Mr. Speaker, it is a fair comment to say that the United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, Sir John Holmes, has spoken out about this. The Secretary-General has spoken out about it. It is very difficult. The Government of Sri Lanka very strongly resists any notion that the United Nations has jurisdiction over something they regard as an area of their national sovereignty.
I know my colleague, the member for Mount Royal, is one of the experts on this question of the doctrine of our responsibility to protect. At what point does the condition of a civilian population give the United Nations the right and the ability to intervene?
Mr.Gareth Evans, the former Australian foreign minister, now the president of the International Crisis Group, has talked extensively about this question, as has our leader, who was involved in drafting the protocol on the question of responsibility to protect.
I think the UN is going to be engaged administratively. Whether we can get the Security Council engaged is another question. Many powers on the Security Council may not be interested in seeing that happen.
I also agree with him that the Commonwealth is one mechanism.
I want to make one point and I do not want to engage in a debate with the minister or with others. The group that has to make a decision now, as much as any group, as to how it is going to proceed is the LTTE. It is up to the diaspora community in this country and around the world to ask this question of their friends, cousins, relatives and others: what do we think we are going to achieve by perpetuating a military conflict in the way it has been conducted over the last while?
I think we have to recognize that this was what the Tokyo group was saying yesterday, and I think it is something Canada should support.