Mr. Speaker, I will be sharing my time with the member for Mississauga West.
Earlier in this debate, the member for Regina—Qu'Appelle recounted how he visited Biafra during the Biafran war in the late 1960s. He told of the horrors of seeing the people starving and the people suffering in Biafra, and just generally the horrors of war.
There is another side to that equation because at the time of the Biafran conflict I was in Britain at Leeds university doing post-graduate work. I chummed around with two other young men of my age, in their mid-twenties. One was a Jewish fellow from London and the other was a fellow by the name of Bennett Okuwosa. When I first met Bennett he was a Nigerian. When I last met him at the end of my two year term he was a Biafran.
The relevance of the three of us and my friend being Jewish is that in the two year period that I knew these two young men both the six day war occurred in Israel and the Biafran war broke out in Nigeria. One young man was, shall we say, on the side of the winners and the other young man, my friend Bennett Okuwosa, was on the side of the losers.
Before these tragic events came about we were very much the three musketeers. We used to shoot pool together and drink beer together and go to dances and sometimes we studied and, though we came from very diverse backgrounds, we had as much in common as young men around the world would have in common.
But then my friend, who we used to call Bennett, confronted the problem of the Biafran war. What happened there was another case of ethnic cleansing. The Biafrans had spread out of Biafra, which is a province of Nigeria, into the rest of Nigeria and had taken over many of the positions of responsibility in the Nigerian economy and political society. This created a great deal of resentment among the Muslim population.
Biafra was a classic situation, as so often occurs, where religious strife breaks out which is really only a guise for economic competition and economic resentment. So it was in Nigeria. The Biafrans were expelled from all positions and were basically driven out of all of Nigeria and back into Biafra. In Biafra they decided that they would form a break-away state, which led to the Biafran civil war and all its horrors.
Communications stopped with Biafra basically. My friend Benno had a very large family. He endured the time when his brothers, who had various positions of authority, were picked up by the Nigerian police and disappeared. Of course, throughout the Biafran war he had to endure the knowledge that his people were suffering terribly.
Ironically, his contribution to the war, because he was in the agricultural sciences, was to try to raise rabbits for Biafra because, of course, there was a terrible shortage of protein and terrible starvation in his home country. In the end, I do not think he ever went back. The last I heard of him was a letter from Berlin. I think he settled in Germany in the end and raised his family there.
I will jump from that to events of just a week ago Monday. I held an open town hall meeting in my riding to which I invited everyone to come and express their feelings on Kosovo. My particular riding, Wentworth—Burlington, and the whole area around there has a very high percentage of Serbian Canadians. We had an open meeting and it was a very emotional event because, while one might have expected much anger, in fact there was much anguish, much hurt.
I held the meeting because I wanted to give the opportunity for the Serbian Canadians to come and express their feelings because this is a democratic country. Although there were some remarks on the causes of the war and the fact that the ethnic Albanians had taken over society and Kosovo and all of that kind of thing, and many of them were there illegally, those arguments did not ring with as much weight as the terrible anguish that these Serbian Canadians had, not only for their kinfolk, but for what was happening in Kosovo, in the former Yugoslavia. Or in Yugoslavia, I suppose it is called still.
For instance, one man asked me “What will happen if Canada actually declares war on Serbia? Will it mean that I will be interned?” Another woman worried about her son in the Canadian forces. What is going to happen if he is sent over in a combat contingent and winds up in combat with his kin? One can imagine the situation.
Many people were worried about the young people of military age who had left the country a few months before the actual bombing started. They knew that their children would be called up. Indeed the call is now for anyone of 14 years of age or over to join the military forces in Serbia to combat the invasion. One can imagine the terrible fear.
These were my fellow Canadians suffering. They were hurting and they were hurting because of what was happening in the homeland that they had left. There is no doubt that they are Canadians now, but they still have strong ties to where they come from.
When thought of that way we have to realize that this is not just a matter of stopping the bombing and coming to a diplomatic solution. This is not a matter of partitioning Kosovo or making it independent. This is a matter of making sure that as we lead up to a settlement of this conflict we leave the door open for forgiveness so that Kosovars and Serbians can live together once more.
I think that Canada has an indirect role to play in this because we are the classic example of a country with all kinds of ethnic diversity and of people who come from conflicts in other parts of the world who can live together.
To this end I think it is very important on the part of the government and on the part of all of us to make sure that we are very careful in the distinctions we make when we talk about what is happening in Kosovo. Biafra was a clear case of ethnic cleansing. The Biafrans were driven out of the rest of Nigeria because they were Christians and the others were Muslims, although I say to members that religion was only an excuse. In 1915 in the former Ottoman empire I believe that the Armenians were driven out of Turkey primarily because Turkey was at war. This was another case of ethnic cleansing. But these are not necessarily cases of genocide. Genocide is probably the ultimate horror and the Holocaust was genocide. It was not just a matter of ethnic cleansing but a matter of destroying the very ethnic memory by killing everybody.
Almost every nation in the world has been guilty of ethnic cleansing at one time or another. I will give an example of our own Canadian experience in the 18th century with the Acadians. The British expelled all the young Acadian men from Nova Scotia and distributed them down the shores of the American seacoast. The Boer War began in the 19th century. The British were at war with the Boer farmers in South Africa. Women and children of the farmers were rounded up and put in concentration camps where they died and had terrible experiences. If we want to go back to a case of genocide we can go back to the American west. Here the American authorities systematically destroyed the food supply of the aboriginals, resulting in their death. We could go to the Ukraine between the wars and we will find Stalin who systematically destroyed the food supply of the Ukrainians. This is genocide.
Genocide is a terrible word, but when it comes to civil war, and the expulsion of an ethnic population, almost every nation in the world has been guilty of it to some degree or another. We have to bear in mind that we have to make these distinctions. If we do not make these distinctions, the people I saw at my town hall meeting will feel that they are branded with a guilt, with a stain, which they do not deserve any more than the Americans, the British, the French or anyone else who has been in colonial power who has engaged in some kind of civil war or repression, however terrible. Some kind of repression is involved in the expulsion of an ethnic, religious or racial group. We have to make those distinctions very clear.
We have to think now in terms of how we are going to find a way to bring the Serbian community, the Serbs and the Kosovars back together. I believe this is the country that can lead by example. As long as we as members of parliament, and we as Canadians everywhere are prepared to go out into our communities and listen to one another, no matter what our backgrounds, our religions or our languages, we set an example that hopefully can be followed after this war.