Mr. Speaker, I congratulate you first all on your appointment as Deputy Speaker. You are somebody who knows Parliament and its history and who loves the institution. You will bring integrity, good judgment and compassion to your office. I congratulate you.
It is a matter of some sadness to me to speak on this debate. I have had the privilege of lecturing to the University of Belgrade, the Serbian Academy and to the University of Zagreb in earlier happy years when that was one country. It is one ethnic community but the cultures are widely different. Three hundred years under the Austro-Hungarian Empire make the lovely city of Zagreb as it was into an Austrian city with the architecture, the gardens, the parks, whereas Belgrade looks another direction.
The original era perhaps, the political era, was joining these disparate communities together in 1919. It was done by consensus. The Croat and Slovanian leaders of the period feared rightly that without a solution of that sort they would be given over to Italy. The whole Illyrian coast had been promised to Italy under the secret treaties of 1915 if it deserted the German alliance and joined the western powers as it did. So you had a basis for a union that was consummated in one of the Versailles-dependent treaties, the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye which I will have occasion to refer to in a moment.
I do raise the issue though that here I think we have a political problem that, reversing Clausewitz, cannot be resolved by military means.
One of the problems here is that Bosnia-Hercegovina was not a situation ripe for solution by classic peacekeeping methods as devised by Lester Pearson. Peacekeeping is not mentioned as such in the charter. It is a gloss on it. When Mr. Pearson devised the concept it was based firmly on chapter 6 of the charter and not on chapter 7. What has happened basically in the Bosnia-Hercegovina situation is that we have escalated into a peacemaking situation which invokes another section of the charter, chapter 7, which does authorize the recourse to armed force but which the precedents indicate clearly that unless there is a consensus as to the political goals to be achieved by the military intervention then the situation is doomed to failure.
I think the problem for Canada, in some respects a tragedy for our military forces who are not responsible for that-they carry out the orders-is that personnel developed and trained for peacekeeping have been used for peacemaking. They neither have the military equipment available nor the sensitive type of political training that is required to carry out even peacemaking missions today.
In a pathological sense I suppose Somalia is the perfect example of how peacekeeping transforms surreptitiously into peacemaking and fails. I echo the sentiments of the member on the other side who raised the issue of the soldiers on court martial for the carrying out of orders as they saw it in Somalia when clearly the political intelligence was lacking.
We have to consider in terms of peacemaking and peacekeeping, the two which are now joined together, the roles and missions Canada is capable of performing. One thing that is very clear is that it is quite impossible to be represented in too many places at one time.
If we are going to be in Somalia and in Cyprus, we cannot be in Bosnia-Hercegovina and do the job rightly. So one of the things our committee on military affairs will have to consider is a more prudent economy in disposition of our forces and deciding the priority areas. This is something that in a period of budgetary restraint has to be considered very seriously.
My main thesis though is that Bosnia-Hercegovina represents an attempt to resolve by military means something that should have been resolved by political means. There was a time when Yugoslavia was breaking up. The problem of state succession in eastern Europe should have been foreseen and provided for in advance but was not any more than one had provided for the succession with the collapse of the Soviet empire and the
movement to a more liberal Russia. It was not foreseen. It was not provided for.
What one has had, and this explains the muddiness of the decisions from the United Nations as carried out by the main powers that must assume the responsibility for them, is a division of attitude among western foreign ministries. In fact, looking back one is reminded of divisions between western foreign ministries at the time of the Russo-Turkish war in 1877-78, at the time of the two Balkan wars, at the time indeed of World War I. You see the divisions between the Quai d'Orsay and the Wilhelmstrasse of those periods replicated in a milder form perhaps but still in the consequence it is the same in divisions as to the policy to be applied in Bosnia-Hercegovina. We are in the middle of that and that is a problem.
There have been criticisms made of one of the European foreign ministries that it precipitated the problem by premature recognition of post-succession Yugoslav states Slovenia and Croatia. I do not accept that criticism in relation to Slovenia and Croatia. They did have a separate historical existence as units of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Their frontiers are reasonably clearly defined under the doctrine of uti possidetis which is recognized in international law.
One has many more concerns about Bosnia-Hercegovina which did not really exist until 1878 and which always has had a high element of artificiality about it. I think it was an error to recognize Bosnia-Hercegovina and to admit it to the United Nations above all without taking the trouble to define what status it should have, what its frontiers would be, what its relations with its neighbours should be. I think this does come within the category of premature recognition and the political consequences with this.
The United Nations efforts through the Vance-Owen plan, noble but politically and may one say constitutionally and legally very naive predictably would end in failure.
I would wonder why our government committing forces to Bosnia-Hercegovina did not perhaps raise these issues of the necessity of a political settlement. Is the time for diplomacy past? Not in the least. It has not really been tried. Yugoslavia was put together in 1919 as a consensual union of the kingdom as it was called of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes by an international conference of which Canada was a part. We signed the treaty of St. Germain. It was our second international act and we are legal party to it.
I suggested in an earlier pre-parliamentary capacity as a private citizen, as an expert witness deposing before the United States Congress committee on foreign affairs, the House of Representatives, that the machinery of the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye be revived. It is a still extant treaty. One needed a global view of the Balkans. One cannot isolate Bosnia-Hercegovina from the fate of other areas, including the former Yugoslav republic that calls itself Macedonia but perhaps should be called the republic of Skopje.
Peace in the Balkans as a whole is dependent on rational solutions in this area as in any other area. The failure was to recognize that post-succession Yugoslavia required a larger political consensus than Bosnia alone before you could safely and decently send military forces into it.
Therefore, I would have some criticism for our own governments in going in too enthusiastically and not asking the questions that European foreign ministries should have asked: Where they wanted to go and what their purpose was and which are present certainly in other fora such as the CSCE, NATO and the European community.
It is not too late for a Canadian initiative maintaining our forces in Yugoslavia and Bosnia until the limit but saying: "Look, a political settlement should come". Is it ripe? There is a time when parties to a conflict wear themselves out. Exhaustion takes over and that is when diplomacy takes over. There are some indications that that could be near.
In any case simply to maintain forces without pushing for a larger political solution, without telling the European Community countries: "Look, you have to get your act together. You have to give some signals of what you want to do". We cannot solve the Bosnia problem without solving the problem in Skopje, without guaranteeing the security of territorial frontiers without the Balkans. If we do not do this, we are back to 1878 and 1913-14. Santayana said that if you do not study history, then you make all the errors again. What is emerging is a sorry exercise in international diplomacy.
I think the big Canadian exercise is steering back to the United Nations the necessity for a larger political consensus, a larger conference of which if we follow the treaty of St. Germain route, we will be a part and we can speak out on this.
I do not think we can solve Bosnia without solving the other problems. Is it to be partitioned? If it is to be partitioned the frontiers will have to be defined. The treaty of St. Germain provides for the compulsory jurisdiction of the international court in these matters. It has the advantage in frontier definition of making an ally of time.
Peace is necessary. We have a basis for a settlement that will be viable and it is better then than casting blame on military forces. I think the military forces are not to blame and we have performed well.