Mr. Speaker, I welcome the opportunity to participate in this debate. I thank the member for Ottawa Centre and his colleague from Laurier—Sainte-Marie for their remarks, and my colleague from Etobicoke North and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and for International Human Rights as well. I share all of their views with regard to the event that has been described, the kidnapping of close to 300 young women.
However, I want to go beyond that and say that there are some things that have been happening since then that are encouraging and others that are not encouraging and are troubling.
On the encouraging side, I want to comment on the fact that there are some Muslim organizations that have denounced this event. I think the more we hear from Muslim organizations, both in Canada and around the world, that denounce the actions of Boko Haram, the more encouraging that would be.
Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti, the top religious authority in Saudi Arabia, has condemned the attacks. The Council of American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, has condemned them, and so have the Council of Muslim Organizations and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. These are organizations that did the right thing, and I would invite others to do the same because, as the Minister of the Environment said, there is a religious connotation to this that is very difficult, and the fact that young women would be converting under duress is absolutely insane. Any self-respecting religion would not seek to have people converting to it by such means.
In any event, that is one thing that I find encouraging.
The other thing that I find rather discouraging or troubling is the slowness in reaction, which has been mentioned here tonight, from the Nigerian government. A story published in today's local paper indicates that on April 15, the day after the event occurred, the United Kingdom offered help, and three days later, on April 18, made a formal offer of assistance. The U.S., through its embassy and staff in Nigeria in Abuja, did offer some help from day one, but it was a month later, Tuesday and Wednesday of last week, that the Government of Nigeria actually welcomed and accepted offers of help from, as I mentioned, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, France, and China.
The lateness and the slowness in reacting, I think, is troubling, and I would hope that there would be lessons learned from that.
The fact that Interpol, the international police agency of which Canada is a member, only offered help formally on May 9, almost a month later, is also very troubling because, again, we are not yet at the stage that military actions are deemed necessary; at least, no country has offered military assistance, except perhaps military know-how through communications or investigations. I know we have people from the United States and Great Britain and, I am hearing, from Canada on the ground today, and I expect some of them might be from the military, but it is not a military operation yet. It is an investigation to try to help the Nigerian authorities find these girls and then find a way to free them.
However, the fact that Interpol would take so long in making that offer is, I find, particularly troubling. I thought we could have acted perhaps a bit faster in Canada as well. I gather it was last week that we made an offer of help. If that is so, I would hope that we also would learn from that.
Another aspect has been mentioned to me by a few people I have talked with over the course of the last week. It is an awkward comparison. There was another incident in the world two months ago in which a similar number of people disappeared. I am talking about Malaysian flight 370, with 239 passengers on board including the 12 crew members.
The response was immediate from around the world. A number of countries immediately offered technical help and planes and boats to look for the aircraft. Four countries—Australia, Canada, the U.S., and Vietnam—spent $44 million in the first month alone searching for the plane, and the search continues two months later.
The urgency was the fact that the batteries in the black box would only work for a month. Therefore, it would be hard to find the remains of the people and to be able to bring closure to their families.
In contrast, here we have a situation of 276 young girls who are alive and have disappeared somewhere into the jungle. They are presumably still in Nigeria. They could also be in Chad or Cameroon, but we are not sure. We do not know exactly where they are, but I think there is an even greater urgency here for the world to act.
I also find the unwillingness of governments so far to actually put resources and money at the disposal of the appropriate authorities to help find these girls and rescue them rather troubling.
There is another example that I wanted to bring up. It concerns another kidnapping of a number of young girls, not in Nigeria, but in Uganda. It happened in October 1996, I believe. A total of 139 young girls were kidnapped. Thanks to one of the Italian nuns working in their school, who followed them into the jungle, 109 were returned. The other 30 remained prisoners. They were forced into becoming brides and were forced into doing sexual favours for Joseph Kony, who headed up the Lord’s Resistance Army.
That guy is still around. He has kidnapped hundreds, if not thousands, of youngsters throughout Uganda, South Sudan, Chad, the Central African Republic, and Somalia and turned them into soldiers. He has done so by forcing them to kill their friends or parents to make sure that they would remain at his service. Alternatively, he has turned them into his brides. The world has not yet taken on Joseph Kony properly.
What is the difference here? I am not too sure that I understand it. Maybe it is social media. It may be the ability of social media, which was not as prevalent in 1996 as it is today, to reach out to the world. We have now had thousands upon thousands of people, reaching into the hundreds of thousands, saying “bring back our girls”.
We have had these experiences before, in Africa and elsewhere, in conflicts, whether in Syria, the Central African Republic, or on other continents, when young boys and girls have been kidnapped and turned into soldiers or forced into providing sexual favours for soldiers. Only now are we finally acting, or I hope we are. I am certainly encouraging the government to act, whether we can offer help through direct services or through agencies.
That is one of the questions that this particular incident should force and encourage us to consider. To what extent are we going to help? To what extent will we, Canada and the world, want to help, and how? Do we want to do it directly, with some of our people and boots on the ground, as I have heard, and with our money, or do we want to do it through international organizations such as Interpol, NATO, and the UN? If so, how? Will we do it with our own people? Will we do it with money?
We would be well placed here to engage in Parliament and engage our citizens in determining how serious we are, and to what extent we want to commit to making sure that we will help a country whose children, girls and boys, get kidnapped at a young age to be turned into soldiers and to be sold, as Boko Haram has threatened.
It is absolutely unacceptable. Most Canadians would encourage us as a country to take a much more active role, whether directly or whether indirectly through organizations. I hope what we will learn from our participation will lead us to a greater ability to do what needs to be done to protect these young people.