Mr. Speaker, 50 years ago the world emerged from one of the bloodiest conflicts in our history. The international community got together to try to reform the structure in which nations dealt with each other to prevent that tragedy from reoccurring. Out of that catharsis came the Bretton Woods institution and the United Nations.
Unfortunately, the last 50 years has proven that we have failed to prevent genocide, we have failed to prevent conflicts from occurring and we have failed to prevent inhumane disasters. From Chechnya to Angola, from Cambodia to Rwanda, the world has been completely ineffective in preventing these wars from occurring. Rather than preventing conflict we have mired ourselves in conflict management.
Rather than talking about the Armenian genocide of 1915, about the holocaust and about Cambodia, rather than speaking of these historical events, supplicating ourselves on the ground to God and saying never again, we should use these historical tragedies to look at what is happening today in the world and what is going to happen tomorrow to prevent further conflicts and tragedy.
The conflict between North Korea and South Korea is one of the hottest potential war zones which could easily become nuclear. We see The Sudan, Rwanda and Burundi occurring again. We see Kenya and the decimation of the Kikuyu by the Kelenjin tribe in which Mr. Moi is implicitly involved. We see Nigeria and the decimation of the Ogoni people. We see China and Taiwan, which
could easily produce a conflagration that could leave millions dead. We see Tadjikistan.
We see Turkish Kurdistan where as we speak elected members in the Turkish parliament, Kurds, have been incarcerated without trial, tortured and summary executions have taken place. We see what is happening in the Middle East, the tragedy which has occurred which our Parliament has spoken out strongly against in the hope that peace can finally come to this ravaged area. It is an area where there is little hope in the future for peace to occur unless decisive action is taken.
These are the conflicts and the genocides of tomorrow. These are the issues we must deal with if we are going to prevent millions of people from dying unnecessarily and countries from being laid to waste.
One of the sad things I have found is that words without actions are completely useless. Rather than being a collection of mere words, I hope that today's debate will translate into definitive actions to prevent genocides from occurring in the future. If we do not do that the deaths of all the innocent people in previous genocides will be for nothing.
As I have said before in this House, we have a very difficult situation. It is difficult to prevent conflicts but it is not impossible. There are solutions we can employ and solutions in which Canada can take a leadership role.
It is easier to prevent a conflict than to deal with a conflict after it has occurred. After a conflict has occurred the seeds of future ethnic discontent, the seeds of future death, destruction and war are laid out for generations to come. Once the killing begins, it is impossible to turn back the hands of time. We must deal with conflict before it occurs. It can be done. This is the challenge of the post cold war era. This is the challenge I know our country can deal with together with like minded nations. It will not cost us more money. In fact, it will save us billions of dollars every year which I will discuss later.
We have to identify the precursors to conflict such as inappropriate militarization. Often there is a destruction of basic human rights of a group of people. When one group of people is dealt with preferentially over another an imbalance exists. Often the result is a compromise of the human rights of a certain group of individuals. This spirals and becomes early conflict, then more widespread conflict. What often happens is a breakdown of democratic and judicial structures in a country. These are the warning signs of a potential conflict.
We must organize a warning system which uses non-governmental organizations, peace building institutions and countries, and diplomatic observer forces from the United Nations. These groups can extract information and then feed it into the United Nations crisis centre in New York. The information would be fed directly into a security council, not the security council we have today, but a modified security council. I will discuss that later. The security council must bring forth non-military initiatives to try to defuse the conflict before it occurs. In addressing these precursors the following initiatives can take place.
There can be diplomatic initiatives from the United Nations to try to bring the warring parties together. Positive information must be put forth to try to defuse and dispel the myths that are often put forth early in a conflict. We need not look any further than the tragedy in the former Yugoslavia or what happened in Rwanda and Burundi to see one of the early signs is that one group often puts forth a lot of very negative hateful propaganda about another group which polarizes groups under stress and leads to conflict. This can be defused. The United Nations currently has mechanisms to achieve that end but it is not employing them as aggressively as it should. I hope that Mr. Fowler, our representative there, can take the initiative to put this forth in the United Nations.
We can use the international financial institutions as non-military levers in conflict prevention. It is a cutting edge issue that we can put forth, but it requires changing the IFIs and their function as we know it.
Some of the interventions they can make involve: using economic levers on groups in conflict; providing economic and technical help to potentially warring parties; providing technical assistance on good governance and building up democratic infrastructure; and providing loans to peace building groups in order for them to pursue peace building initiatives by people in the country in question. They could provide small repayable loans, such as those of the Grameen Bank, to groups which are being subjected to human rights abuse or where economic levers are being used to push them down economically.
Sanctions must be used very carefully so as not to harm those who will suffer the most in these conflagrations.
Another approach which is not used often enough is to freeze the assets of leaders who are flagrantly abusing the rights of their citizens. This can be done to great effect. Unless we employ measures that will directly affect these leaders where it counts, in their pocketbooks, there will not be much change in their behaviour. This could be applied to such individuals as General Abacha of Nigeria, Mr. Moi of Kenya and others. By applying financial
restrictions and freezing their assets, a powerful lever can be applied to their behaviour.
Implicit in this are changes to the UN Security Council. The way it is structured now, these suggestions cannot and will not work. I suggest expanding the United Nations Security Council to involve the top 32 economic countries in the world. Many would argue that it is unfair. The reality is that he who pays the piper calls the tune and that is the premise it has to be based on. It is not fair, but it is certainly better than what we have today. We must also provide that there is no veto power. All decisions of the security council must be made with a two-thirds majority.
These changes are necessary. We cannot use the 1940s model of international co-operation which has failed to deal with the present geopolitical situation in the world which does not resemble the world situation of 1945. The current structure has hamstrung our ability to pursue peace and avoid the genocide we are talking about today.
Some would argue that the aggressive interventions I have addressed today are not going to be useful and they are not allowed, that they are somehow illegal. That is simply not true. The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights presupposes that a nation's affairs are not sacrosanct. What is sacrosanct are the basic human rights of the individual. In other words, international law protects the individual, not the integrity of the nation state. That should be a very important consideration if these changes are to be made.
There is also an economic rationale for early intervention in these areas to prevent a conflict rather than managing the conflict at a later time. We only need to look at the statistics of the last five years to see that peacekeeping costs have skyrocketed way out of proportion and the demands on peacekeeping are going to increase in the future. We cannot allow this to happen. It is simply not sustainable. Therefore, these conflicts must be prevented.
All countries, Canada included, are hamstrung by their current economic situation, their debts and deficits. We do not have the money to get involved in these conflicts. The time is coming when we will not be able to carry out peacekeeping duties which our military men and women have done so admirably, honourably and bravely for so long.
I suggest that Canada cannot do this herself. Canada has an international reputation for fairness and good diplomatic initiatives which is unrivalled in the world. Canada is known to be fair and above board, unlike many other countries. We ought to bring like minded nations, such as New Zealand, Australia, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands and Belgium, together as a group and then try to influence international structures around the world for peace building. As I said, we cannot do this alone. We have to do this in a multinational fashion. We can get these groups together right now to start.
If we are to have peace we will need all parties involved in a potential conflagration on board. We cannot deny any one group representing the people. We have to also pursue democratic and judicial peace building initiatives in a potential conflagration.
Another issue we are avoiding in peace building is the economic issue. A country will never be able to get on its feet unless the economic structures are there for the people to stand on their own two feet and provide for themselves.
The former Yugoslavia is an excellent case in point. The Dayton peace plan which produced the international implementation force there today is a noble and good solution for the short term. It will not, though, provide peace in Bosnia in the long term. The reason is unless the people in Bosnia can have the economic infrastructure and can then stand on their own two feet and provide for themselves we will always have conflict. We will always have people struggling to get the basic necessities for themselves that are simply not there.
When the basic necessities are not there then we have a desperate population which is prepared and willing by necessity to whatever it has to do to get those basic needs met. That includes conflict.
Those have to be provided. We cannot do it ourselves, and I am not suggesting that. The international community must work with the nations involved and the belligerents involved to build up the infrastructure. In the former Yugoslavia a greater responsibility must be placed on the shoulders of the European Union.
The world has seen the proliferation of internecine conflicts. They have littered the face of the globe over the last 50 years. The international community has been completely unable to prevent conflict. We have managed it sometimes well, sometimes poorly, but we have neglected and have been unable to prevent the genocides from occurring.
We can do this and we must do it. I have given some suggestions I hope the Minister of Foreign Affairs will take into consideration. The way to sell this not only to the Canadian people but also other countries is not only on the basis of humanitarian grounds, which are ample, but on the basis of self-interest.
Unfortunately we will not be able to get anything done unless we argue in a nation's self-interest. If we do not prevent conflicts nation states are laid waste, we have migration of refugees, we have increasing demands on our defence forces, our foreign aid and our domestic social programs. These are costs that hit home. We can prevent these. It takes an investment now but the saving in the long term will be far greater than the investment we do today.
A negotiator in the Palestinian peace process once said peace is when a child buries its parents; war is when a parent buries its child. I hope we can do something to prevent in the future more children being buried unnecessarily.
