Mr. Speaker, I remind myself that I am speaking on a motion by the Minister of National Defence:
That this House take note and welcome the recent Dayton peace agreement and the international community's continued efforts to bring enduring peace and security to the Balkans, and Canadian support of these efforts by participation in a multinational military implementation force under NATO command.
In the next 10 minutes or so I plan to talk about the new ground we are breaking, what are the trends, talk about what I see the missions are and give some possible areas of the difficulties that I foresee. Maybe from that one could draw some ideas about some of the things that Canadians could do with the considerable experience they have had in peacekeeping.
I want to start by going back to 1947. It depends on how one reads history, as the member for Renfrew-Nipissing-Pembroke mentioned. If members look at history they have to look at the trends. If they look at the trend beginning in 1947 and the 40 years until 1987, there were really 13 peacekeeping missions.
From 1987 until this year there have been double that or 26. If members look at 13 in 40 years and 26 in 5 years, there are twice as many in one-fifth the time. Therefore there is a factor of 10.
Whether that factor of 10 will continue to rise, I am not sure. It is an indicator that what we are doing now we are likely to have to do again some time in the not too distant future.
This is peacekeeping operation No. 40 in the world. I believe it is the most challenging one and that it will allow us to break new ground.
There is another aspect of this which, if it does not bother me, it guides me in my personal belief of what should be happening. There are 184 countries in the world. Some are very large. We are the second largest of the countries. Some are very small. Of the 184 countries, what is important to remember with respect to ethnicity, cultural differences and various other differences is that only 10 per cent of those countries have any kind of homogeneity in their population. Of those countries the 10 per cent has an ethnic grouping of about 75 per cent.
What we are seeing here may not be the end of our involvement in historical patterns. For that reason it is important for us to debate this issue. What we decide today will be debated in cabinet and will eventually become the Canadian decision. It will set ground rules for future involvement in what will inevitably be the result of these kinds of actions downstream, hopefully not too soon, but in all likelihood before this Parliament ends.
When considering the 44 months of difficulty which has existed in Bosnia, it is uplifting to talk about a chance to change the horror of war to the prospect of peace. A quarter of a million people have been killed. In the city of Sarajevo 10,500 people were killed. There are up to a million refugees. It is a very sad situation. They have a decimated landscape of shattered buildings, roofless homes, deserted towns and countless graves scattered in the hillsides, bearing the names of young men and women who were born after 1970.
The special joint committee of which I was privileged to be a member saw all of this. There is a battered, bombed out mental institution in Bacovici being run by Canadian soldiers and the wretched inhabitants of this institution depend on Canadians for their very existence.
In a civil war such as the one we have witnessed in Bosnia there are no winners nor are there likely to be winners. The only likelihood of a winner is the prospect of peace. Peace can be the only victor in this lexicon of issues.
The peace implementation plan, although it is not perfect, offers hope that some things will be no more. There will be no more days of dodging bullets and nights of artillery barrages. There will be no more winters of freshly dug cold and sinister graves. There will be no more years of isolation from the outside world.
There are 10 highlights to the Bosnia peace accord that were mentioned by the Minister of National Defence this morning. First, Bosnia remains a single state within a present border. There will be a Bosnian-Croat federation with 51 per cent of the territory and a Bosnian-Serb republic with 49 per cent.
Second, there will be a rotating presidency, beginning with a Bosnian-Muslim, a two-house Parliament and a constitutional court. The central government will have responsibility for foreign policy, foreign trade, monetary policy, citizenship, immigration and other collective issues.
The capital, Sarajevo, is united and under Muslim-Croat control. This may prove to be difficult in the future honing and improving of these negotiations.
International supervised elections should take place next year, or in the foreseeable future.
Almost a million refugees will be able to return home and people may move freely.
The control of Brcko, a Serb held town, will be decided by an arbitration panel made up of Muslims, Serbs and Europeans.
It is important to the issue that there will be a corridor of between three to five miles in northeast Bosnia linking the Serb held smaller territory to the east to the central northern part by a corridor called the Posavina corridor. That is still the subject of some intense negotiation.
The Muslim held town of Gorazde will be linked to the federation by a land corridor. The Serbs retain Srebrenica and Zepa, Muslim enclaves they overran last summer. Last but not least, the NATO implementation force will be participating in the near future. In fact it has already started.
What are the NATO objectives? There are two, primary and secondary. The primary objective, as I see it, which I will put slightly differently but with the same thrust as the Minister of National Defence, is to oversee the withdrawal of warring factions from a buffer zone about five kilometres or two and a half miles wide created in most places along the current ceasefire lines. After a certain period of time, maybe 30 or 45 days, this zone will be widened to five miles or more, except in Gorazde, Sarajevo and Brcko which, as I mentioned earlier, will have special boundaries.
The secondary mission is removing land mines and also quasi-military roles such as providing security for relief agencies, delivering food and other necessities of life and ensuring passage for the thousands of refugees that I mentioned.
To try and prevent small conflicts from growing there will be an agreement that several commissions could be created to discuss this.
I have given the background of what I believe is the setting for Canada's participation. We are breaking new ground. This is the first time that NATO has had a pure peacekeeping role. It is not only NATO. We are involved with the partnership for peace, our future allies, and Russia has a role to play with a command and control system that has been set up for the very first time.
Quite frankly, as a parliamentarian and a member of the government, there are risks involved. There have been risks in every peacekeeping operation. However, I quote the hon. member who stood up a few moments ago and said: "The risk of not participating either monetary wise or the risk of lives or wounded may be much greater than not participating".
From the various debates we have had in the last two years, from the special joint committee on defence, the white paper discussion and the present discussion on reserves, it is very clear to me that Canadians are prepared to and want to take this risk and participate in this operation.
It is the role we have to play. I really implore the opposition members, after their political rhetoric, to give the government some indication of what they believe the Canadian people would like us to do so that we can be guided in the cabinet discussions and downstream decisions.