Mr. Robert Fowler Lecture

Sleeping With Al Qaeda

Mr. Fowler is a former Canadian diplomat whose career has included Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Ministers Trudeau, Turner and Mulroney; Deputy Minister of National Defence; and Canada’s longest serving Ambassador to the United Nations, where he represented Canada on the Security Council in 1999 and 2000. He was also Ambassador to Italy and the three Rome-based UN food agencies; Sherpa for the Kananaskis G8 Summit (for which he chaired the creation of the Africa Action Plan); and the personal representative for Africa of Prime Ministers Chrétien, Martin and Harper. He retired from the federal public service in the fall of 2006, and since then has been a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. In 2008, Mr. Fowler was appointed special envoy of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to Niger. On December 14, 2008 he was captured by Al Qaeda and held in the Sahara desert for four months before his release.