Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank the member for Scarborough—Agincourt for bringing this important matter to the House of Commons.
One of the great tragedies of World War I was the deaths of 1.5 million Armenians at the hands of the Ottoman empire. It is another sad episode in the history of modern warfare.
Prior to the wars of the French Revolution in 1792, war was very much a matter of battle between opposing armies. Few civilians were ever killed. There were episodes in every war where cities were sacked and women assaulted after decisive battles outside of city gates, but few civilians were killed.
The wars of the French Revolution changed all that. The past pattern of warfare between small professional standing armies came to an end when the French instituted the conscription of troops in 1793 to fight the Austrians and their allies. The days of the small professional armies manoeuvring across country and only giving battle to punish a strategically placed inferior opponent were over with. Henceforth armies were large, unwieldy mobs of civilians in uniform trying to kill each other and battle was given quite freely.
The advent of the industrial revolution just made warfare far more deadly and machine dependent. Due to the combination of conscription and the industrial revolution, the foundation of a nation's military strength changed. By the 1850s the true foundation of a nation's military strength had begun to rest on the size of its civilian population and its industrial infrastructure. Modern warfare was born.
It took almost the next 100 years to perfect it to a point where in World War II one could argue that civilians and industrial infrastructure had become the real targets. That is the real evil of modern war. In World War I, 20 million people were killed, the majority being soldiers, but in World War II, 50 million people were killed, the majority now being civilians.
Many Canadians know the horrors of the Holocaust and the evils of Nazism, but few Canadians know of the misfortune of the Armenians butchered because they were stuck between the Ottoman empire and the Russians. The decaying Ottoman empire found them to be a threat. The Armenians were an industrious, energetic Christian community awash in an Ottoman Turkish sea. Out of a population of two million Armenians, one and one-half million were killed.
The massacre of civilian populations has always been the ugliest aspect of modern war. The Armenians suffered from what today would be termed ethnic cleansing. The survivors escaped into Russia or faced forced resettlement. Indeed the Geneva protocols were brought forward by like-minded nations to protect civilian populations like the Armenians from the ravages of war. Later the League of Nations attempted to protect civilian populations between the wars. After the second world war, the United Nations took on the challenging job of trying to prevent war and protect civilians.
The terrible truth is that even though we see ourselves as more civilized than our forefathers on this planet, we are not. Every day we hear of the terrible human cost of modern war: Rwanda, Burundi, Bosnia, Croatia, and now Kosovo; where ethnic groups are the targets of the most reprehensible acts known to mankind, places where Canada has always dispatched peacekeepers and peacemakers to end these brutal practices.
Canada sent troops to Rwanda under the command of the United Nations and led by a Canadian, a brave Canadian, Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire. They were forced to witness one of the worst episodes in man's inhumanity to man.
Canadians were also in the former Yugoslavia, in Bosnia and Croatia and again witnessed unspeakable atrocities, atrocities similar to what one and a half million Armenians suffered. In Sarajevo a group of Canadians led by General Lewis MacKenzie distinguished themselves at an airport trying to help the unfortunate in Bosnia. Again outside a small village in Croatia, in an area known as the Medak Pocket, Canadians attempted to put a stop to ethnic cleansing.
Unfortunately for Canada's badly neglected military, they will likely find themselves soon in Kosovo trying again to protect civilians from harm. Canada has always stood up for those who need our assistance and who could not protect themselves.
The fact that wars, horrible wars, both state on state and state on sub-state or ethnic group continue on this planet is the key reason that the Government of Canada must commit some of its coming budget surpluses to its neglected, cut to the bone military. Indeed, the government must re-equip our forces so that Canada will be able to play a more important role on the world stage in trying to stop the horrors of war and ethnic violence.
The fact that the Armenian people suffered at the hands of a dying empire between 1915 and 1918 is of great sadness to all in this House and to all Canadians. Armenian Canadians have contributed greatly to the fabric of Canadian society and culture and we are all richer for that. It is only fitting that we remember them here today below the chimes of the Peace Tower, and that we take steps to prevent this past tragedy and other inhumanities from ever taking place again.