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kofi annan

Kofi Annan, Former Secretary-General of the United Nations, takes part in a panel discussion at the University of Ottawa on Friday, November 4, 2011.Sean Kilpatrick

The West should not fear the rise of Islamic political parties in the wake of the Arab Spring uprisings, a former United Nations chief said Friday.

Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan noted that a previously banned Islamic party garnered the most votes in the recent Tunisian elections, and that the Muslim Brotherhood may have a role to play in Egypt.

The leaders of newly-liberated Libya have also talked of embracing tenets of Islamic law as they move forward in creating a democratic country.

"The West has to get used to the fact that Islam will play a role in these societies," Mr. Annan told a gathering of students, academics and diplomats at the University of Ottawa.

"Islam doesn't mean terrorism."

Mr. Annan was one of several panellists discussing recent events in the Middle East and North Africa.

Mr. Annan was the UN chief for a decade until 2006 and was a leading advocate of the Responsibility-to-Protect doctrine, which underpinned the recent international intervention in Libya.

He was taking part in a panel discussion on the 10th anniversary of the Responsibility-to-Protect doctrine — known as "R2P" — that also included former Liberal foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy.

Mr. Axworthy and the previous Liberal government sponsored the international commission that created the R2P doctrine, which attempts to specify when and how the international world can intervene in a country to protect civilians from being harmed by their own leaders.

University of Ottawa President Allan Rock, a former Liberal cabinet minister and UN ambassador, said R2P has proven to be "a unique and creative contribution to the way we think about state sovereignty."

The NATO-led, UN-sanctioned aerial bombardment of Libya to protect innocent civilians has been seen as an example of how R2P has been implemented. The international mission led to the defeat of dictator Moammar Gadhafi who pledged to crush a popular uprising of his own people.

Canada lent warplanes, a warship and surveillance aircraft to the NATO efforts, which backed rebel fighters on the ground and eventually ended Col. Gadhafi's 42 years of brutal, totalitarian rule.

Annan recalled how he spearheaded an effort to craft the doctrine after the world sat idly by and failed to stop genocide in the Balkans, Rwanda and Cambodia.

But he said its implementation in the recent Libya campaign was far from perfect.

"Regime change came up very quickly in the game," Annan noted, saying that the UN resolution that backed military intervention did not account for regime change.

But Mr. Annan said Gadhafi "brought some of it on himself" with overt threats against his own people.

Col. Gadhafi was killed last month by rebels in his hometown of Sirte, after NATO air strikes disabled the convoy in which he was travelling.

Mr. Annan also said it is legitimate to question why the world intervened in Libya and is not taking similar action in Syria, where 3,000 have been by state forces during eight months of protests.

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