Mr. Speaker, it is with great concern that I rise today to speak about the important issue of Canada's involvement in NATO's intervention in Kosovo.
This intervention is one of the riskiest ventures that NATO has ever participated in. The air strikes against Bosnian Serbs in 1995 were successful in many ways. In due course a treaty was signed which has since then worked fairly well. I visited Bosnia with the foreign affairs committee in the fall of 1997 and was able to see some of the success of the Dayton accord and the post-Dayton situation is relatively stable.
Canadian peacekeepers are respected globally. I saw first-hand the professionalism of the Canadian peacekeepers who were participating in the S-4 intervention in the former Yugoslavia. It really made me very proud to be a Canadian.
Periodic air attacks in Iraq by the U.S. have helped to prevent Saddam Hussein from committing some atrocities. He has still continued to flare up periodically and to commit atrocities against his own and other people, but the air strikes have helped somewhat.
This time, however, it is different. This is the first attack on a sovereign state that stands accused of vile behaviour not to its neighbours but to its own people. Where was NATO for instance when Russia tried to squelch the Chechnians at a cost of 100,000 lives? What did we do to try to prevent genocide in Rwanda in terms of significant interventions?
How would the west respond, for instance, if China were to carry out air strikes against an Indian government that was fighting to prevent a Muslim majority province such as Jammu-Kashmir from seceding, or if one country were to intervene in an other country's internal debates about issues of human rights or ethnic cleansing?
In Serbia, we are dealing with a better armed and more militarily sophisticated group than the Bosnian Serbs. It is in fact more militarily equipped and more sophisticated than latter day Iraq.
Hopefully, the smart bombs and the missiles can achieve victory without the use of ground troops. However, I think that is naive. I think the Canadian government, in creating an expectation that is possible, has misled many Canadians. Many military experts, including the supreme general of NATO and the U.S. military experts, have agreed with the view that ground troops will be necessary.
In Kosovo and Serbia the military targets and the civilians are inextricably linked. As my hon. colleague from St. John's East mentioned, the terrain in Kosovo is not conducive to effective air strikes.
NATO members are becoming increasingly uneasy. The goals of the air attacks were to end Serbia's brutalities against the ethnic Albanians, who make up nine-tenths of the population of Kosovo, and at the same time not break up the country. Yet in the first four days of NATO air attacks the number of Kosovars driven from their homes had risen to 500,000, one-quarter of the population. Up to 100,000 Kosovars have been killed.
By last week about 1.1 million of Kosovo's 1.8 million people had been driven out of their homes. NATO seemed unprepared. There was a chaotic response to the refugee issue. The response from Canadians at the grassroots level who wanted to help was very warm. I saw it in my own riding. To see Canadian non-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross and the Salvation Army coming forward and individual Canadians offering to help reaffirmed my belief in the Canadian people. However, at the same time NATO and this government's participation in NATO did not seem prepared for the inevitable issue of the refugees.
While NATO has carried out the bombing, the Serb forces in Kosovo have continued ethnic cleansing. In fairness, this ethnic cleansing, these killings, would have taken place anyway. They would have taken place perhaps at a more leisurely pace than they have, but they would have taken place.
I received a petition today in my constituency office from a group in Wolfville. The petition states:
We want an immediate end to the bombings and a return to diplomacy and negotiation with the active involvement of the UN.
This group generally feels that the bombings have heightened a sense of nationalism and in fact have strengthened Milosevic. The group is right in a way because the bombings have strengthened the resolve of the Serbians and Milosevic's popularity is up. However, I believe that sustained bombing over a period of time could serve to sap morale and lead to the Serb population questioning Milosevic, making it more difficult for him to lead and defend what is an untenable position.
Perhaps Milosevic will give up the ungovernable province of Kosovo anyway, in the same way that he has given up territories in the past which he had previously said he would not give up. Part of Milosevic's strategy has always been to create a sense of martyrdom with the Serbs, to revel in this martyrdom and past defeats. He almost celebrates these defeats. It is possible that at some point he will give up at least some of his demands in relation to the Kosovo issue.
It is possible also that the Kosovar guerrillas will be effective on the ground against Serb soldiers in the same way that the Croat soldiers were during the NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serbs in 1995. We do not really know if the Kosovars have an effective soldiery now, but there is a risk that the Kosovar ground troops could get an upper hand. It will be very difficult for NATO to stop the Kosovar troops from butchering the Serb minority in Kosovo and declaring independence. That is an issue we have to look at as well.
The west does not want that. It does not want to break up Yugoslavia. It is not there for either side to win. It just wants security for the Kosovars, the ethnic Albanians.
Ground troops may be necessary. NATO currently has 12,000 troops in Macedonia. The Serbs have 40,000 troops in Kosovo. NATO would need about 150,000 troops for a decisive victory.
There would be many casualties and as mission creep evolved there would be comparisons with Vietnam. There are several NATO countries which might back out. Greece, Italy and the Czech republic are already lukewarm at best.
I believe that NATO was right in principle to intervene. We should not hide behind the antiquated 19th century notion of national security solely as a foreign policy imperative. The evolution of human security in the post-cold war environment is a very important evolution. There have been 100 conflicts in the post-cold war environment. Most of them have been interstate conflicts and most of those have been between governments and their own people.
We have seen the evolution of an international criminal court. We see cases like the Pinochet case. Leaders simply cannot get away with atrocities against their own people as they were able to do in the past.
We only need look back at the film footage of the liberation of some of the concentration camps at the end of World War II to realize that there were times in the past when we should have intervened and did not. Today more than ever, in the post-cold war environment, with the evolution of human security, there are times when we must act and I believe that this is one of those times.
However, there must be a new global framework that can work to avert crises by addressing them earlier through a concerted effort by the UN. I heard one member speak earlier about the involvement of the IMF and the World Bank. We could use diplomatic and economic levers and evolve some of the institutions, such as the Bretton Woods institutions, which need to be reformed to reflect current realities. Canada should play a leadership role in these fora and I am concerned that Canada is not maximizing its leadership as it should.
Even if we accept human security as an imperative, where do we draw the line? Where do we intervene and where do we not intervene? Are we prepared to intervene in the inevitability of ground troops? Is our Canadian military prepared? I fear that is not the case. The government has allowed the Canadian military to reach a crisis situation of its own in terms of equipment and personnel.
The bottom line is that these types of debates are very important. They should be accompanied by a vote. Certainly before we send ground troops to Kosovo it is very important that we have a full debate in the House, with a vote, to demonstrate unequivocally that not only are the members of the House unanimously committed to this very important humanitarian effort, but that Canadians value democracy enough to protect it within their own borders.