Mr. Speaker, I rise to join with the Prime Minister and others in expressing the profound relief and thankfulness of the members of the official opposition, and I am sure all Canadians, that temporary peace has been achieved in Kosovo and a temporary peace which we hope and pray will become a lasting peace.
As has been noted earlier today, the bombing has been suspended, Yugoslav troops are pulling out of Kosovo, hundreds of thousands of refugees hopefully are preparing to return home and a peacekeeping force with a UN mandate, including Canadians, will soon roll into Kosovo.
As I said during question period, it is a day to extend our profound thanks and appreciation to NATO and those brave Canadians who served with NATO for this great achievement. This is also the time to express our thanks and appreciation to those moderate Serbs who, under very difficult conditions, have brought pressures to bear on their own government to accept this proposal.
I want to suggest that this is also an appropriate time to pause and measure our progress toward peace in the Balkans against the objectives that we set for ourselves when this conflict first began.
The moral objective of NATO and Canada's involvement has always been to halt the ethnic cleansing perpetrated by the Yugoslav government and to care for the victims of Serb aggression.
The political objective has been to create a safe home for all the Kosovars in the region and to stabilize relations between Kosovo and the Republic of Yugoslavia and its neighbours.
The military objective, which was set at the beginning, was to damage the military capability of the Yugoslav government to carry out ethnic cleansing and hopefully drive it to the bargaining table.
Measured against the scale of those three objectives, we can now say with some confidence that the military objective has been achieved, that the moral objective has been at least temporarily achieved, and that the great challenge now before us is to achieve the political objective of creating a safe home for all Kosovars in the region and the basis of a lasting peace.
I want to suggest that achieving this political objective will be an even greater test of our ingenuity, our resources and our determination than achieving the military objective. However, we cannot turn back now.
I will raise a question: Are there any lessons which Canada can learn from our participation in this NATO exercise thus far and which call for follow-up action by the government and this parliament? Let me suggest two lessons.
The first lesson is that years of neglect and mismanagement of our armed forces by this government and others have left us and our armed forces personnel in an unacceptable position. Canada has had great difficulty in mustering the minimal resources required to be an active participant in this NATO operation. If we are called upon to do more or to sustain another peacekeeping operation somewhere else in the world at the same time, it would simply be beyond our capability.
We therefore call on the government to address this problem in a meaningful way immediately as well as in the next throne speech and budget if it is our intention to be a real player in maintaining world peace.
The second lesson to be learned from this Kosovo crisis, and this was referred to by numerous members during the take-note debate, is the very real need to create a better legal framework for multinational actions against inhuman acts by the governments of the sovereign state.
In the Kosovo case, NATO took the initiative to halt ethnic cleansing and to restore regional stability in an area of the world where NATO countries have a strategic interest.
The UN mandate to send in peacekeepers came after the NATO initiative, although I think many of us would have preferred if it had come before. The question still remains on what grounds should other states be permitted to intervene in the affairs of a sovereign state. How are such interventions to be regulated in law so as to permit multinational efforts to stop ethnic cleansing as in Kosovo but also to safeguard against the abuse of the right to intervene?
The most thoughtful speech given in the Chamber on this subject was given by Václav Havel, President of the Czech Republic, when he addressed the Chamber on April 29. Dr. Havel's convictions, like those of Nelson Mandela's, are not only sound because they are well reasoned but are sound and acceptable because he has suffered so much for those convictions.
Dr. Havel told the House, and he was applauded by all members when he said it:
While the state is a human creation, humanity is a creation of God.
From that premise he reasoned that human rights rank above the rights of states and human liberties constitute a higher value than state sovereignty. He said in reference to NATO actions in the Balkans:
It has now been clearly stated that it is not permissible to slaughter people, to evict them from their homes, to maltreat them and to deprive them of their property. It has been demonstrated that human rights are indivisible and if injustice is done to some, it is done to all.
He then went on to justify NATO military action in the Balkans on the grounds that in this instance protecting human rights should take precedence over respecting the rights of states.
I want to suggest that the challenge for the future is therefore to find a framework in international law which provides for international intervention in the affairs of sovereign states, if those states persist in violating basic human rights, while at the same time ensuring that international law does not permit alleged violations of human rights to become an excuse for one group of states to attack the sovereignty of another.
As in most issues involving human rights and the rights of states, the challenge will be to find the right balance, and finding the right balance is a task for which the country has a peculiar talent. This is a challenge which all of us must address in the months ahead so that the tragedy of the Balkans is not repeated in other parts of the world.
