Madam Speaker, in a more cynical and uncaring age than our own, Bismark once quipped that the Balkan conflicts were not worth the bones of a single Prussian Grenadier.
In depositions I gave to the committee on foreign affairs of the United States house of representatives on August 12, 1992 and August 3, 1993-and these are entered and published in the congressional record of those two dates-I recommended that with the pending break-up of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which was first put together as part of the World War I victors' peace settlement, it would be wise to go back to the original Versailles treaties of 1919 and specifically the treaty of St. Germain-en-Laye which created Yugoslavia to achieve a peaceful, orderly succession and avoid loss of life and hardship to the civilian population of the region.
Now, three years and 250,000 civilian deaths later, we seem to be reaching the same result as might have been obtained under the
orderly international law processes envisaged by the Versailles treaties, including resort to the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court afforded by the treaty in case of impasses of territorial frontiers.
Our foreign minister and later Prime Minister, Lester Pearson, fathered the concept of United Nations peacekeeping. We have since come of age in our experience with UN problem solving in the former Yugoslavia with the mission in the Bosnia-Hercegovina region being quickly transformed from classical UN peacekeeping, which is simply physically keeping apart warring rivals who have already accepted a military ceasefire, and these involving chapter VI of the charter, pacific settlement of disputes, the transformation into the new concept of an activist peacekeeping role involving chapter VII of the charter.
Having gone so far, Canada has become part of the continuing post-communist succession problem in Yugoslavia and should stay the course.
There are however steps that can be taken to offset or reduce the dangers of our continuance in the new NATO based phase of the operation and to ensure that decisions taken are compatible with and protected by international law and also rational in the political and larger geopolitical sense.
First, it should be recognized that NATO as a regional security arrangement falling within chapter VIII of the United Nations charter, derives its international law authority from the United Nations charter and cannot go beyond that. Issues such as the right of self-defence and its present day practice can be updated or redefined in contemporary international law terms by the security council and also the general assembly as glosses on classical doctrine and jurisprudence as the 1992 decision of the International Court of Justice in the Lockerbie case confirmed.
NATO itself however has no power to dispense from existing international law norms and NATO commanders and their political governors would act at legal peril if they did not refer back to the security council and general assembly when new political facts challenging the political-military settlement now reached might emerge.
One such potential problem obviously concerns future relations of the two main constituent parts of the new Bosnian entity: the Croat-Muslim Bosnian Republic and the Serbian Bosnian Republic, their relations to their adjoining mother states, Croatia and rump Yugoslavia which is Serbia-Montenegro.
The current political military settlement has an element of historical transition inherent in it and irredentist pressures for ultimate junction with the adjoining mother states can be expected.
It would be an error for NATO to view such matters, if they should arise, as purely military in character and proper for a NATO military decision alone. Political common sense and prudence counsel following what international law in any case enjoins, namely referring the high political issues back to the security council and general assembly for definitive ruling.
Likewise whatever dispositions the NATO high command might wish to make, the military decisions of NATO are referable back to the United Nations for their ultimate sanction and justification under international law.
In adhering to the new NATO force for Bosnia, the Canadian government might perhaps attach appropriate reservations confirming the primacy, as to Canadian forces, of the United Nations as through regional security organizations authorized under chapter VIII of the United Nations charter.
This being understood, we can and should support Canada's continued participation in the Bosnian peace process that after four long winters seems at last to be opening up the prospect of the rule of law and peace and elemental security for the inhabitants of that historically troubled region.