Mr. Speaker, I will be splitting my time with the member for New Westminster—Coquitlam—Burnaby.
For the third time in this century there is war in Europe. Eighty years ago we brought the war in Europe which we thought was the war to end all wars to an end. It was not the war to end all wars. Twenty years later the war that claimed more lives than any other war in the entire history of the world also commenced in Europe.
The history of Canada is replete with stories of Canadian valour, bravery and personal commitment in the face of danger during these wars. When it comes to war in this century, Canada has stood side by side with the great and mighty nations. Now we have a conflagration in the Balkans that was easy to start but perhaps could prove difficult to finish.
Perhaps we have lost sight of the fine distinction between making war and making peace. In the last 40 years Canada has carved out its role as a peacemaker. Lester B. Pearson, our Prime Minister who won the Nobel peace prize, sent our Canadian troops to the Suez Canal not to make war but to make peace. Since that day Canada has played a leading role as a peacemaker deploying our armed forces in many places around the world.
Through our active role in peacemaking we can say that tens of thousands of civilians are living peacefully today in what were once trouble spots where ethnic cleansing could have been implemented before it became the buzzword to describe the military activity in the Balkans.
But the Balkans are living up to their historic reputation of small statehoods whose hatred and enmity of each other far exceed their desire to live in harmony and peace. Upon the ascent of Slobodan Milosevic to power in 1989, the Balkans have slipped inexorably into the morass of ethnic division, animosity and now slaughter.
If ever there was a need for peacekeeping, it is right now in the Balkans. We feel that we have contained the fighting in Bosnia and now supervise an uneasy peace there. Now we are faced with the rape, murder and displacement of tens of thousands of innocent Kosovar Albanian civilians whose only crime is to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The wrong place is their very own homes and villages where they have lived for generations. The wrong time is when a Serbian nationalist is bent on ensuring that his ethnic group, the Serbians, are no longer a minority in what he perceives to be their country of Kosovo and Serbia.
The human tragedy unfolding in that region is beyond our ability to comprehend. That is why I endorse Canada's position that we have a humanitarian obligation to protect the lives of innocent civilians in the Balkans today. It is an affront to our civilized society to watch what is happening. We cannot stand idly by.
There is a difference between making peace and making war. There is a difference between helping innocent civilians unarmed and defenceless to remain in their own homes and villages to live free of the threat of imminent rape, murder and displacement, to live free from the notion that their homes and livelihoods could be destroyed before their very eyes, free from the fear that their families could be scattered in some cases with no hope of being reunited. There is a difference between helping innocent people and attacking a government which has not exhibited territorial ambitions or shown any desire to expand beyond its present boundaries.
In the name of keeping the peace, NATO has gone to war. In the name of saving people's lives, NATO has started killing people. In the name of protecting the homeland of ethnic Albanians in Kosovo, we are destroying the homeland of the people in Serbia.
We in Canada live by the rule of law. While I understand the human emotion that caused us to carry the war to the front door of Slobodan Milosevic, it already seems to be a dubious strategy. For months we have threatened Milosevic with bombs if he did not recognize the Kosovars' right to live in peace. When he agreed to our demands, we relaxed the threat of bombing him into submission. When he reneged on his commitments, we reiterated our threat to bomb him into acceptance. All the time, Milosevic was advancing his strategy of ethnic cleansing while we were finding out the costs of our high stakes bluffing.
We are now at the mercy of our own rhetoric. We threatened to bomb and threatened to bomb only to find that it meant nothing to Milosevic. We had a choice of making good on our threats or revealing that we were a lion that could only roar, that when the chips were down we were not up to making good on our threats.
Our negotiating strategy of demanding that Kosovars be allowed to live in peace or else we would bomb has become a military strategy of bombing to bring about peace. With hindsight, neither seems to have been close to the mark.
Had we focused on our humanitarian mission of alleviating the suffering of ethnic Albanians, our focus would have been clear and our strategy would have been obvious. There seems little doubt to me that it will require ground troops to resolve this issue. When neighbour is pitted against neighbour, it cannot be managed or resolved from 30,000 feet above the earth. Bombs cannot differentiate between friend or foe in hand to hand combat.
The point I want to make clear is that we must never lose sight of our objective which is to alleviate the suffering of innocent civilians; to stop the rape, murder and displacement of innocent civilians; and to stop the burning and the pillaging of homes where people have lived for generations. Ground troops have been required in every other peacekeeping mission to date. Dropping bombs can never be considered an act of peacekeeping.
In the final analysis we want the rule of law to prevail. It is rather ironic that in order to achieve that dream, we have trampled on international rule of law by bombing Serbia even though we all consider Milosevic to be an evil dictator.
But the end does not justify the means. Our focus is to help the innocent and to save the children. What we have done is to expand the enmity which is no longer one Balkan ethnic group against another, but is now focused with greater intensity to the war making machine of the western industrialized countries that have always forsworn the desire to strike first at a nation that does not express a threat to their own internal security.
In summation, I said that while it was easy to start, it could prove difficult to finish. Having crossed the line from peacemaking to making war, the cost of achieving our objective will be significantly higher than had we focused strictly on relieving the misery of the Kosovars and leaving Serbia to the Serbians.