in his presentation that I might take issue with, but on that one, it's basically autocracy up here and democracy down there. There's no movement. This is essentially a highly patriarchal, clan-based, undemocratic, totalitarian, repressive society and government. You're not going to get anywhere, really, by pumping a lot of money into promoting NGOs. On the other hand, you might get somewhere in the area of education and educational opportunity by pulling people out, by giving them a different start. Really, the programming has to be modulated and sensitive to the context in which it occurs.

[Translation]

The Chair: Mr. Rocheleau.

Mr. Yves Rocheleau (Trois-Rivières, BQ): Mr. Chairman, I was very impressed by Mr. Armstrong's presentation on the complexity of the situation, on the fact that it seemingly defies explanation. You argue, for instance, that to speak solely in terms of Russian imperialism or of an oil policy is to limit the debate, because these issues account for only 5 per cent of the problem. I have to wonder why we should be interested in this complex region of the world, if not for special economic interests.

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When we talk about values and human rights, are we not talking in terms of the history of these peoples, a history that goes back much further than ours? Are we not guilty of cultural imperialism or paternalism by jumping into the fray, even though from an economic standpoint, we can justify our intervention? It reminds me of a slogan used by a finance company in Quebec which went like this: “We want what's best for you and we're going to get it”. What are our real interests in this region? Can North America really claim to be a model for other countries when it intervenes elsewhere? It's all well and good, but we don't hear people talk very often about the slums of Sao Paulo. It's not a pretty picture. Therefore, what are really doing in this region? Are we there simply there to wheel and deal? Should we be doing even more?

[English]

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: Of course, it's not a part of the world we ever did pay much attention to until oil came along.

You will be meeting people who are highly intelligent, highly sophisticated, from ancient cultures far beyond anything we can think of, who are paid $100 a month when they get it. And I'm afraid to say, having once been involved in a hideously embarrassing moment where I was delivering a message of disgusting arrogance and condescension in Almaty and was roundly embarrassed by my Kazakh opposite number, that I'm a big believer in humility. That's something the west has not carried very much of to these places.

What can we do? Little things, I think. It was only, after all, 15 years ago that Gorbachev became general secretary of the Communist Party, and an awful lot has happened in those 15 years. I am a great believer in step-by-step, patience and humility, and things like that.

Ms. Jean Augustine: Especially in that part.

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: Absolutely.

The Chair: Hectoring and lecturing other folks doesn't carry you very far.

Merci. Thank you. It's a good object lesson for all of us.

Bernard Patry.

Mr. Bernard Patry (Pierrefonds—Dollard, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you very much for all your remarks this morning.

I have one question for Professor MacFarlane and another one for Mr. Armstrong.

Mr. MacFarlane, in your comments this morning you talked a lot about the Russian pull and the United States pull, but in your brief in article 7 you say “I think we should be cautious about the “new silk road rhetoric” emanating from Brussels (and underpinning the TRACECA program of the European Commission)”. Can you elaborate a little bit more about this TRACECA program—I don't know about this one—or what is the new rhetoric emanating from Brussels?

Now for Mr. Armstrong, I'll give you my two questions right away. One, what's happening recently in the last couple of weeks in the Armenia parliament? It seems that some members want to depose the president. Can you give me a little up-to-date about what's happening in Armenia? Thank you.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: The European Union has, under the auspices of the TACIS program, which is technical assistance to the countries of the CIS, two regional cooperation programs. One is a program called INOGATE, which is interstate oil and gas, and it's basically designed to assist all CIS states in the amelioration of oil and gas infrastructure through rehabilitation of pipelines and through technical feasibility studies of new routes and so on and so forth. That program doesn't bug the Russians because it includes the Russians. The other one is TRACECA, which is Transport Corridor Europe-Caucasus-Asia. It's east-west. That's why it's associated with the silk road rhetoric; i.e., you're building this.... And their vision of TRACECA is not just oil and gas; it's roads, it's railroads, it's ferry services from Odessa in Ukraine to Supsa and Poti in Georgia, and from Baku in Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan across the Caspian.

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The idea here is essentially we're recreating this medieval trading route between Europe and Asia while in addition, in a very multi-functional way, we're integrating this sector of the Eurasian land mass into Europe, ultimately—and this is not stated—so that Europe can more efficiently exploit the natural resources of central Asia and the Caspian Basin. That's the bottom line, really. It will work to some extent, particularly on oil and gas. They will eventually get multiple pipelines, but it's never going to be restored to the central role that Tashkent, Samarkand and Bukhara played in the traditional east-west trade.

I'm sorry, that's probably too long. I can't resist a brief comment on the previous question, if I may.

[Translation]

As far as I'm concerned, the government's main interest in this region is the oil reserves. Clearly, its interests are economic. However, EDC's interests are wide ranging. While economic interests are important, the government is also concerned about issues that affect civil society, such as human rights, the rights of women and universal rights. As I see it, the Canadian government is duty bound to represent everyone, not just Fronterra Energy of Calgary.

Of course, when it comes to promoting civil and political rights, the going isn't easy. I may be naive, but I am nevertheless a member of this civil society and my interests are at issue as well. Efforts must be made to make these principles universal throughout OSCE countries and in Central Asia and the Caucasus. It's not an easy process, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't persist in the endeavour.

[English]

The Chair: Dr. Armstrong.

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: I wish you'd asked me that question on Wednesday. Tomorrow I'm going to be spending the morning with an interdepartmental group discussing it. I think what's going on is, as you know, the war in Karabakh went on for a long time.... The Karabakhians, Armenians, gathered quite a bit of territory from Azerbaijan. A lot of people were killed.

In the background of any Armenian thinking about Azerbaijan, which they consider to be a Turkic country, are the massacres at the beginning of the century. It is very hard for Armenians to accept living under a Turkic authority. There's a lot of talk about some kind of deal, settlement, that would presumably exchange territory. I've heard various rumours and I don't honestly know what the truth of it is.

I think what's happening in Armenia—and again I stress that I think—are tensions about this. If Yerevan is going to sign on with some kind of deal in Baku that gives away a lot of the territory that for a large number of Armenians and Karabakhians was won at considerable blood, they don't want any part of it. I think that's what's going on, but I don't really know for sure. Wednesday, I might know more.

The Chair: Information flows are never quite in sync with what we're trying to do, but thanks.

Let me ask a couple of wrap-up questions. I have one question of Professor Carment. In your democracy-autocracy index of Turkey and Canada, you have Turkey quite high up and rather consistent. But that seems to me to be totally inconsistent with all your next figures, because you show political rights as being very low, and civil liberties are low. I don't know about the Freedom House rating. I don't understand. That graph seems to be contradicted by the subsequent two graphs.

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Prof. David Carment: That's probably a good thing because—

The Chair: For professors maybe, but not for us.

Prof. David Carment: I'm not trying to be clever, but the point is that you have two distinctly different sources of information here who are tapping into different measures of polity type, or freedoms. The obvious point is that civil freedoms and political freedoms are not equatable with political constraint. What you're getting in the autocracy-democracy measure is the degree to which leaders are constrained by their constituencies, the degree to which there's a regulated form of participation, and the degree to which executive choice is legislated or selected competitively. That's why Turkey ranks high according to the Polity III 1998 data. Although you're right that when you look at Freedom House data, which has been defined as being somewhat conservative, an American think-tank measure of political and civil freedoms, you get a somewhat different picture—there being less mobility for individuals.

My obvious point is that by having and tapping into distinct measures of political operationalization I think you get a better picture. So at the end of the day, one can take with a grain of salt the view that Turkey is a democracy, and when one gets at the level of civil or political rights and looks at the possibility for the emergence of a civil society in Turkey, one would probably conclude that it's fairly unlikely in the short run.

So here you have simply different measures tapping into slightly different things.

The Chair: Thank you.

I have two questions for Dr. Armstrong. The first one is sort of a philosophical one. Your description of hill people versus plains people sounded like the Baburnama and all the great classical fights between the tribes people who rush down from the hills and take the lowlanders who are cultivating their fields and string them up and do all the things they do.

I'm astonished that this is still that prevalent in the region. Maybe it's because it's such a mountainous region. My question would be to push you a little on it. I wonder to what extent modern means of communications, such as the Internet, you can foresee, looking a bit into the future, will interrupt what has clearly been a pattern that might go back a thousand years or two thousand years, especially given that we find other societies rapidly evolving away from those sorts of traditional patterns due to modern communications? I wonder if you can see changes coming from those traditional patterns. That will be my first question.

My second question of you would be that you didn't mention the role of Iran when you were discussing Islamic developments. Particularly you mentioned Chechnya and Wahhabism. We had wanted to include Iran as one of our countries to visit on this trip, but we felt that if we included it, it would be introducing such a set of other enormous issues into our study that we wouldn't be able to deal with it. What's the role of Iran in all that?

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: In terms of your first one, yes, I think there will be an effect. I can't think of any great anecdotes to illustrate it. I can think of a counter one. I remember reading a fascinating book by a British mountaineer who was climbing in Svaneti, which is a part of Georgia up in the mountains, and he talked about the way the locals greeted a stranger, which was that they opened fire at him. It was that kind of a place.

I feel an affinity for these people because my ancestors on the Scottish border were like this. It's a tough area. You have to be a tough guy to survive, and there are a lot of feud and honour societies.

The Chair: I remember once in Corsica mountain climbing and being told by somebody in a village that it was right here that the French hanged so-and-so, and it was right here that this was done. I finally pressed him a little bit and said when did this occur? It was 1792.

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: You get a lot of that in this area.

There are two things the communists actually delivered. They delivered electricity practically everywhere in the Soviet Union, and they delivered literacy, and a degree of education—I think actually a reasonably high one. These have to make a difference, but there are still things that have to be settled out.

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As for Iran, Iran of course is Shiite. The areas on that map that are Shiite are Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Tajiks are basically Persian people, whereas the other people in central Asia are basically Turko-Mongols. It's very curious, incidentally, that Azerbaijan should be Shiite, because it's essentially a Turkic people. Shiites aren't going to sell that well among the Sunni, and the Iranians have tried to have their influence there.

Islam can survive a lot of persecution because it's a fairly private religion that doesn't require churches and priests and this kind of stuff. It's a family sort of religion. But they did suffer under the communists because they didn't have Madrases, they didn't have mosques, and Korans were hard to get.

So there's a big flood at the beginning, getting in here. The Shiites from Iran would have had difficulty from the start, whereas the Wahhabis are Sunni and have money behind them. They managed to get a toehold, except of course in Tajikistan, where different things operate. There's a case where the Aga Khan's foundation is very important in Badakhstan, which is the southern part of Tajikistan.

I think that's the reason for Iran. Its entry to the area is going to have to be political. It's a bit of a loser in the oil in the Caspian because no oil has been found in its part of the Caspian. The other consideration Iran has to think about is that there are a lot of Azeris living in the northern part of Iran. When President Aliev finally goes, we will see this kind of thing start up again, because one of the potential successors is supportive of Iran to a degree.

The Chair: President Aliev is in—

Dr. Patrick Armstrong: He's the president of Azerbaijan.

I think that's the answer for Iran, but it's active in there politically and economically.

The Chair: Thank you.

I have two quick questions of Professor MacFarlane.

You alluded to the role of the OSCE and its potential a couple of times. Quite a number of us participated in the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, so we're active in that role. How would you rate the OSCE with other multilateral organizations in the region? The OSCE doesn't seem to have much of an economic mandate at all, except maybe an educational one. It's mainly a human rights and political agenda. That would be one question.

The other issue is that you mentioned energy diplomacy in the U.S. We had an American from Washington who came and gave us a very romantic view of why the U.S. should be actively engaged in the area, largely around the energy issue. He didn't say it was bigger or more dramatic than available supplies in Saudi Arabia or other countries, but he seemed to pitch it as being important because it gave an important alternative to OPEC. If you could develop it, at least you had some resources you could use as a trade-off and a bargaining chip when you're fighting with OPEC or other suppliers. That seemed to be what he was suggesting, anyway.

Do you think that's where the Americans are coming from on this one and why they think it is an important energy source for them?

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Mr. Chairman, I spent a lot of time working the OSCE circuit in the region as well, particularly in Georgia and with regard to the Minsk Group involvement on the Karabakh issue. If I were to look at relative success and relative failure, I would say the OSCE in Georgia has been fairly successful. Their principal responsibility is the monitoring and observation of the conflict in South Ossetia, coupled with the more general human rights monitoring role in Georgia as a whole.

South Ossetia has been quite stable for years, and it's universally agreed that the OSCE presence has played a significant role in this in at least two respects. First, it mitigates Russian predominance. The second is that the presence of foreigners, oddly, has built confidence among the locals. It creates a more reassuring environment in which they can start to rebuild economic connections between communities.

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That said, among international organizations, obviously the OSCE is the most underresourced. You put the OSCE office in Tbilisi up against the UN office in Tbilisi and it's a whole different ball of wax. Where the OSCE has been effective in that context is in developing innovative means of cooperating with people like UNDP in order to release UNDP resources for projects with a conflict resolution thrust that the OSCE wants in South Ossetia. They've been reasonably successful at that.

As for Minsk, Karabakh, and the Armenian conflict, my sense here is that I don't think this story is a particularly happy story. Minsk Group was put together in 1992, if my memory serves me. We've been at this mediation of the conflict for eight years now, and it's not obvious to me we're any further ahead than we were in 1992. If we are further ahead, it's because of bilaterals between the two presidents, Aliev and Kocharian, and his predecessor, Ter-Petrosian; it's not the OSCE.

Why is this so? I don't think Russia has decided that it wants a settlement to Karabakh just yet, because having an active civil conflict in Azerbaijan, one party of which is closely associated with the Russians, gives Russia leverage over energy development, among other things, and it's a card in their hand that they don't want to lay on the table just yet. Maybe that will change under Putin.

The second reason is that as a community.... I hesitate to say this to someone who's involved in the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly, but I think that as a community the community of western states hasn't actually decided on just what the role of the OSCE should be and how it's to be useful and whether we should invest in it. I think we should invest in it, but who am I?

The Chair: Without getting too much into OSCE politics, one of the problems there obviously is the consensus minus one vote in procedures, where it's very difficult to get anything done because of the consensus organization. I find it very difficult. We have the same problem in the parliamentary assembly meetings. It drives everybody crazy. We have to address some issues like that.

The other one was on this U.S.—

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: Oh, I'm sorry, yes.

The Chair: Do you think it's a serious...? Is that where it is coming from—it's a potential alternative, maybe not as big as the alternative, but it's an alternative?

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: I actually wrote a paper on this for a conference in Kazakhstan a year and a half ago, because I frankly couldn't figure out the obvious discrepancy between the rhetoric of vital interest because of the energy alternative question and the reality of the reserves, which are much lower than one would expect. I concluded from this, and no one actually complained about it there, that in fact the purely energy-alternative-based explanation for American behaviour was not credible.

I think there's a geostrategic agenda, to which energy is related, but not necessarily the most important part. I think it's related to dual containment of Iran and Iraq. I think it's related to the spread of fundamentalist Islam, as they would refer to it. I think it's related to, frankly, contesting the primacy of the Russian Federation in this particular space. In other words, it's a very multifaceted agenda, of which one part is energy, but you can't explain it purely in terms of the numbers on energy. So I think you have to look farther afield.

The Chair: But if you look at the European Union's activities there, surely they're only interested from an economic point of view; they don't have any geopolitical strategic interest.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: That is correct. At least in my humble opinion it is correct.

The Chair: Unless Turkey became a member of the European Union, which is drawing a very long bow.

Prof. Neil MacFarlane: I've done a lot of work in Brussels at the European Commission on this point, and my sense is that there is actually a very clear and fairly rational energy focus to TRACECA and to the broader lines of TACIS activity in the Caucasus in particular and in the Caspian Basin more generally.

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If you look at energy consumption patterns in Europe and what source country serves what market in Europe, it's fairly credible that the resources of the Caspian Basin are located in a geographical area that is useful for mid-range supply of southern and south central Europe. From the European perspective, you're not talking so much about the dangers of excessive dependence on the gulf in this context; you're talking about excessive dependence on such other states as Libya and Algeria. I think there's a concrete case to be made that this is a useful alternative to them, and I think that's what they're focusing on.

The Chair: Thank you. That's very helpful.

Mr. Carment, I'm going to ask you if you could write down for the committee a little bit about your CIFP. You have a thing here about present goals. Obviously you'd like to expand, adding mapping capacity and things like that. If you could send us a bit more information on that, we might put something in our report about it. I don't want to get into it now because it's 12 o'clock and it's been a long morning, but if you could send us a little memo on that, it might be helpful to the researchers when we're doing the report. We can decide whether this is a facility that we might urge the government to continue funding or to expand. Without getting into oral testimony now, we can deal with that later.

I want to thank all three of you very much. It has been a fascinating morning. It's been very interesting. We appreciate your evidence very much and we thank you for it. I hope when you read the report you will say, Dr. Armstrong, that they went to a crazy place but they didn't come back completely crazy. So we'll see.

Thank you very much for your help.

The meeting is adjourned.