Mr. Speaker, there is no question that the signals for a negotiated settlement must come from Belgrade. My colleague talks about having no conditions at all. NATO has clearly indicated certain conditions. The difficulty of having breathing space is that it is often a time for parties to regroup.
What we have here is a two-pronged approach. We have the current military operations that are going on in Kosovo and Yugoslavia. I agree with my colleague that we need to involve the Russians. Yesterday, the German foreign minister was talking about involving the Russians more.
There are discussions going on behind the scenes, but in order to have discussions we have to have a position for which people are prepared to stand up and say “yes, we are prepared to stop the ethnic cleansing that is going on”.
What is happening is that there seems to be no signal from Milosevic that he is prepared, under any circumstances at the moment, to do the kind of things that my colleague is asking for. I would suggest to my colleague that diplomacy is always the better route. The difficulty, however, is that in order to have diplomacy we need to have people of goodwill who are prepared to sit down and negotiate.
It is not like this has just happened. The road to the conflict has been simmering for many years, but more so within the last year. I think Milosevic has received enough signals to know that at some point what is going on now was going to happen if he was not prepared to sit down reasonably. There were arguments on both sides, but the negotiations in Rambouillet, France indicated that they rejected all of the proposals and conditions. We cannot have a starting point if one side refuses to accept any conditions at all.
In conclusion, I hope that the discussions going on behind the scenes will move more to the forefront. In the meantime, I do not think we can relinquish our resolve in dealing with this situation.