Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the hon. member for Winnipeg Centre.
The situation in which we find ourselves in Yugoslavia today with respect to Kosovo is a perfect example in my mind of what was meant when someone said that the road to hell was paved with good intentions.
We had a situation developing in Kosovo which was reminiscent of things that had happened previously in Bosnia. Europe, North America and the world in general felt guilty about not doing enough about that situation in time. When we saw an analogous but not a perfectly analogous situation developing in Kosovo, there was an appropriate sense of moral urgency that we not allow a similar situation to occur. We had this sense that something had to be done, but what was to be done?
In spite of all that we know from history about the ineffectiveness of bombing and about the counterproductive effect that bombing often has on a population, we nevertheless opted as a parliament and as a country to approve air strikes by NATO. We did that with the understanding that three conditions applied at the time.
The first condition was that it would be short in duration, that it would only be for two or three days. This is the kind of assurances that were given publicly and were given privately.
It was also agreed to on the condition that it would be effective in bringing Milosevic back to the table. That is why it would only take two or three days. The argument was that Milosevic only needed this almost therapeutic bombing to provide him with an opportunity to come back to the table.
We were told that this would be effective in protecting ethnic Albanians, that it would bring an end to the atrocities being perpetrated against the ethnic Albanian population of Kosovo.
It failed on all three counts. It has not been short. We are almost at the end of the third week of bombing, and the bombing has not been as selective and as smart as we would have liked. That is another thing we were promised. We see almost every day now mistakes being made, trains being bombed, car plants being bombed. It has not been effective in bringing Milosevic back to the table. It has not been effective in protecting ethnic Albanians. Certainly no one would want to argue that. The situation has become arguably worse since the bombing started.
Having regard to the debate about ground troops, I would certainly be sceptical if the same people, the same analysts, the same brain trust that gave me these assurances three weeks ago, were then to come back to the House and say that they would like us to make a decision in favour of ground troops in Kosovo. Frankly their record in terms of analysis and in terms of consequences is not a good one. It seems to me that there is a rational argument for at least taking stock of the current situation, taking stock of our analysis and what might have been wrong with it, and taking stock of where we go from here.
Very quickly in terms of the analysis, we need to entertain the notion that we underestimated the depth of Serbian feeling about Kosovo and the depth of the symbolism involved in Kosovo with respect to the Serbian collective psyche, something that transcends Mr. Milosevic and something that we may well have misunderstood and underestimated in our initial analysis.
We need to entertain the notion that we have not fully understood the implications of the Rambouillet agreement in so far as it pertains to how the Serbians understood that agreement. Many of the conditions in Rambouillet may have been conditions that were simply never on with respect to how the Serbians saw the situation.
I am thinking in particular of what I understand to have been a late add on to Rambouillet after the Russians signed off in an earlier stage of the negotiations which stipulated that it would be NATO troops in Serbia that would supervise the Rambouillet agreement. We need to look at that and ask ourselves some difficult questions about it.
As I said earlier, we need to ask ourselves whether or not we are exaggerating the difference between the KLA and the Serbians in terms of who signed the agreement and who did not when we know that the KLA only signed after it knew the Serbians would not sign. We know that there was an earlier agreement in which the Serbs signed and the KLA did not.
I raise these things in terms of thinking that we have to be self-critical. We have to be reflective on whether the analysis that caused us to embark on this was adequate. Having done these things with an inadequate analysis but nevertheless for the very best of reasons, which was to stop the ongoing humanitarian disaster in Kosovo, we need to take stock of what to do now.
My leader in the House of Commons and the critic for the NDP, the member for Burnaby—Douglas, suggested that one thing we could do would be to lower the threshold which is now being imposed upon Milosevic for coming back to the table.
We know what NATO is saying and what the UN secretary general is saying, that Milosevic has to meet five different conditions. We know those conditions are unacceptable, so why are we setting the bar so high that we know we are literally making ourselves captive to a bombing strategy that goes on and on? Why not make the only condition that the killing stop, that the atrocities stop and that the expulsion of Albanian Kosovars stop?
We suggest that be the condition on which NATO and Milosevic go back to the table with the bombing and killing stopping. We hope it would create an opportunity in which diplomatic efforts can succeed. If it does not then we have to consider once again what the military strategy may be. We simply do not see the wisdom of adhering to a policy which says basically that we have set conditions that we know are unacceptable and if they continue to not accept them we will bomb Yugoslavia forever and a day until such time as it accepts the unacceptable. We find this to be a dubious strategy.
Another thing we have said, which is an important point to make, is that we have been very concerned, particularly with the way the Minister of National Defence has talked, about it having to be NATO troops that are there to supervise whatever settlement is arrived at. We need to talk more about the international community and the UN, but I am also concerned that what is happening in the House and in the debate generally about Kosovo is that the international community and NATO are being spoken of interchangeably. This raises concerns for us because whatever NATO is, it is not the international community. It should not pretend to speak for the international community.
That raises concerns about what is going on inside the collective mindset of NATO. I was at the last two NATO parliamentarian meetings in Barcelona in the spring of last year and in Edinburgh in the fall of last year. One thing that concerned me then, and I wrote about it at that time, was that I could see NATO making a bid in its own mind to replace the UN as the policeman of the world, so to speak.
We see here a manifestation of that. It is a manifestation we have supported, only to the extent that we felt the situation was urgent, that something needed to be done, and that NATO was the only organization with the capacity to do anything about it at the moment. We do not do it with any support whatsoever for what may be in the minds of some NATO planners or subliminally in the collective consciousness of NATO, which is that it is in fact to replace the UN as the enforcer of international law. That would ultimately be very hypocritical and could well be interpreted as fitting into a larger American plan to degrade the status of the United Nations, which they have systematically done by not paying their dues, and by generally calling the reality and credibility of the United Nations into disrepute.
There are a lot of things here that ought to be of concern to Canadians while at the same time we all join together in knowing why we made the decision we did.
We also need to be open to changing our minds, to responding to the newness of the situation or to failure, to the fact that what we are now doing does not appear to be working. I would urge that open-mindedness upon the government and ask it not to be too NATO fixated and always be looking for the solution. Of course, as we have said over and over again, the solution will involve bringing the Russians into the loop and into the process.