Madam Speaker, it is a great honour for me to speak to Bill S-37, an act to amend the Criminal Code and the Cultural Property Export and Import Act.
Today's discussion is very profound in light of the circumstances in which we find ourselves internationally. What comes out of today's debate has to be the springboard to a larger discussion about how we are actually going to move forward as a country to ensure that what we bring forward in the House is implemented on an international scale.
We are discussing two issues in terms of the Hague protocol. One is the older issue of looting and war. Looting has been an intricate part of war since time immemorial. Many empires were built on the art brought back from war. This goes from Alexander's time on. Members know the old expression “to the victor goes the spoils”. We have to put this in the context of modern looting which is much more deliberate and has to be looked at in terms of the breakdown of international order.
The other issue we are discussing today is the destruction of cultural identity and the planned and deliberate cultural destruction of memory. When we are talking about heritage and describing specific sites, we are talking about the repositories of a community or a social group's living memory. It is a very profound thing. To deliberately target and try to erase that memory has profound implications both politically and socially.
We are very much aware in the 20th century of the targeting of memory in order to control history and the future. This was very much a part of what the Nazis and the Communists did. Orwell wrote about the erasing of memory, the erasing of what happened and replacing it with fictitious facts. He talked about this in the context of Spain where the Communists and the Fascists first faced off against each other.
Orwell said that he who controls history controls the truth. We are now talking about something profoundly different. When we move from the battle of political ideologies or the battle between political nations toward the battle between cultural groups, the issue of erasing becomes much more important. It is not a matter of the old example of the May Day parade and who was cut out of the picture and erased from the Soviet general's staff never to be mentioned again. We are talking about removing the on the ground facts of an entire way of being. For example, in Dubrovnik a bridge that was built in the 1500s to represent the power of a civilization was deliberately targeted. That says to those people that they were never here. It says that they had no right to be here. It says that they have no claim on the land now. That is a very profound thing.
We talk about memory and identity. I would like to place this in context. Memory and identity are fundamental to the ability of a people to partake culturally and politically in their space in the world.
Neil Postman wrote in terms of our own culture that in the digital age of 24/7 television, we had basically lost our ability to look to cultural references or to look to history to have a context. He said that it is not that we refuse to remember; rather we are being rendered unfit to remember. For memory to have any value, it needs a context or a metaphor.
In cultures where their sense of memory is based on a building, a church, a synagogue, or a museum, where people can say that is the living repository of their memory, for another nation, another ethnic group or a banded army to deliberately attack and destroy that is not just an attack on that community but it is an attack on the fundamentals of human civilization. What we have seen since the second world war is a major transformation in how these wars are fought.
There was deliberate destruction of certain ethnic identities during the second world war, but on the whole, it was basically wholesale looting. What we have seen in the latter half of the 20th century and definitely going into the 21st century is deliberate destruction. The whole notion of ethnic cleansing is not simply to remove people from a village, but their well water is destroyed or poisoned, and their land is seeded with explosives so that they cannot return. Where there was a living community, a wasteland is created. Part of that process is the destruction of the libraries, the destruction of the churches, the mosques and the synagogues. Yes, we do need a law which says that these are crimes against humanity, that these are crimes that cannot stand. We should have the power as a nation to go after the perpetrators of these crimes.
In the modern age, the question we have to ask ourselves, and my one question with the bill is where are the teeth behind it? When we look at the nations and the bandit states that are perpetrating these atrocities, by the time we get down to the fact that they are destroying Buddhist temples that are a thousand years old or cultural artifacts, they have already committed so many crimes that we tend not to even place the cultural destruction on the level where it needs to be. That has to change. The destruction of cultural identity has to be a number one priority in dealing with the modern bandit states.
Another question I would like to raise, and this is where it becomes more germane to our own communities in Canada, is how are we dealing with international looting of cultural artifacts that have been obtained in war? This is a very profound issue because it puts us on a direct collision course with our two traditional allies. The two countries that will not sign on, the United States and the United Kingdom, are now overseeing the complete running of a country that was mercilessly looted.
If we are talking about cultural crimes in the last generation, the fact is that under shock and awe, the entire library, the historic memory of Iraq was allowed to be looted and destroyed while the U.S. army stood by. The U.S. army was securing the oil buildings, but it allowed the destruction of the Iraqi museum. We are not just talking about one museum. We are talking about the cradle of civilization, the original land of Ur, the land where writing first began, the land in the Mesopotamian Valley where the first seeds were sown and the agricultural economy was built up.
We read the stories, many of them written by Canadian journalists who were there at the time of the looting to see fragments of ancient artifacts spilled all over the ground. Artifacts that are irreplaceable, artifacts that no other civilization has managed to collect were basically thrown out on the streets while the U.S. army stood there and did nothing. We are talking about the destruction not just of Iraq's memory, but of our entire cultural memory going back to the beginning of civilization. That is a crime. It is a war crime.
We are also talking about the fact that only two nations, the United States and the U.K., are basically treating Iraq as their own personal fiefdom. There is no international body there to oversee, so what are we to expect? We are to expect that their soldiers, their officials can be part of this massive large scale looting of a cultural identity. Where do we stand up in terms of going after these people?
The hon. member from the Conservative Party said that we have to be careful about people who buy products in good faith. There is a black market for the illegal selling of historic artifacts. Buyers know what these artifacts are. They know their value and they know how to get them. In the same way we talk about blood diamonds, we are talking about blood artifacts, artifacts stolen from a culture and which are being sold on the international market and no one has the ability to intercede to protect these artifacts. We need some clear laws in place to go after those people. We should be able to go after them mercilessly.
The other issue that has to be raised in terms of the decisions that our southern neighbours are taking now toward unilateral invasions of other countries is that we need people on the ground to assess the cultural properties when these invasions occur or soon after the invasions occur to make sure that there is not a black market infrastructure that grows and sells these products to European, American or Canadian buyers. Once these products are stolen, once these collections are destroyed, there is no rebuilding of them.
The New Democratic Party will support Bill S-37. However, we would like to state that we need to take this bill seriously enough that we are actually going to put some teeth and some money behind it, so that our international presence is seen as protecting cultural identities. We have to ensure that the ongoing theft of artifacts from all over the world, including Kosovo, Bosnia and Iraq does not continue.
