Madam Speaker, I am struck tonight by the relative brevity and great relevance of the remarks to this issue and what appears to be a growing concern in this House on both sides as to where our government should take us over the next few hours in dealing with this very difficult issue of the request for the possible use of air strikes in and around Gorazde and other places in Bosnia.
The views expressed here tonight I am very sure will provide great strength to the members of the cabinet, our government, when they make their decision, a very difficult decision but one that they are charged with and one which will bind inevitably all of us as Canadians, those who pay taxes, those who wear military uniforms, those who have relatives abroad and Canadians in all walks of life.
What we see here tonight is a Parliament at work expressing the views of Canadians for the benefit of a government which shortly must act. As I understand it there are a number of other countries in this world which are waiting for Canada to make up its mind. We are on the verge of that now as we speak.
I think most of the issues that one would have wanted to deal with here tonight have been dealt with extremely well by my colleagues. There are only two that I will refer to. It is the often heard statement that we should not get involved in this kind of a war because we cannot win it. We would prefer to be involved in a peace. Let us not turn this into another Vietnam.
In this particular case I do not think the intention is to get involved in a war. No one intends to invade Bosnia. What we are dealing with is not even the whole country of Bosnia. What we are dealing with is five safe havens, five places where the world, through the United Nations, told Bosnians, principally Bosnian Muslims, that they had safe haven. At the time we were developing that thesis we also, maybe for good reason, imposed an arms embargo. We said they may not have the arms to protect themselves, we will stop arms from getting to them but we will also put some blue helmets on the ground and have some safe havens. In the end I think we had five safe havens.
We created them. We set up the arms embargo and now the people there numbering in the tens of thousands-in this particular case tonight as we speak it is Gorazde-of men, women and children without weapons to defend themselves. We are watching and some of us are saying we should not be there. I say we are there and we must stay there to finish our commitment.
We cannot walk away and leave those men, women and children to the guns that are advancing. References have been made in this House tonight to other incidents in history in which maybe we should have been there but we were not. Suffice it to say that we are there because, although we might rather not be, we wanted to be there and we have a job to do. I say we must finish and deliver on our commitment.
The second thing I want to say is that there are millions of people all over the world watching what is happening in Bosnia with a slightly different perspective than that of most Canadians. One cannot help but notice that the majority of the people in Gorazde and in the safe havens are Muslims, people of the Muslim faith. They have lots of brothers and sisters here in Canada and they are also looking at the world. They are looking to see if other countries of the world, those that have the money, the guns, the resources, the morality, the guts, the principles, are willing to stand by and protect the lives of those tens of thousands of people.
The fact that they are of the Muslim faith is very relevant to the whole world. There are millions of people all over the world who will be watching to see how we Canadians stand up for the principles, the morality which we have espoused since the beginning of this country.
I want to close and mention the bad words air strike. This is a mechanism, this is a method by which we are informed by the experts, by the people who know about these things, that we may be able to fulfil our commitment. It will not achieve it by itself. It may enable us to accomplish those very limited goals of protecting the safe havens.
We do not want to micro-manage what happens there on a minute by minute basis or even on a day by day basis. We are asked to say yes to the use of that instrument and I am prepared to say yes.