Mr. Speaker, certainly it is my pleasure to speak to this issue. I guess it is the sort of thing that one wishes they did not have to talk to in this parliament.
I have to go back to when I first came to this parliament. I think the very first week we were here we were discussing Bosnia. That was one of the first issues on the table. At that point we again had a take note debate and again we were dealing with the issue of how to deal with this sort of situation.
It is obvious that we do need to deal with it. There are 275,000 people suffering, both of Albanian and Serbian background. There are 50,000 or more homeless people. All of us are touched by that. We all watch television, and we all believe that we must respond.
I do not think the question is that we need to respond, that we need to do something. However, there are a lot of questions that we need to address, that we need to bring forward. Therefore, this evening I will try to ask some of these questions. Some of them are not answerable, but I still think Canadians expect us to discuss them in this House.
It is symptomatic of the age in which we live, the post-cold war period, that we have a lot of these problem areas which require action.
We agree with much of what the minister says. That is the case on issues such as this. Certainly we have to support the fact that we may require NATO action because people like Slobodan Milosevic seem to understand only one thing and that is the big hammer over the head. It is unfortunate that people like that exist, but there are many of them in many parts of this world that we have to deal with. We obviously support that sort of NATO response or the ultimate probability that that response will be required.
We as well read the report of Kofi Annan this week. We read about the 6,000 to 7,000 buildings which have been destroyed. We saw villages totally damaged, being shelled, and people living in fear of returning to their homes.
As I look at those pictures on television I cannot help but think back to travelling through some of those valleys in Bosnia where there was mile after mile, kilometre after kilometre, of bombed out villages. There was nobody there. The only thing we could see were the graves in the ditches as we drove along in the bus. There was total silence. I have never experienced war. There were not even birds flying in the air. It was totally dead silence. There were nothing but graves.
That brought it home very quickly. We could not step off the roadside. We could not drive our vehicle off the road. We were told to only stand on what looked like old pavement because there were mines everywhere. There were mines in the corn fields. Cobs of corn had plastic explosives in them. When someone picked that cob of corn they would loose an arm or a leg. They would be maimed.
The most serious thing I saw was in a schoolyard. The children had all gone into the school. I visited with those children. They wrote to me about what it was like to live in a war zone. I have 12 pages of 10 and 11 year old kids telling me what it was like and what their future would be like. What I saw in the schoolyard were Coke tins. They looked like full Coke tins sitting on the table. I said to the translator “Those are Coke tins. The kids are going to love those”. He said “Let me grab a big stick”. He grabbed a big stick and pushed the Coke tin off the table. There was a loud boom and the table disappeared. There was a mine underneath that Coke tin. Some little kid was going to grab that Coke tin when they came out from class. That would be retaliation.
That is what we are talking about. That is the kind of environment that we as Canadians cannot imagine exists anywhere in the world.
It is obvious why we need to get involved. The humanitarian factor is so obvious, but the problems are many. We saw the guy on television carrying the limp body of his young child. That wells up something in all of us and says that we must respond to this kind of terror.
As well the minister mentioned the problem of the United Nations. This is a problem that we are going to have to deal with. This problem is not just in Kosovo. We can go back and talk about Rwanda. We can talk about Nigeria. We can talk about Bosnia. The inability of the United Nations to respond is becoming a more serious problem.
I travelled to India and Pakistan this summer. The inability to respond to the problem in that area is something that the world has to deal with. We need to deal with the Kashmir problem. I have said, and I will say it again, that Canada has an important role to play. We can show some leadership. I call it diplomatic leadership. I call it mediation. We could become the mediators of the world. I use some of these examples and I would even carry it as far Kosovo. We have a reputation which would allow us to be there and do things that the Americans cannot do, the Russians cannot do, the French cannot do and the British cannot do. No one can do it but a country like Canada which is a middle power. We are in the G-7. We belong to NATO. We belong to all kinds of things. We would be respected in playing that role.
I am frustrated, as I am sure the minister is. I grabbed from my notes a note of March 23, 1998 when I talked to our caucus about Kosovo. I could grab other ones. I said that there has to be action. People are being killed. Women and children are being killed. We are now in October and we are still talking. We have done nothing. That is extremely frustrating for all of us. We have to end it. We have to find a better way of dealing with these kinds of situations. I wish I had all the answers and could say “Mr. Minister, this is what we have to do and it will all work”. I can give him some suggestions, but I do not know that they will answer all of the problems.
I have difficulty with take note debates. I repeat this and I will say it every time we have one of these debates. I think the better way would be to have the House invite someone to give us a complete briefing. It would be for all members of parliament and it would be done in a non-partisan fashion. We should bring in the best experts we have in this country, and we have a number of them. Let them tell us all about this issue so that we as Canadians understand the issue much better.
Then we could let two speakers or four from the government and two from the opposition, whatever the formula, give the position of their respective party.
Then we could have an honest vote, based not on partisan politics. This is not partisan stuff. We are talking about lives. We are talking about people. Then we could vote on what we should do. We could come to a consensus. I think foreign affairs lends itself to that and we would be respected. We would feel better in ourselves. Many feel they should speak on these issues but do not necessarily have the background, understanding or information to do it. I would put forward that suggestion as being a better way than the take note debate we are having here tonight.
I think the problem of being so slow to respond is probably more frustrating than anything else about this issue. I would like us to address that. When we deal with someone like Slobodan Milosevic or Saddam Hussein, or whoever we want to put in this category, we know what kind of person we are dealing with and, therefore, we should be able to build a response to these kinds of people.
Canadians want to know a number of things. They want to know what we will bomb if we have to bomb something. They want to be assured that we are not just going to create more victims. They are concerned about the nature of the police force, the nature of the Serbian clean-up and the ethnic cleansing. Can we really go in and bomb unless it is decided that we are going for Belgrade and we are really going to teach this guy a lesson? He would understand that all right, but is that really the solution that we should be talking about? How far do we go? We should talk about that.
What about the dangers for Canadians? We should talk about that too. We understand that in Serbia there is a really good radar system. There are missiles, there are rockets and there is a defence system set up there.
If Canadians are at risk we should know that ahead of time. I know it is fine to say military is always at risk, but I think the levels of risk could certainly be discussed more fully.
Are we considering using ground troops? We know ground troops would be the way to make it work. In Bosnia it works because there are people with big guns and they use a big stick.
One thing I learned from talking to people there was that the hatred is still there and they are waiting. They are waiting because that big gun will go away some day and when it does they will kill their neighbour who killed their grandmother, their grandfather or their child.
These kids can talk about what happened in 1942. They are 10 years old. They can relate what happened in 1536 when the Ottoman Turks came. My goodness, they are living 500 years of history and it is affecting them.
The answer would be to get on the ground and come up with a plan.
I think we always have to ask about U.S. dedication to this whole issue. That is a question that we all need to know because I do not know that any of us could be there without that big U.S. stick.
We need to know and we need to be assured by our defence minister about the readiness of our troops and equipment. We are proud of them. Those of us who have travelled in war zones, when we see the Canadian flag on the troop carrier, it makes us darned proud. But we have to be sure that they are equipped to handle this sort of thing.
As well, besides saying that we need a long term plan, we should be a part of the contact group. I think we have earned our stripes. We have been there from the beginning. I cannot see how we cannot force ourselves, more aggressively, to become a part of that contact group. Our future involvement should partly depend on our having a say about what our troops do.
When we talk about a long term plan we need to involve the European Union. We need to ask what it is prepared to commit in its backyard. I know the difficulties in asking that question. I posed it to Germans and French and have received opposite stories. They need to face up to that as well.
We need schools. We need infrastructure. We need planned society for 30 years or 40 years if we are to fix that part of the world. Who has the commitment and the money? Only on a big, collective issue can we do it. Then we could be proud and say that we have done something for that country.
The concept of regional instability troubles us all. We are concerned about Russia economically, from a nuclear standpoint and from a stability standpoint in Europe and the rest of the world. We are concerned about Macedonia and Albania and a potential flare-up. We are also concerned about Greece and Turkey, two NATO partners that may come into conflict in terms of this decision. We need to ask those questions and need to be sure we have looked at them before we get too far into any kind of military action.
I wish I could say tonight that I have the solution, that this is what the minister should be doing and if we were government we would do it. However, this is not situation we are looking at. We are looking at a situation where Canadians need to understand our involvement. We need to get that information out through members of parliament of all parties. We need to answer their questions. We need to address the issues. Then we can say we have done what we are here to do in terms of an issue like this one.
I hope the minister thinks seriously about a different approach to take note debates. If it does not work we can always come back to this method. If we could just give it a try we would have better informed members of parliament, better informed Canadians, and more pride in the actions we take to help people of the world in serious crises such has the one in Kosovo.