Madam Speaker, if history has taught us anything, it is that we have learned nothing. Across the world, from Angola, Sierra Leone to the Sudan we have seen countries implode and thousands of civilians killed. In fact 90% of the casualties that are borne in the wars of today are innocent civilians, unlike what happened in the first part of the century. What all these situations have in common is they demonstrate an abysmal failure on the part of the international community to get involved before thousands of people have been killed and countries have been laid to waste.
Kosovo is the latest of those countries, the one that is the apple of the eye of the media, the one that is drawing the most attention. It is by no means that which is going to be the greatest in terms of death and destruction in our world today.
As I said before, in Sierra Leone hundreds of thousands of people have been killed and thousands more are killed every day. In northern Uganda 10,000 child soldiers between the ages of eight and twelve are committing horrendous atrocities and thousands of young girls of the same age are used as sexual concubines. No one hears about that, no one talks about it and no one cares.
The situation in front of us is one where we had some very difficult choices to make, to act or not to act in the face of Kosovo. With the memory of Croatia and the memory of the atrocities of Banja Luka, Srebrenica, Bihac and Sarajevo fresh in our minds, we chose thankfully to act. And act we did, perhaps not in the best way, but we acted.
There were a number of obligations and end points we wanted to accomplish. The first was the most important, to save the innocent civilians' lives. The second was to bring Slobodan Milosevic to the table to engage in a diplomatic solution to this problem.
The fact is Milosevic is not at the table and while we were bombing Belgrade, the ethnic cleansing continued. The reason is simply that bombing will not stop ethnic cleansing, or should I use the proper term, mass murder, that takes place door to door, person to person, eyeball to eyeball. That will not stop it, although I must say that I applaud and support the government's support of NATO's bombing in the federal republic of Yugoslavia.
Our current objective has several goals. The moral obligation is to save people's lives. No one disagrees with that. The political obligation is to get Milosevic back to the table and stop further ethnic cleansing. It is also to engage in a diplomatic solution.
I would argue that the diplomatic solution put forward at Rambouillet, France is now a dead duck. The notion of an autonomous Kosovo will not happen. Too much blood has been shed, too many people have been killed and the memories last a very long time. These people, quite frankly, are not going to live together.
How are we going to deal with this problem? I would proffer the following solutions to deal with the situation in Kosovo; solutions which I put forth in a motion last October in the House, which unfortunately was not taken up.
The first solution is to protect innocent civilians. The way to do that is to organize a safe haven in the southern part of Kosovo. This can be accomplished with minimal or no casualties on the part of the west, but it will involve ground troops. Ground troops are required to engage in a safe haven in southern Kosovo and those ground troops, in my view, should be European Union troops. The reason is that they were tasked five years ago to deal with the impending implosion of the former Yugoslavia and they sat on their hands. They sat on their hands and thousands of people were killed, maimed and left homeless.
The European Union troops could engage in this, which would accomplish the following. First, it would protect the Kosovar Albanians. Second, it would enable humanitarian aid to get to these people safely and efficiently. Third, if these people are going to be repatriated at the end of a politically organized solution, then it is far easier for them to be repatriated while in their own backyard than for them to be repatriated while spread far afield. It will not do to send these people all over the world and expect that at some point in the future they will somehow wind up back in Kosovo. That simply is not going to happen.
It would involve the partition of Kosovo. As I said before, these people are not going to live together. Why I think this is doable is that Milosevic wants the northern half of Kosovo because that is where the Field of Black Birds is and that is where the seat of Serbian nationalism comes from. That is primarily what he wants, along with some mines which I think are less relevant.
If we try to bring the two together it will involve a ground war and a lot of allied troops being killed. At best, it will be apparent victory. At worst, NATO will back down because of the number of body bags returning home and, as a result, NATO will lose an enormous amount of credibility; credibility that it would take a very long time to regain. A ground war is not something that anybody has the stomach for.
The long term political solution must involve Serbians coming to the table, but how do we do this? One of our failures has been to assume that Mr. Milosevic deals with the same moral framework that we do. He does not. He is the one who is responsible for the slaughter in Bosnia. He is the one who instigated the slaughter which we saw in the towns of Srebrenica, Bihac and Banja Luka. He is the one who engaged in a ground war with Croatia. He is the one who is largely responsible, with his leadership, for the implosion of the former Yugoslavia.
We have to recognize that we are not dealing with a familiar creature. In fact, I would liken him to Hitler. Appeasement was attempted in the late 1930s when Hitler was committing atrocities. It did not work then and it certainly will not work today. We have to use a different framework to deal with a creature like Slobodan Milosevic.
First, to bring him to the table will mean engaging in bombing, but I think it has to happen.
Second, we could use economic levers through the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Both of those groups have enormously powerful economic levers to apply to any country and they must be applied to the federal republic of Yugoslavia. If we choke off the money supply we greatly diminish the ability of Milosevic to carry out a war for any lengthy period of time.
Third is something we have not looked upon which is the propaganda war. Many people in Serbia are falling behind their leader partly as a result of the bombing we have engaged in. Any time a country is bombed it is more likely the people no matter how much they despise their leader, will fall behind their leader not out of support for the individual but out of support for their country.
Therefore we have to get into the propaganda game. We need to use short-wave radio. The UN and other groups have the capability of beaming in what is taking place in Kosovo. We need to use television to demonstrate what is taking place in Kosovo and also the atrocities that took place in Croatia and in Bosnia. The people in Serbia do not know what their leadership has been up to and it is high time they did. If we are going to undermine Mr. Milosevic we have to do it from within. The easiest and most efficient way is by informing the Serbian public of what he is responsible for.
It is important for us to demonstrate and articulate to the Serbian people that our problem is not with them but with their leadership. I am sure that the Serbian people, like other people of the former Yugoslavia, want peace, that they want to live in harmony. Let us not forget that 10% of the population of Kosovo is Serbian. They have no stomach for killing as I am sure the vast majority of Kosovar Albanians have no stomach for killing. Unfortunately we see the manipulation by political leaderships to engage in war or to compromise their people at any price.
At the end of the day we have the Kosovo situation and we will have more Kosovos as time passes. I have been in war situations. I have seen people with their legs blown off from land mines. I have seen teenagers hold their bowels in their hands after being eviscerated by guerrillas. They did not want their bowels to fall on the ground. These are innocent people who did not ask for this.
I implore the government to try to change its foreign policy from one of conflict management to one of conflict prevention. I introduced a motion which will come up for debate on Monday. It articulates a way in which we can move our foreign policy from one of conflict management to one of conflict prevention. It articulates a series of methods for identifying the precursors to conflict and pragmatic tools such as the use of diplomacy and economic levers that have not been explored to prevent conflict from occurring.
It has been encouraging to see people across this House work together for the common goal of peace. I look forward to the future debates we may have to make sure Canada stands in the forefront of saving people's lives. We have in the past and we will in the future.