Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate this day of having gone through the whole Chamber and come down to the last speaker, being me. We are going to be out of here before midnight.
I represent the federal riding of Waterloo made up of the township of Woolwich, Waterloo and a part of Kitchener. We are the home of Project Ploughshares at Conrad Grebel College, as well as a Centre for Conflict Resolution. Of course we have a very strong Mennonite base. The Mennonite community is strongly involved in assisting people in other countries in time of crisis.
When we look at our country, when we listen to speakers and when we see the background we have in the Chamber, we are like a little United Nations. I cannot help but reflect that we represent very much a beacon of hope to a troubled world.
One person in my riding, a Dr. Elmasry, is a professor at the University of Waterloo. He is an active member of a number of human rights organizations. He wrote in his presentation, an article that he sent to me, that the overwhelming fact that confronts the moral fabric of the post cold war era was that the world aggression in Bosnia-Hercegovina was a war of genocide. The second important fact was that there was no decisive international will to stop the genocide. The holocaust prescription never again became meaningless. In this pathetic moral desert the European Community and its security and human rights concerns have become severely tarnished.
I received some quite important communications from some grades six, seven and eight students. It is important to me in my personal circumstances. In 1956 when Canada embarked on its peacekeeping mission at Suez I was a nine-year old boy in Hungary and the Hungarian revolution was going on. I do so very well recall Hungarians felt so abandoned when the Suez crisis took over. Somehow we felt that a right to self-determination of the Hungarians was sacrificed on the altar expediency on the Suez campaign.
The students who wrote to me were in a group called the Urgent Action Team at St. Agnes Elementary School in Waterloo. JoAnne Thorpe is their parent volunteer who works with them. One letter was written by a student, Cheryl Feeney:
In Bosnia they are crushing the skulls of children and slitting the throats of the women and shooting the men as they try to defend their family.
Celene Krieger states:
I am sure that you heard about what is happening in Bosnia, like wars, death and many innocent people dying, being raped just because of their religion. The most horrifying thing is that many of these people are children.
Beckey Curran states:
I believe that Canada should help in peacemaking. I know that some people say we should take care of our own problems before we take care of others. That may be true but we take our freedom for granted and we should realize how it would be if our own country was not free and we were at war.
The letters go on. I guess I am touched by the serious tone of the letters and the fact that our young people have so ingrained in themselves that one of the great roles of Canada in this world is peacekeeping and peacemaking.
I was speaking to Ernie Regehr about Project Ploughshares and I asked him: "What is your prescription to the problem?" One of the points he made was that unless there were people in Bosnia-Hercegovina, unless there are witnesses to human suffering, unless there are people who are ready to assist with the human suffering, we will never know what has gone on there. We will never know what will continue to go on there. In some ways the actions of the Europeans and the United Nations in putting the arms embargo in place have left the Muslims of the region defenceless.
As Canadians, one of the stronger proponents of the United Nations, we must try to establish international law and to fight against lawlessness. It is generally accepted that if there is anything that unites us as a country this is one of the issues. We cannot do it all. We have to work through strengthening the role of the United Nations. We have to make the commitment that we will stand together with the democracies of this world to make sure that law, order and self-determination will prevail.