FAIT Committee Meeting

STANDING COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE

COMITÉ PERMANENT DES AFFAIRES ÉTRANGÈRES ET DU COMMERCE INTERNATIONAL

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Tuesday, February 15, 2000

• 0935

[English]

The Chair (Mr. Bill Graham (Toronto Centre—Rosedale, Lib.)): Colleagues, I want to call this meeting to order. We have a quorum for purposes of hearing evidence.

This is the second hearing in the matter of Kosovo. You'll recall that at our last hearing we heard departmental officials but had to break in order to have two votes. We will be requesting Messrs. Wright and the other officials who were before us to return and complete their testimony, and we will complete the opportunity of members to ask them questions.

In the meantime, if anyone wishes to write them, you'll recall that we had an agreement with them that they would send written answers to questions addressed to them. If anybody wants to try to get something out of the way before we get them back, go ahead and do that.

I'm very pleased to welcome an illustrious panel this morning. With us we have Mr. Fawcett, who's an analyst with the International Crisis Group; Mr. Bissett, our former ambassador to Yugoslavia; Professor Cohen; David Matas, who's familiar to this committee from many occasions; and Professor Mendes, who, when he's not on television, comes before this committee occasionally.

Thank you all very much for coming here today. I'm going to ask you if you would keep your remarks to 10 minutes, because we want to get through your remarks and enable the members to ask you questions, which is always the best part of our hearings.

We'll start with Mr. Fawcett and then go to Mr. Bissett.

Mr. Fawcett, sir, is 10 minutes maximum okay?

Mr. John Fawcett (Analyst, International Crisis Group): I'm going to dive right in and get into something fairly specific, a topic that I was most interested in. I'd like to draw attention to the Kosovo verification mission, not only to point out some of its flaws but to attempt to identify a value in this notion of unarmed monitors.

In the fall of 1998, under a rising threat of NATO military action, Slobodan Milosevic changed his course and agreed to “internationalize” the Kosovo problem and to the deployment of up to 2,000 unarmed verifiers under the mandate of the OSCE. This mission was to verify adherence to Security Council resolution 1199, which called for a ceasefire, withdrawal of forces, and access for humanitarian aid. The KVM began in October 1998 and withdrew from Kosovo just days before the initiation of the NATO bombing campaign in late March 1999.

I was and still am skeptical of the effectiveness of unarmed or even lightly armed monitoring missions that attempt to stabilize a situation and provide protection to endangered civilians merely by the presence of foreigners. Armed local groups, usually those of the government, can readily ignore or intimidate outgunned and naive foreigners. When the international community seriously wants to stop excess violence, force is used. In other cases, we send monitors.

In January 1999, I went to Kosovo for a month to evaluate the international community's humanitarian response, the role of the KVM, and the options for stability or renewed violence in the upcoming spring.

The KVM was an ad hoc deployment of the OSCE. The OSCE itself hardly warrants the word “organization”. It is a relatively new international body. It is very much at the mercy of its member governments. Its 55 members and its mandate of human rights, democratization, and arms control lend themselves to only the most common of denominators and therefore little support for an aggressive, dynamic agency.

In Kosovo, therefore, I was not surprised to find a disorganized, chaotic, fractured deployment of monitors. They truly deserved the epithet “2000 points of ignorance”.

However, there were exceptions to the rule. One exception in particular was large enough to warrant special mention, as its success provided evidence that unarmed missions can be beneficial. In other words, this case argues against my skepticism. This was the KVM deployment in the city of Prizren in southwest Kosovo. It was under the command of the Canadian Michel Maisonneuve. While still struggling with all the administrative, logistical, and personnel issues of an ad hoc deployment from a dysfunctional agency, the Prizren KVM personnel had a mission clearly defined by their commander.

The only chance to stabilize this situation and provide a sense of protection to people was to be aggressive. The Prizren KVM seemed to be a contradiction in terms: they were an aggressive, unarmed mission. The core of my presentation today looks at why this contradiction was successful, what are the risks of it, and what is necessary to duplicate this approach.

Two examples should suffice to describe what is meant by aggressive presence of an unarmed mission. In a village near Suva Reka, one of the towns in the Prizren area, there are often outbreaks of violence between the KLA and the Serb forces. While this conflict was very much of a David and Goliath nature, it doesn't mean that on some occasions David didn't throw the first stone, that is, if a Serb armoured car was shot at, the Serb forces retaliated by pounding the village with indiscriminate artillery fire. Civilians were overwhelmingly the victims.

• 0940

The KVM personnel in this region were operating under the direction that upon the first inclination or information that there had been an outbreak of violence, whether KLA provocation or otherwise, the verifiers were to go towards the threatening Serb artillery installations and into the village itself. Their presence was an attempt to head off the escalation of violence that the Serb authorities were prone to. This was in marked contrast to nearly all the other KVM sectors, where the safety of the verifiers was paramount and an outbreak of violence saw orders go out for the verifiers to scuttle for the safe haven of their bunkers.

A second example of the value of the aggressive unarmed monitor took place in the city of Prizren itself. Early one evening, a father and son were found assassinated in the back room of the shop they owned. They were Kosovar Albanians, owned a sporting goods store, and were legally authorized to sell hunting weapons and ammunition. Rumours of gun-dealing to the KLA, of brokering Serb weapons, and of inter-Albanian mafia gang wars began running rampant. No one had seen the murders but everyone had a theory. It was a situation ripe for an explosion of urban violence.

Without waiting for orders, but understanding their mission, the KVM members arrived on the scene within five to ten minutes of the bodies being found. This is also, by the way, a credit to the establishment of the hastily devised but extensive intelligence network. The verifiers interjected themselves into the crime scene amongst the growing crowd and the investigating Serb police. Without taking over the investigation, they nevertheless were not afraid to point out to the police the existence of various bits of evidence that should be secured and not overlooked.

This presence accomplished two things. The growing Kosovar Albanian crowd was aware very early in the crisis that KVM was on the scene; along with the rumour flow went the news that the KVM was there. It also demonstrated to the Serb investigators, who many suspected of having done the killings or of knowing who did, that they could not perform a whitewash investigation. Other KVM sectors may have asked the authorities about their investigation on the following day or even completely ignored it, as “it was not in their mandate to be police”.

There is an obvious pitfall to the aggressive, unarmed monitor approach. That is the risk to which these people are exposed. Using your presence in a village in hopes that by doing so this inhibits firing upon it is riskier than watching the destruction of that village through binoculars from a nearby ridge. There is no way to argue that the aggressive, unarmed monitor approach is not a risky venture. Simply, it is.

However, just as with a military deployment, if force protection is the highest priority, it is often better not to deploy at all. The nature of success and failure in these environments is directly related to the degree of risk we are willing to take.

In order to duplicate the aggressive, unarmed monitor approach, we have to identify certain institutional structural factors that allowed it to happen. I argue that it was the very ad hoc nature of the KVM and the inability of the OSCE at large to assist or constrain it that allowed a vacuum to be filled. In most sectors, it was filled by the timid and the cautious. Prizren had the luck to draw Michel Maisonneuve. I'd argue that once the OSCE “learns” how to deploy monitoring missions, they will be less effective.

How, then, does a contributing member of the OSCE, such as Canada, encourage this type of approach? First, accept that force protection is not the highest priority. Second, choose and train personnel that will take responsibility for balancing risk to benefit in fluid and dangerous environments. Third, target a significant portion of the crisis-specific support behind those people.

OSCE will inevitably grow and institutionalize as an organization. However, the unique nature of each crisis precludes a refined model of reacting to them. Flexibility, risk, and resources provide some chance for unarmed monitors.

Finally, I have two caveats. First, I don't intend to give the impression that if all the KVM had been like Prizren it would have been successful in forestalling Serb violence in the spring, hence avoiding the bombing. The best the KVM could hope for was to provide a window for negotiations to succeed, for the development of a NATO consensus on the necessity of force, or for Slobodan Milosevic to rethink his position. All that aggressive monitoring may do is to deepen and prolong the window. Second, I'd like to say that I've never discussed this issue in depth with Michel Maisonneuve and I don't mean to imply that he would necessarily agree with it.

Thank you. On behalf of the International Crisis Group, it's a pleasure to give this talk.

• 0945

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Fawcett. That's very helpful. You may want to know that General Maisonneuve is coming before us on February 24.

Mr. John Fawcett: Good.

The Chair: We'll be interested, and we'll be able to follow up on your observations.

Secondly, you might be interested to know that several members of the committee are actively involved in the OSCE parliamentary assembly. I'm sure that when we meet in Romania this year we'll have an opportunity to review the whole issue of how monitoring is done, with a view of the Kosovo operation. Your remarks are very helpful, so thank you very much, sir. We appreciate your coming here.

Mr. Bissett.

Mr. James Bissett (Former Canadian Ambassador to Yugoslavia): Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.

I'd like to thank the committee for giving me the opportunity of speaking this morning. It's some comfort to know that although I wasn't allowed to speak to my former colleagues at the Canadian embassy in Belgrade a couple of weeks ago when I was there, I still have the privilege of coming here and speaking to members of Parliament. That's some comfort to me.

The Chair: We're a very open crowd, Mr. Bissett, so don't worry about it.

Mr. James Bissett: Thank you.

The Chair: You'd be surprised at what we hear.

Mr. James Bissett: I've been an outspoken critic of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia. I think it was a serious mistake. Indeed, I think it's probably going to go down as a historic miscalculation that will have very far-reaching implications for all of us. When NATO bombs fell on Yugoslavia last spring, in March, they not only spread death and destruction in Yugoslavia, they also struck a serious blow to international law and to the framework of global security that had probably protected us all, since the end of the Second World War, from a nuclear holocaust.

Kosovo broke the ground rules for NATO engagement. The aggressive military intervention by NATO into the affairs of a sovereign state for other than defensive purposes marked an ominous turning point in the aims and objectives of that organization. It's important, I think, that we understand this. We should seek clarification as to whether this was a one-off aberration on the part of NATO or a signal of a fundamental change in the nature and the purposes of the organization. This is something the committee may well want to examine in the course of its work.

The NATO war was an illegal war. NATO's war in Kosovo was in violation of international law. It was conducted without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. It was a violation of the United Nations charter and its own article 1, which requires NATO to settle all international disputes by peaceful means and not to threaten or to use force “in any manner inconsistent with the purposes of the United Nations”.

Some apologists for NATO, including our own foreign minister and our defence minister, try to avoid this issue by simply not mentioning it. There has been no attempt to explain why the United Nations Security Council was ignored in Kosovo. No effort has been made to spell out under whose authority NATO bombed Yugoslavia.

The ministers and their officials continue to justify the bombing on the grounds that bombing was necessary to stop ethnic cleansing and atrocities that were being committed in Kosovo. They continue to argue this despite all the evidence that shows that by far the bulk of the ethnic cleansing took place after the bombing, not before it. Indeed, it was the bombing that triggered off the worst of the ethnic cleansing.

As for the atrocities, it seems that here again we were lied to about the extent of the crimes that were being committed. United States Secretary of Defense Cohen told us that at least 100,000 Kosovars had perished. Tony Blair spoke of genocide being carried out in Kosovo. The media relished every atrocity story that they heard from Albanian eyewitnesses.

The myth that the war was to stop ethnic cleansing and atrocities continues to be perpetrated by departmental spokesmen and by large parts of the media. No one wants to defend atrocities, and the numbers game in these circumstances can become sordid, but numbers do become important if they are used to justify military action against an independent and sovereign state.

In the case of Kosovo, it appears that about 2,000 people were killed prior to the NATO bombing. When one considers that a civil war had been going on in Kosovo since 1993, that is not a remarkable figure, certainly not when compared with a lot of other hot spots in the rest of the world. It doesn't warrant a 79-day bombing campaign.

• 0950

It's also interesting to note that the UN tribunal indictment of President Milosovic in May 1999 cites only one incident of deaths before the bombing, and that's this infamous Racak incident, which itself is challenged by a number of French journalists who were there on the ground in Racak at the time this atrocity was alleged to have taken place. These journalists suspect a frameup on the part of U.S. General Walker, who was the first to claim that atrocities had taken place there.

The Kosovo war reveals, in my view, very disturbing evidence that lies and duplicity can mislead all of us into accepting things that we know instinctively to be wrong. Jamie Shea and other NATO apologists have lied to us about the bombing. The sad thing is that most of the media and our political representatives have accepted without question what has been told to us by NATO and our own foreign affairs spokesmen.

NATO was an unnecessary war. This is perhaps the most serious charge that can be levelled against NATO. The NATO bombing of Yugoslavia was a choice by NATO to use violence rather than negotiation and to choose force rather than try to use diplomacy. NATO leaders tried to convince us that dropping tons of bombs on Yugoslavia was serving humanitarian purposes.

Mr. Fawcett has mentioned the UN resolution of October 1998, where President Milosovic accepted some 2,000 monitors to go into Kosovo to try to de-escalate the fighting that had been taking place there. From the accounts of a number of these monitors, their task was relatively successful. While ceasefire violations continued on both sides, the intensity of the fighting did abate considerably. We have the word of the former Czech Foreign Minister Jiri Dienstbier, who was on the ground in Kosovo. We have our own Rollie Keith, from Vancouver, who is on the ground as a monitor in Kosovo, and others who have stated publicly that the OSCE mission did de-escalate the fighting and that for the last five months of their presence in Kosovo, there was very little internal displacement and very few, if any, externally displaced refugees during that period. So the OSCE mission demonstrates that diplomacy and negotiation might well have been tried a little harder to resolve the Kosovo problem without resorting to the use of force.

In my view, it was a failure of the flexibility of the United States in dealing with Belgrade in the weeks leading up to the bombing that spelled diplomatic failure: the adamant refusal of the United States to involve either the Russians or the United Nations in the negotiations; the refusal to allow any other intermediary except Americans to deal with Milosovic; and finally, the imposition of the Rambouillet ultimatum, which was clearly designed to ensure that Yugoslavia would refuse it.

It's now generally accepted by those who've seen the terms of the Rambouillet agreement that no sovereign state could have agreed to its conditions. The insistence of allowing access to all of Yugoslavia by NATO forces and the demand that a referendum on autonomy be held within three years guaranteed a Serbian rejection. The Serbian Parliament, despite this, did meet most of the political terms of the Rambouillet agreement and indicated a willingness to “examine the character and extent of an international presence in Kosovo immediately after the signing of an autonomy accord acceptable to all national communities in Kosovo, the local Serb minority included.” But the United States wasn't interested in pursuing this commitment, and NATO in effect needed its war. NATO's formal commitment to resolve international disputes by peaceful means was in effect thrown out the window.

The Rambouillet document itself was not easy to get a hold of from NATO sources. The chairman of the defence committee of the French national assembly asked for a copy of the Rambouillet agreement shortly after the bombing took place. He wasn't given a copy until about three days before the peace agreement was signed.

I hope that members of our committee will have a copy of Rambouillet and will be able to take a look at it, examine it, and satisfy yourselves as to what modern, sovereign state could possibly have accepted those conditions. It would also be interesting for you to find out just if and when the Canadian government was informed of the conditions of Rambouillet.

• 0955

NATO's campaign, in my view, was a total failure. We've been asked to believe that the war in Kosovo was fought for human rights, and indeed the President of the Czech Republic received a standing ovation in the Canadian House of Commons when he said that Kosovo was the first war fought for human values rather than for territory. I suspect that even President Havel would have second thoughts about that statement now that the one effect of Kosovo has been that a very large part of Serbia has in effect been handed over to the Albanians in Kosovo.

The war allegedly to stop ethnic cleansing hasn't done so. Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, Slav Muslims, and Turks are being forced out of Kosovo every day under the eyes of 45,000 NATO troops. Murder and anarchy reigns supreme in Kosovo. The KLA and criminal elements have taken charge, and the United Nations admits failure to control the situation and warns Serbs not to return to Kosovo.

The war allegedly to restore stability in the Balkans has done the opposite. Yugoslavia's neighbours are in a state of turmoil. Montenegro is on the verge of civil war. Macedonia is now worried that Kosovo has shown the way for their sizeable Albanian minority to also seek self-determination. Albania has been encouraged to continue its dreams of a greater Albania. Serbia itself has been ruined economically. Embittered and disillusioned, it feels betrayed and alienated from the western democracies. So the fuse on the Balkan powder keg is much shorter now than it was before the bombing.

This illegal and unnecessary war has alienated the other great nuclear powers, China and Russia. These countries are now convinced that the west cannot be trusted. NATO's expansion eastward is seen as an aggressive and hostile threat and will be answered by an increase in the nuclear arsenal of both nations. After Kosovo, who can with any conviction convince the Russians or the Chinese that NATO is purely a defensive alliance dedicated to peace and the upholding of the principles of the United Nations?

More seriously, the NATO bombing has destroyed NATO's credibility. NATO stood for much more than just a powerful military machine. It stood for peace, the rule of law, and democratic institutions. The bombing of Yugoslavia threw all of that out. No longer can NATO stand on the high moral ground. Its action in Yugoslavia revealed it to be an aggressive military organization prepared to ignore international law and intervene with deadly force in the internal affairs of any state with whose actions or behaviour it does not agree.

The Chair: The 10 minutes is well over, so if you could...I know you have a page and a bit of your presentation left.

Mr. James Bissett: I just have a little bit to say.

The Chair: Use your diplomatic experience to kind of fly over the last of it.

Mr. James Bissett: A lot of people believe that the idea of state sovereignty can be overruled now if human rights violations are taking place in an individual country. The ground rules for intervention as they exist now are that this can be done if the Security Council agrees. Those are the ground rules that we've all lived under. Now, people in Kosovo argue that we couldn't get the Security Council to agree because China and Russia would have vetoed them. But that's part of the rules; that's what we all agreed on. Not only that, but I don't think any effort was really made to convince the Chinese or Russians, or ask them to abstain. There was no attempt, as Truman did in 1950 because he didn't think he could get the Security Council agreement, to go to the General Assembly and ask the General Assembly to give them authority to intervene in Kosovo. None of that was done.

I'm not opposed to the idea of intervention in a sovereign state to protect human rights. I think that's probably going to be necessary, and Rwanda is the closest example of that. But if the ground rules for intervention are as they are now, then we should obey them. We can't just overlook the structure that is there in the United Nations Security Council. If we don't like it, let's change it. But while those rules apply, let's follow them; let's obey them. We have to have some legitimacy before we intervene in a sovereign state.

I think the whole intervention in Kosovo by NATO was an unmitigated disaster, and we're all going to pay the price for it. Not only that, it raises other questions. I think it should be a warning call to Canadian democracy. I think we have to wake up to the fact that foreign policy is important; otherwise we'll all wake up, as we did last March, to realize that we're at war. We were at war with a state. People in Canada didn't even know where Kosovo was, and yet we were sending our pilots off to bomb Yugoslavia.

• 1000

I think that's wrong. And the more serious thing about it was it was done without any consultation with the Canadian Parliament. The Canadian people had no idea why we were at war. This isn't satisfactory. It seems to me that if we have to give up some of our sovereignty as the price we pay for belonging to international organizations like NATO, then we should be able to insist that NATO follow the ground rules, their own rules, and the rule of law and the principles of the United Nations. This NATO did not do, and I think for this reason it's incumbent upon your committee to look very hard at Canada's participation in the Kosovo war.

Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Bissett, for your perception. I think, just as a last observation, you might want to reflect on your observation that Parliament and Canadians were totally unaware of where we were going. Certainly that was not true of this committee and the debates we had in the House on this issue, which you'll recall were extensive. But we might get an opportunity to discuss that with you at question time.

Mr. Cohen.

Professor Lenard Cohen (Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University): Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today.

In the interests of brevity, I will just highlight a few points I made in my submission. The UN, which was largely sidelined during the pre-war diplomatic negotiations over Kosovo and during the ensuing war, had really not adequately prepared to take over civilian management of Kosovo. Moreover, unlike in Bosnia, where the return of refugees and displaced persons had been protracted, in Kosovo, hundreds of thousands of ethnic Albanians returned rapidly after the war. The catastrophic humanitarian refugee crisis and the infrastructure damage throughout the province was compounded by very bitter, revanchist attitudes of the Albanian population toward Kosovo's remaining Serbian minority, as has been mentioned.

Most Albanians believe their Serbian neighbours shared responsibility for the atrocities committed against Albanians by members of various Serb paramilitary organizations and security personnel. Such sentiments were reinforced by accumulated grievances that Kosovars nursed against heavy-handed Serb political and police control in earlier decades and by the culture of vengeance that has been an integral, historical feature of the Albanian socio-political life. Indeed, by the end of the 1999 war in Kosovo, most Albanians believed that the remaining Serb minority should quit the province altogether.

As you know, the KLA emerged from the war as the strongest Albanian military force and enjoyed widespread support from Kosovo Albanians. But it soon became apparent that beyond the ongoing intra-Albanian political struggle, Kosovo was also experiencing the first stage of a political tug of war between the KLA and the international community over who would control Kosovo.

The initial difficulty faced by the international community in Kosovo was the security vacuum left by the war. KFOR troops provided a strong deterrent to the return of Yugoslav military forces—and still do—and also overshadowed the strength of KLA forces. But as the number of refugees returning to the province mounted and the discovery of atrocities committed against Albanians during the war unfolded, the defenceless Serb minority became the target of ethnic violence, including intimidation, kidnapping, looting, arson, and assassination carried out by hardline Albanians, some directly or closely associated with the KLA.

KFOR and the United Nations' administration officials quickly found that their limited resources and personnel were incapable of providing the security necessary to preserve a multi-ethnic Kosovo, which had been the prime goal of international intervention. Throughout the summer of 1999, a vicious cycle of ethnic vengeance and violence unfolded in Kosovo. It was cold comfort to innocent Serbs forced to flee the province under such circumstances that international commentators described their exodus as a disaster unprovoked by any formal state authority, while noting that the earlier expulsion of Albanians had occurred as a result of state-sponsored policy.

In addition to the problem of violence against Serbs and other minorities, general crime by organized gangs, many associated with criminal networks in neighbouring Albania, increased strikingly. Perhaps the major difficulty impeding the smooth transition process in the province was the delay in establishing a robust, international police force for Kosovo. Training an impartial, professional, and trusted Kosovo-based domestic police force also occurred at an excruciatingly slow pace. Fewer than 175 foreign police officers had arrived in Kosovo by mid-July, with that number rising to just 700 by the end of August. Although KFOR troop strength had increased to over 40,000 by this time, military personnel were not trained to maintain public order and could not ensure adequate protection for the harassed and anxious minority communities.

• 1005

The international community was overwhelmed by the turbulence and ethnic violence in Kosovo during the summer of 1999. Indeed, in the face of the Serb exodus from Kosovo, the only significant multi-ethnic cooperation in the province could be found in the structure of KFOR and the internal operation of the fledgling but growing United Nations bureaucracy.

Following the advent of the United Nations mission and KFOR control over Kosovo, Serb political influence in the province dropped off sharply. In the early fall of 1999, Kosovo appeared on its way to becoming a largely mono-ethnic unit—a nearly ethnically homogeneous protectorate likely to evolve, in my opinion, into a future Albanian-controlled national state. Meanwhile, the protectorate's small minority of Serbs hunkered down, as they are today, essentially becoming a community statelet within a parastate.

As of early 2000, the security situation in Kosovo remains unstable. Only 1,800 to 2,000 partially equipped UN civilian police officers are operating in the protectorate, despite the United Nations request for 6,000 police personnel.

Despite its ongoing difficulties, the United Nations has made some gradual progress in establishing an administrative framework for Kosovo, appointing several hundred judges near the end of 1999. However, dissatisfied with the ethnic composition of the judicial appointees and the fact that the use of the Yugoslav criminal code was being ignored, Serb leaders in Kosovo threatened to organize their own judicial bodies in the province. At the same time, from behind the scenes in Belgrade, the regime attempted to manipulate Kosovo Serb activities to keep the issue of the province's future alive for their own political purposes and to give the appearance that they've not totally abandoned Serbian hopes of re-establishing influence over Kosovo.

The institutional and security vacuum that characterized the first stage of Kosovo's post-war transition does not augur well for the protectorate-province's stability and democratization, in my opinion. Various administrative bodies created by leading Albanian political organizations continue to compete with each other for authority as well as with international agencies and quasi-state bodies established by the remaining Serb leaders.

Nor has the international community reached a consensus regarding sovereignty in Kosovo. For example, some foreign officials stress the need for both close adherence to UN resolution 1244 and cooperation with the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in shaping Kosovo's future. But other international officials working in Kosovo, perhaps the majority, in both KFOR and the United Nations administration protectorate establishment take a more expansive view of their powers. They envision Kosovo as an entity no longer linked to Yugoslavia and unlikely to be linked to Yugoslavia in the future.

Moreover, although the international community has provided a relatively safe environment for the return of Albanian refugees to Kosovo and is committed to the economic and political transformation of the province, its initial failure to provide adequate protection for Serbs and other non-Albanian minority communities in the province has undermined any real chance of creating a multi-ethnic democracy. This failure has actually deepened the already wide chasm of distrust between Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo.

Short of money and personnel, especially police, the special representative of the United Nations seemed frustrated with his task at the outset of the new year and admitted that Albanians and Serbs could agree on virtually nothing. At the end of 1999, he also acknowledged—rather belatedly, in my opinion—that, “We found out, and it's a lesson, that one oppression could conceal another.” It's a rather late time to get this lesson.

I agree with some of what Ambassador Bissett said about the necessity of perceiving that earlier, that one oppression could conceal another in shaping our initial policy and the whole question at Rambouillet, and the decision to go to war.

The alternating cycle of repression in Kosovo by either ethnic Albanians or Serbs, depending on the historical period, was well known to foreign observers before the 1999 war. Had the international community given more careful attention to the consequences that a bombing campaign would have on ethnic relations in Kosovo, or at least made adequate preparations to rapidly police the area following such a campaign, the province's present ethnic segmentation and probable mono-ethnic future might have been avoided.

Finally, the future of Kosovo as an international protectorate appears likely to mime the experience of Bosnia—namely, alternating periods of progress and regress in democratization and inter-ethnic reconciliation, a condition reflecting, in part, the international community's vacillating commitment to Balkan transformation.

• 1010

In the longer run, however, whatever the political evolution of neighbouring Serbia and Montenegro, and whatever the position of the international community, the Albanians of Kosovo appear determined to pursue their own state-building dreams.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Professor Cohen, and thank you for giving us your paper in digest form. We have the whole paper here, and I'm sure we'll read it. It was a helpful digest for us on the types of problems we focus on when we're talking to our own government officials about what is actually taking place in Kosovo.

Mr. Matas.

Mr. David Matas (Individual Presentation): Thank you very much.

It's an honour to be invited to appear before this committee. It's even more of an honour to be invited to appear before you again. I was invited before, and you've heard me once.

The Chair: Don't blot the record by what you do today.

Voices: Oh, oh!

Mr. David Matas: Yes. I hope what I say today will not lead you to decide that this is the last time.

The Chair: I'm sure not.

Mr. David Matas: My approach to the Kosovo crisis is that international legal institutions should be used and strengthened. When we rely on international law, as we do in the Kosovo crisis, we must rely as well on international legal institutions. Bombs and guns alone say nothing about the law. To have legal meaning, they must be put in a legal context. The law we are talking about here is human rights and humanitarian law.

Now, there's no doubt that the aim of the Kosovo bombing was to promote respect for human rights and humanitarian law, to stop threatened ethnic cleansing, to prevent a re-enactment of the Bosnian tragedy. But was that the best way? My own view at the time was that it was not.

There was then, as there is now, a number of unindicted war criminals charged for their ethnic cleansing crimes in Bosnia. There were then, as there are now, NATO troops in Serbia. At the time of the NATO bombing of Kosovo there were 30,000 of them.

We would have had, in my view, a far greater deterrent effect in Kosovo with much less use of force simply by arresting those already indicted in Bosnia. We would have been able to get the message of no ethnic cleansing to Milosevic more clearly by arresting the indicted war criminals in Bosnia than by bombing Serbia.

Be that as it may, the fact is we did not arrest those people at the time. Indeed, many of them are still not arrested, including the leaders Karadzic and Mladic. In my view, of course, they still should be. I would urge this committee to recommend to the Government of Canada that it in turn recommend to NATO that NATO troops in Bosnia arrest those indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia.

But the bombing of Serbia leaves us with another question—that is, how do we promote the rule of law in that context? Here, I would suggest that Canada is letting an opportunity slip through its fingers to have the international law developed by asking the world's leading international lawyers, the judges of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Instead, what is happening now is that Canada is attempting to keep the issue of international law and Serbia away from the court. If Canada succeeds, the result will only be continuing uncertainty in the law.

The Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in April 1999 brought an application to the International Court of Justice in The Hague against the ten NATO allies who participated in the bombing campaign. Each of the allies, including Canada, was sued individually by Yugoslavia. In the application against Canada, Yugoslavia asked the court to declare that Canada, by taking part in the bombing campaign, had violated international law. Each of the other nine applications asked for the same declaration against the other nine allies.

At the same time as it filed its application against the NATO allies, Yugoslavia asked the court to order provisional measures. The provisional measures requested were orders to cease acts of use of force and to refrain from any act or use of force against Yugoslavia.

The request for provisional measures was heard at The Hague last May. Canada as well as the other allies argued that the court did not have the jurisdiction to grant the provisional measures requested.

• 1015

The court consisted of seventeen judges, including fifteen permanent members and two ad hoc judges. There was a different ad hoc judge for each ally as the case was heard, and our ad hoc judge was Marc Lalonde. The judges dismissed the request for provisional measures on jurisdictional grounds. Four judges dissented: the ad hoc judge from Yugoslavia, as well as the judges from China, Russia, and Sri Lanka.

For two of the ten NATO allies sued, the United States and Spain, the court held that its absence of jurisdiction was so apparent that the cases should be struck from the court list. For the other eight, including Canada, the main applications remain to be decided.

For its case against Canada, Yugoslavia just submitted its memorial last month. Canada has until July of this year to submit a counter-memorial.

There's no doubt that international law in this area is in a state of uncertainty. The fact that this committee is holding hearings on this issue is one testimonial to that. The case before the International Court of Justice, I would have thought, would have been welcomed by Canada as an opportunity to introduce legal clarity in this area, yet Canada argued against the jurisdiction of the court at the time provisional measures were requested and presumably intends to carry forward this argument to the main application.

I believe Canada was mistaken to argue against provisional measures on jurisdictional grounds. It would compound that mistake by arguing against the main application on jurisdictional grounds. Canada should rather use the International Court of Justice proceedings in The Hague by Yugoslavia against the NATO allies to pursue the search for peace and the rule of law, rather than harping on legal technicalities. On the main application, Canada should concede that the court has jurisdiction.

The Chair: You're an experienced legal scholar, Mr. Matas. You're saying that the issue of jurisdiction is a legal...how did you describe it? As a legal technicality?

Mr. David Matas: I did, yes.

The Chair: Well, okay. You better not have that used against you in court when you have a case in which you raise the jurisdiction of the court for one of your clients, but anyway....

Mr. David Matas: Well, jurisdiction has substance in relation to the status of the court, and also in relation to whether the remedy should be pursued elsewhere. In terms of those substantive issues of what the status of the court should be, my own view is that the status of the court should be promoted rather than weakened. Also, there is no alternate remedy. When I argue jurisdiction in court, I say we should go here rather than there. What we're talking about in this situation is having nowhere to go. Where we have a venue, we should take advantage of it.

In my written submission to this committee, what I've done is set out the various jurisdictional arguments that were used at the time of the argument on provisional measures. I indicate that one of them should not be conceded because it's a clearly inappropriate argument. The other two could be conceded because they're legally arguable. Indeed, the court has already accepted a similar concession in an earlier case, when Bosnia sued Yugoslavia for genocide and Yugoslavia conceded jurisdiction.

I'm not going to actually read out to the committee the jurisdictional arguments, but I point out that they are there. Member McWhinney has actually asked me for footnotes to these arguments and I will provide them, but I just draw them to your attention.

I'd like to just finish off by saying that right now we have eight of the ten allies remaining. The court rejected the provisional measures against all the allies on jurisdictional grounds, and in relation to Spain and the United States said the jurisdictional arguments were so clear that they were removed from the main action. For the other eight, they put the jurisdictional issues on the main action over to be decided with the merits.

I would say that Canada should concede jurisdiction on two of the three grounds. There are some overlapping jurisdictional issues with the other allies. They're not all the same, but where Canada does share jurisdictional issues with the other seven, I would suggest that Canada should not only concede jurisdiction, but should attempt to persuade its allies to join with Canada and also to concede jurisdiction. Furthermore, Canada should not just rest on the defensive, it should counterclaim against Yugoslavia. The counterclaim would be to ask the court to declare that Yugoslavia has violated international law by its ethnic cleansing of Kosovo. While arguments that the NATO bombing campaign at least in some respects violated international law are plausible on their merits—and you've heard some of these arguments today—arguments that Yugoslavia violated international law by its ethnic cleansing of Kosovo are overwhelming.

• 1020

Obviously Canada could not both counterclaim and argue against the jurisdiction of the court. That's another reason why it would make sense to concede jurisdiction. One advantage of abandoning its jurisdictional position would be that Canada would be free to counterclaim against Yugoslavia.

Yugoslavia has asked the court to order Canada and other NATO allies to pay damages for the losses suffered from the NATO bombing. Canada in its counterclaim should ask the court to order Yugoslavia to pay damages to the Albanian Kosovars for the losses suffered from ethnic cleansing, as well as to pay for the intervention. If Canada can go to war because of the common humanity Canadians share with Albanian Kosovars, then Canada can surely go to court because of that common humanity as well.

Canada should use the Yugoslav case to help to strengthen the court, to support the rule of law, and to develop international law. Between now and July 2000, when Canada files its memorial on the main Yugoslav application, Canada should abandon its jurisdictional position, concede jurisdiction, ask the court to determine the merits of the dispute, counterclaim against Yugoslavia, and ask for the seven allies remaining before the court to do the same. I would ask this committee to so recommend.

Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Matas. I'm sorry I interrupted when I did, but the lawyer in me got the better of me. It's under my skin. It happens occasionally in this committee. My fellow members try to reprimand me when it does, but I managed to sneak it in this time.

We go to Mr. Mendes, another lawyer. We're in trouble this morning.

[Translation]

Mr. Errol Mendes (Director, Human Rights and Education Centre, University of Ottawa, Individual Witness): Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for inviting me here to discuss with you these issues which are fundamental to our country and to the world. I will be making my presentation in English, although the French version of my submission appears in the bulletin of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre which I have circulated to members.

[English]

I also want to say I'm a bit intimidated by the fact that you've asked me to present on international law issues when there are three distinguished international law professors around the table, yourself included, Mr. Chair, along with Professor Ted McWhinney and my dear friend Irwin Cotler.

I would have loved to have had maybe the Bloc's representative on this distinguished allegation, Daniel Turp, at the table too.

Ms. Francine Lalonde (Mercier, BQ): He's not here, and I'm a non-lawyer.

[Translation]

The Chair: Ms. Lalonde is not a lawyer by profession, but she is a lawyer at heart.

[English]

Prof. Errol Mendes: I have a feeling I was invited here to be a counterweight or counterpoint to Ambassador Bissett. I want to start off by saying I profoundly disagree with almost everything he said. I would like to start by saying that if he wants to draw on history, perhaps we should go back further in history.

The notion of territorial integrity and political independence that you do indeed find in article 1 of the UN charter is counterbalanced and in some respects creates what I call in my paper a tragic flaw, by article 1.3, which also states that it's a fundamental purpose of the United Nations to promote and protect human rights.

The origins of this tragic flaw, as I call it, lie in the very origins of the UN charter itself, which is in the ashes of the Second World War. On one hand, the UN's founding countries wanted to ensure that territorial integrity was paramount, so that you could never have the situation that led to the Second World War in the first place. On the other hand, a driving force in the UN charter was also to say “Never again” in terms of the Holocaust, “Never again” in terms of what happened to the minorities in Europe. Hence, for that reason, in article 1.3 you also have the counterweight of human rights.

What happened, coming forward in history, was that this counterweight to the principle of territorial integrity and political independence was frozen during the Cold War. When you had the competition between two superpowers for hegemonic expansion around the world, the principle of territorial integrity and political independence was paramount. Hence, during the Cold War you had massive human rights abusers being overlooked by both sides. Both sides have a great degree of guilt in that regard in terms of Cambodia, in terms of East Timor. I'm not talking about the most recent East Timor incidents. I'm talking about the 1970s. I'm talking about the 500,000 people who were killed in Indonesia when Suharto came to power.

• 1025

Because of the imperatives of the Cold War, the human rights counterweight to territorial integrity was frozen, but that does not mean to say it was overlooked. What happened in the period between 1948 and as recently as 1999 was that the edifice of human rights and humanitarian law was being built slowly by those who had a long-term vision.

So you have, for example, the Geneva conventions being constructed in 1949. You have the genocide convention, which I'll come back to, being constructed in 1948. You have the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which, if you like, was the implementation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was implemented in 1966. And finally, you have the regional human rights charters, the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights in 1950, and ultimately, the Committee Against Torture in 1995.

The theory behind building up this edifice of human rights law and humanitarian law was that some day the Cold War would end and some day the counterweight to territorial integrity and human rights would have equivalence.

The Cold War did end in 1989, but the reality of the counterweight did not gain its full force until two dreadful events in modern human history had to take place. One was the horror of Rwanda and the second was the horror of Bosnia.

Let me repeat some of the main issues surrounding the horrors of Bosnia and the horrors of Rwanda.

In Rwanda no one came to the aid of the 500,000 people who died, despite the pleas of General Dallaire, who asked for nothing more than a small peacekeeping contingent of 5,000 men and whose request was denied.

Nothing really happened in Bosnia either until the very end, and then it was only for humanitarian aid, again led by a Canadian.

It's interesting that Canadians have been at the forefront of pleading for the counterweight to have equivalence to territorial integrity in human rights: in the case of Rwanda, General Dallaire; in the case of Bosnia, General MacKenzie.

Despite the efforts of the international community in Bosnia, you had again the principle of territorial integrity and political independence still being paramount, and hence you had the horrors of Srebrenica, where 8,000 men, women, and children were massacred.

Likewise, you have seen many similar incidents since then in East Timor. It's interesting that ultimately collective guilt does force countries and nations and indeed the multilateral organizations to sit up and finally take notice of the counterweight. That is what happened in the case of Kosovo.

Ultimately, the burden of guilt drove NATO to decide that despite the law...I fully accept that the law in the UN charter was stacked against NATO intervention. There is no doubt about that.

As a public international lawyer, I would be remiss not to agree with the fact that when article 53 of the UN charter allows collective actions to promote chapter 7 actions, it requires the authorization of the Security Council. I fully accept that this authorization was not sought after and it was not given because of the perception by NATO that Russia and China would have vetoed it. What would the west do in that situation? Allow another Rwanda? Allow another Bosnia?

I think it is absolutely shocking to talk about numbers, that only 2,000 died. As Michael Ignatieff in the Sunday Times in Britain and again in the Globe and Mail pointed out, it is obscene to say that 2,000 is not sufficient to have a humanitarian intervention. One is too much, let alone 2,000.

The fact that 2,000 died perhaps showed how imperative it was for the west to intervene at that stage.

• 1030

So essentially what triggered, in my view, the NATO intervention was finally the realization that with the end of the Cold War there would be an equivalence between human rights and humanitarian law and the principle of territorial integrity and political independence.

It's interesting that human history sometimes has a synchronicity and a serendipity to the turn of events. At the same time as NATO decided to stop bombing in March 1999, you had some other tremendously significant events taking place. One is the establishment of the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. The whole purpose behind this court is to say “Never again”, to reinforce the Nuremberg principles, to reinforce the Nuremberg court that you would have never again entrenched in our international law.

At the same time, you also had the establishment of some kind of universal jurisdiction over war criminals, which would include present and past heads of state. You had the on again, off again, but finally the on again ruling by the House of Lords in England, which said that no one will be immune or can be free from the reach of the laws against humanity, the crimes against humanity, and war crimes. Even though Pinochet may go back to Chile, that precedent is established.

So you have, in essence, the final equivalence of human rights and humanitarian intervention with territorial integrity. That doesn't mean to say I'm denying that it presents tremendous dilemmas and moral challenges for countries in the NATO alliance. It is as difficult to produce a just peace as to fight a just war.

I totally agree with all the challenges Lenard Cohen has laid out for NATO and for the rest of the world in producing a just peace in Kosovo. The fundamental choice was perhaps between an unjust genocide and an unjust peace. Given that dilemma, given that choice, what would people want us to do?

I'll end with that. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Mendes. I appreciate that.

I have several questioners on our list. We have just under an hour, colleagues, so we'll do the usual and go ten minutes for the first three questioners and then move to five-minute segments.

Mr. Martin.

Mr. Keith Martin (Esquimalt—Juan de Fuca, Ref.): Thank you very much to all of you for coming here today.

Where to start? I thank you, Mr. Mendes, for finishing off on your point because it leads into my questions.

Given the great body of human rights law that we have, perhaps what we're asking ourselves here is how we can put teeth to it. How can we actually act in the face of a potentially impending human rights disaster?

Given the actions of Mr. Milosevic in Bosnia, and you mentioned the actions in Srebrenica, I'd like to ask you, Ambassador Bissett, what choice did we have at that point in time, faced with the recent history and the recent example of Mr. Milosevic's behaviour in those areas and his genocidal actions in Bosnia?

Secondly, you also asked the very good question about what can be done about the Balkan powder keg? What can we do to diffuse the situation in Montenegro, and what can we do to protect the civilian populations in Kosovo? Is the ultimate solution to this the partition of Kosovo, with the north going to Serbia and the south becoming an independent state of Kosovo that perhaps will ultimately be amalgamated with Albania?

Lastly, Mr. Fawcett, you suggested that if we're going to monitor this that we accept that forced protection is not the highest priority. I would suggest to you that this is a non-starter both from a military perspective and a political perspective in this country. I'd be interested to know from you whether or not you suggest that monitoring groups be as heavily armed as they would be in a war situation and be tasked to have robust rules of engagement in the protection of civilian populations.

The Chair: The questions were addressed to Mr. Bissett and then to Mr. Fawcett.

• 1035

Mr. James Bissett: Thank you. I'll answer what I think is the easiest question first.

Yes, I suspect that in the final analysis the solution to Kosovo will be some sort of geographical division. I don't think there's much hope there that Serbs and Albanians can live peacefully ever after. Some realistic division, with the north part belonging to Serbia and the south remaining with Albania, is my preferred solution.

I think that probably will also apply to some degree in Bosnia. I don't think the situation there has made any appreciable difference. You still have Serbs, Croats, and Muslims separated and doing their own thing. The idea of a multi-ethnic population in Bosnia and Kosovo is probably unrealistic at this stage.

Eventually all of these countries have to realize that geography will predominate. They have to get along with each other. The transportation routes run through all of the countries. They have to trade with each other; they have to have commerce. That probably will come, but I think before it comes they'll have to be separated.

A great deal of the problems there are wound up with history, particularly the history of the Second World War. Ethnic cleansing didn't start in Bosnia or in Albania in the 1990s. It was long before that. I think some geographical division is probably the essential thing to do.

The second question is more difficult. When do you intervene in a sovereign state for humanitarian reasons? I am very suspicious of human rights people who believe you can pursue humanitarian objectives by bombing people. I was in Chechnya in 1994. I've seen what a rocket will do and what a 2,000-pound bomb does to civilians. It tears them to pieces.

The idea that you can start bombing people in Belgrade because of what Milosevic is doing in Kosovo is absolutely horrendous. The people of Belgrade voted against Milosevic, 80% of them. The people in Novi Sad voted against him. Yet we're bombing these people because of what his security forces are doing in Kosovo and we're doing it in the name of human rights. I mean, that's nonsense.

I think the ground rules may have to change. At the moment the rule is you don't intervene unless you have Security Council permission. We intervened in the Gulf War. We've intervened in a lot of places with Security Council authority. We didn't have it in Kosovo, and there are other ways of doing it rather than resorting to violence. Here we are, six months before the new millennium, and we decide the way to resolve human rights problems is by bombing a modern state.

Mr. Keith Martin: What choice did we have, Mr. Bissett?

Mr. James Bissett: The choice is to try negotiating.

Mr. Keith Martin: We've tried that many times before.

Mr. James Bissett: Well, I don't think we tried very hard. I don't think there was any negotiation done by the Americans with Milosevic. They were issuing ultimatums. Remember, they didn't even bring the oil embargo against Yugoslavia until after the bombing. There was really no serious attempt to sit down and bargain with this guy. It was done before with him. He can be bargained with. Dayton proved that. He did allow the OSCE to come into Kosovo, under the aegis of the United Nations.

Milosevic had no reason to support and believe NATO. NATO air strikes helped cleanse 300,000 Serbs out of Croatia. As a politician he wasn't in any position to accept all the demands of NATO. There was clear evidence that he was listening to what the United Nations was saying to him. He would have listened perhaps to the Russians or to the Indians or the Pakistanis. Why did it have to be the Americans? So I think there were other alternatives there.

In addition to that, let's face it, there was a civil war going on. At one point, 80% of Kosovo was controlled by the KLA. They were armed. They were killing Serb policemen. They were terrorists. He was trying to protect his turf. He did it in a brutal, savage way. I'm not defending that, but the principle is fairly sound. If you take up armed violence against a state, the state has the right to try to protect itself.

I believe there are occasions when intervention should take place, but we have to be very careful about that. Remember, Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938. Why? For human rights violations. He claimed the Sudeten Germans were being persecuted by the Czechs and he invaded Czechoslovakia to stop that from happening.

A voice: And we appeased him.

Mr. Keith Martin: And we didn't stop him.

Mr. James Bissett: We didn't stop him, but we have to be very careful of this business of invading countries because of human rights.

Mr. Keith Martin: Sorry to interrupt you, Ambassador Bissett, but I said it in the context of what had previously occurred with Mr. Milosevic's behaviour with respect to Bosnia. I think we cannot take Kosovo in isolation. As you well know as the ambassador, we have to look at it in the context of what happened before that and the behaviour of this individual.

• 1040

You brought up the excellent example of Hitler and what we saw and what we failed to do. By ignoring his behaviour, we allowed that to take place.

Mr. James Bissett: But I brought it up in the context that he invaded for human rights reasons. I think we have to be careful of that. I think there are occasions when a sovereign state has to give up some of its rights if it's abusing its citizens. But to do that, there have to be fairly firm ground rules. That's what I'm saying. Otherwise, who decides?

Mr. Mendes suggested that if one person is killed, we should intervene. If that were the case, we'd be intervening everywhere. I don't like to get into the numbers game either, but 2,000 people killed in Kosovo up to the bombing is not a big deal compared to what was happening in Colombia, in Turkey, in Iraq, in many places. I don't have to give the list.

The second question is a tough one to answer. I don't have the answer to it, but I really do feel we have to decide whether NATO's constitution still stands. Does NATO still undertake not to use violence to resolve international disputes? Does NATO still stand for what article 1 of NATO claims it does? I think we have to get that straight, because if it doesn't, then we're in a new ball game. It's a ball game that affects us all and affects the whole security of the world because basically it means that it will be the United States that will decide, with its $270 billion defence budget. It becomes the policeman.

There's a lot of evidence that in Kosovo the U.S. determined to bomb in Serbia not only for NATO's credibility on its 50th anniversary, but if you believe The New York Times and a lot of U.S. commentators, it was to get Bill Clinton's name off the front pages and to get this victory surge that always happens when U.S. presidents go to war. As it turned out, that didn't happen, but there's strong evidence to indicate that this was Madeleine Albright's real gain here. It was pushing hard.

Because of Milosevic and his actions in the past, he was a target; there's no question of it. But he has been demonized by the press. Bosnia is a long story. I witnessed what was happening in Yugoslavia from 1990 to 1992, and the western intervention there, as always happens in the Balkans, made the situation much worse. People forget that in Bosnia, the Portuguese foreign minister had reached an agreement, signed by the Muslim, Croat, and Serb leaders, to keep Bosnia intact but with three separate parts. They all signed that in Lisbon in March 1992.

My neighbour, the U.S. ambassador, flew to Sarajevo and convinced Izetbegovic to withdraw his signature from that agreement a week after he'd signed it. If he held a referendum in Bosnia, the United States would recognize the independence of Bosnia.

The Chair: Sorry, this always happens when we have questions. We now have gone 11 minutes and other people want to ask questions.

Mr. James Bissett: All right. Sorry.

The Chair: Mr. Fawcett, can you give us a very brief answer to whether or not they should be armed? I think that's something the committee has been following.

Mr. John Fawcett: The point is whether force protection is the highest priority, not whether it's a priority but whether it's number one. That's the problem. Certainly if you're going to send monitors into a war zone, not to arm them to the capacity that the military commanders themselves require is wrong. The basic problem with putting force protection as the highest priority is that it undermines the whole mission.

Very quickly, three examples: UNPROFOR in Bosnia, which was deployed and then immediately used as an example of risk to our troops, therefore we can't do anything further; SFOR in Bosnia, as someone alluded to earlier, has failed to arrest the war criminals for force protection reasons; and then the KVM in Kosovo being a non-aggressive deployment. Had we been tougher with them, all of those involvements may have avoided the necessity for bombing. But we weren't because we put force protection as number one.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

I know Mr. Matas and Mr. Cohen wanted to get in on this discussion, but unfortunately we're well over the time. I'm going to Madame Lalonde, so just hold your fire and maybe you can work in your ideas with somebody else's question. You'll have a chance, I'm sure.

Madame Lalonde, s'il vous plaît.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde: Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I can understand their desire to intervene, because we will indeed be pressed for time. I want to thank all of you. The issue at hand, namely the powerlessness, so to speak, of the international community, is both riveting and extremely disturbing.

• 1045

As a regular participant in the assemblies of the Council of Europe, I've been on hand when at least three reports were tabled and each time, I sat in on debates on the situation in Kosovo. I have to say that I'm troubled by your comments, Mr. Bissett, but not convinced. I've listened to countless reports. For many of the people who listened to Milosevich and who even discussed matters with him - but not everyone because representatives of members of the Yugoslav federation were also heard—despite the worthy OSCE representatives, some of whom remained behind after the bombings began, according to their firsthand reports, according to OSCE observers, the plan in place was barely disrupted. Is it acceptable to leave people to weather the storm alone, even if, as you claim, Canadians were unaware of what was going on, even though television reports prior to the decision being made provided parliamentarians with considerable fodder for discussion?

One can argue that Serbia acted with impunity, just as Russia has acted with impunity, which is also disconcerting. Is this a justifiable reason for invoking the defence of human rights? You could have argued that the international community decided to take action in Serbia, but not in Russia because Russia was viewed as a superpower, even though it is not as wealthy as it once was. Was it necessary to draw up and implement a Munich-type agreement? That troubles me a great deal.

Moreover, when you mention 2,000 persons, this figure fails to take into account events prior to March 1999. Lastly, I listened to Mr. Rugova, a soft-line democrat, argue that the crisis in Kosovo would not be resolved unless independence was achieved. He stated this quite clearly, without being pressed to do so, when I had the pleasure of accompanying Minister Axworthy to Pristina.

Conversely, Mr. Mendes, because everything isn't always so cut and dry, does the international community have the means to intervene on an ongoing basis to police the situation? This brings us back to the question of what needs to be done to ensure democracy, particularly when we note the widening gap between rich and poor nations. Even in wealthy nations, democracy is threatened by mounting wealth, on the one hand, and increasing poverty on the other hand.

[English]

The Chair: We'll start with Mr. Bissett and then go to Mr. Mendes. Bear in mind to keep it short.

Mr. James Bissett: I've spoken quite a lot, so maybe we should start with Mr. Mendes.

[Translation]

Mr. Errol Mendes: You are quite right. There is a certain amount of hypocrisy to all of this, considering Russia's actions in Chechnya.

[English]

One has to be consistent in this area, and Canada has a critical role to play here. If we believe what I have said about our action in Kosovo, we have to also take a consistent position toward what's happened in Chechnya. I would hope that a similar type of investigation would be done, as to how many people have died as a result of the Russians' actions in Chechnya.

There should be consequences. Maybe there could be military consequences or maybe there could be economic consequences, given the fact you have a superpower with nuclear weapons. There should be some discussion.

You mentioned the Council of Europe. Should Russia be allowed to stay in the Council of Europe, given what has happened in Chechnya? Likewise, in terms of the role of the IMF and the World Bank in Russia, are we to just turn a blind eye to what has happened in Chechnya? I think you're absolutely right that we have to be consistent; otherwise it smacks of rank hypocrisy.

Thank you.

The Chair: Mr. Cohen, do you want to comment? Why don't we go to Mr. Matas, Mr. Cohen, and then Mr. Bissett?

• 1050

Mr. David Matas: In some ways, the question Madame Lalonde asked is similar to the questions Mr. Martin asked, which are obviously troubling the committee, in the sense that we can't do nothing and yet we can't do everything. How do we decide what to do?

First of all, we don't have just this stark choice between using force and doing nothing. There are intermediate actions we can do in the human rights matters of concern around the world. I think we have to look at the range of intermediate actions. I don't think we have to use recourses that we know in advance are going to be ineffective.

Mr. Bissett suggested maybe going to the General Assembly, as Harry Truman did, or going to the Security Council and getting some sort of vote. If we know in advance these recourses are not going to work, I don't think we have to go there just to show they are not going to work. There are other things we can do to promote human rights other than armed intervention.

Particularly in terms of Kosovo or the Balkans, if we look at why these things are happening, I would say it's because of the promotion of inter-ethnic hatred. I don't think we have to accept promotion of inter-ethnic hatred as a given and just try to work around it in some way, by creating territorial divisions or stopping one side from acting out that hatred. I think we can try to combat the promotion of that hate directly. We have a lot of techniques we have developed in Canada, through the use of our own hate laws and human rights experience, to do that, which we can transport internationally.

When it comes to the point where nothing else is working and it's force or nothing else, then we also have to think about which use of force is going to be the most effective. That's why I raised the arrest of the Bosnian indicted in the context of Kosovo. As I said before, when we use force, we have to use it in the context of trying to develop and strengthen international legal institutions, so we get a legal benefit from it and not just the benefit in terms of that immediate crisis.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde: I've read your submission, Mr. Matas. I'm sorry I wasn't here when you spoke. You say that Canada should accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice in the Hague and you speak of the consequences of refusing to acknowledge the court's jurisdiction. However, what consequences are there to acknowledging its jurisdiction?

[English]

Mr. David Matas: Obviously, when you enter into litigation, you can win or you can lose. If we win, I think we will win quite a lot. If we lose, I suppose we will get a money damage against us and some lessons. But even when you lose in court, you at least get a statement of what the law is and give some development to the institution that's articulating the law. I think we have less to lose from losing than we have to gain from winning.

The Chair: So you won't mind if, at the end of this session, we decide to pronounce a decree of divorce against you, Mr. Matas, or somehow put you in jail for something. You won't raise the committee's jurisdiction or anything like that, as we decide.... I have a lot of trouble with this argument, as you can see.

If the court doesn't have jurisdiction, wouldn't it destroy the whole fabric of international law if party states went before it and said “Hey, decide something you have no jurisdiction over”? Wouldn't that threaten the whole fabric of international law as well?

Mr. David Matas: That's not the nature of the court. The court can take jurisdiction, if the parties accept it.

The Chair: I shouldn't jump in on this because Mr. McWhinney has his views on this too, so I'll let him raise it as well. You can see where this problem leads us, but we'll come back to it.

Mr. Cohen.

Prof. Lenard Cohen: Frankly, I don't think it's very productive to talk about body counts in general. Whether it's 2, 2,000, or 200,000, it could be considered an atrocity.

But let me go back to some of Mr. Martin's questions and some of the other comments and tell you my position on this.

Frankly, while it's been said that Mr. Milosevic is no box of chocolates, by any means, and certainly a hard person to deal with, it doesn't take an international lawyer to realize what the situation was back in February 1999. In common-sense terms, we wanted to achieve at least three things: we wanted to improve the human condition for the Kosovo Albanians; we wanted to stabilize the situation in the Balkans; and we wanted to start moving toward democratization. Obviously, leaving aside international law for the moment and body counts, the bombing didn't really achieve those goals.

• 1055

Mr. Milosevic was already on the skids politically at that time, so it only, in the short run, helped him garner support, reconsolidate, and look like the hero of a victorious campaign he turned around, facing 19 countries from the NATO alliance.

By the way, there were other options too. If you took the position that you wanted to save human lives, there was the ground option. This is completely on the other side from making concessions with Milosevic. We obviously weren't practically prepared to make a ground invasion at that point. But if you're going to think along those lines, from that position, then you should have the courage of your convictions as an alliance—we all should—and prepare ground troops for an invasion, because bombing does not help people on the ground. That hasn't even been discussed, let alone the American president's kind of wrong-headed ruling out of the ground option after the bombing campaign began, which only lengthened the war.

On the question of partition that came up, I would have favoured that long ago, as a solution to many of these problems, in order to save human lives. But now we have a commitment as an alliance in Bosnia and our other protectorates in the Balkans—and I include Macedonia and Albania proper in that as well—that will have no partitions in the future. But de facto there will be self-rule for communities within states that we call united, even the Serbian community in the north. Whether we partition Kosovo or not—and I don't think we will, and it's moving toward an Albanian homeland again for a new Albanian state—while we're there, there will probably be some form of self-rule in those northern areas, whether we have a fig leaf and call it a multi-ethnic state or something else.

The question of Montenegro was raised too. That's a very serious question. I think the best approach there is to help Mr. Djukanovic not make a unilateral declaration of independence, because that's an invitation for Milosevic to act with the army. Lately, Mr. Djukanovic has been acting extremely sober, putting off the referendum in Montenegro, because that would only exacerbate the problems.

Right now we're using Montenegro—I just returned from there recently—as the back door into Yugoslavia, to help the democratization process. In fact, I was at a political science conference in Montenegro. Yugoslav political scientists from Belgrade feel happier about going to Montenegro to discuss political issues openly. That's something they can't do, without certain trepidation, in Belgrade. So I think we should help Montenegro maintain its self-rule, without moving toward a unilateral independence.

The Chair: That's very helpful. Some of us at the OSCE summit in Istanbul had a chance to talk to Mr. Djukanovic when we were there. He seemed to be backing away from an immediate referendum anyway.

Prof. Lenard Cohen: It's a sign of his sobriety.

The Chair: One is always careful when speaking of sobriety and politicians.

Prof. Lenard Cohen: That's right. In the land of plum brandy, we have to be careful.

The Chair: Madam Carroll.

Ms. Aileen Carroll (Barrie—Simcoe—Bradford, Lib.): Thank you, Mr. Chair.

It's really excellent to have the opportunity to hear you speak on a very important issue, because it leads us in directions. If we've made mistakes, hopefully we will move with more wisdom in the future.

Mr. Bissett, I read the article you wrote in the op-ed page of the Globe and Mail, January 10. Much of what you've said today, of course, is an extension of this, or gives more details on this. But in one part you mention that “I doubt any Canadian member of Parliament has bothered to request a copy” of the Rambouillet document. I guess when I read that, it just hit again on the conundrum I felt at that time. I'm sitting on the opposition side here, but I sit on the government side of the House. My background isn't law. My background—graduate school—is international politics and international law. Also, I went to university at a time when I was very active in the anti-war movement, so many of the questions you raised and we dealt with were difficult. Like everyone, whether I'm a legislator or an ambassador, I have to try to reconcile diplomacy and how far we can go with it before we have to make tough decisions.

I listened carefully this morning as you talked about the United Nations and how far we can go in that regard. Sovereignty can be overruled where human rights are violated, but only when the Security Council decides. But we created the United Nations after the failure of the League. It's flawed. How long do we continue to assign to what is the ultimate decision-making international body those kinds of decisions, knowing it is hobbled from the outset by that veto power? I want you to comment on that.

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I'd appreciate, too, your insights, if you could share them with us, on the role of the Canadian ambassador. I know you were there from 1990 to 1992, but tell me, as a legislator, how you input decisions made in Mr. Axworthy's office.

Finally, if I can—and I know I'm getting into difficulty—Madame Lalonde mentioned Chechnya. We were recently at the Council of Europe, and I headed that delegation. While I couldn't participate in the debate, I tabled my debate.

The Council of Europe is based on three principles: the rule of law, human rights, and diplomacy...sorry, democracy—it's a very important slip. And yet that body decided not to suspend Russia, even with the foreign minister of Russia standing there before they voted, being as clear as he could be, saying, when we've got at this, when we've attained that, then we'll do what you are asking for when you say you want an immediate ceasefire and political negotiations, and so on. Nevertheless they went ahead.

My concern is, how far are we willing to go in the name of diplomacy, working with flawed international institutions, before we draw a line in the sand? I need to know how you input that, particularly as an ambassador.

Mr. James Bissett: On the first one, the Security Council, as I said, current ground rules before intervening in a sovereign state would be that you have to have the authority of Security Council. As Mr. Mendes has said, that was an emergence from the Second World War, but it was also in the reality that a lot of the major powers were armed with nuclear weapons. If you start intervening into Russia or China today, you risk a nuclear war. That's why nobody wants to meddle with Russia over Chechnya.

We won't be meddling in the affairs of India or Pakistan any more either, because they have nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, the way it goes now, we will intervene only in those states that really aren't able to hit back at us very hard. That's the reality. It's unfortunate, but that's the case. We can complain all we want about what the Russians are doing in Chechnya, but we can't do anything about it, because to do something about it, really, would probably result in retaliation of some sort.

Ms. Aileen Carroll: Should they have suspended Russia? Should they have made a statement? Or for the sake of continued dialogue with parliamentarians who don't even represent the government in most cases, should they have altered the prestige that international body has by continually giving three or four more months?

Mr. James Bissett: That's a very difficult question, and you have to balance factors one against the other. Is it going to do you any good to ban Russia from that agency or to impose sanctions? Very often, by doing that, you just harden their resistance and make any form of dialogue that might hold forth the promise of a relaxation of the Russian attitude even more difficult. So that's the reality of it. It's extremely difficult.

As for the role of the ambassador, the ambassador is basically a messenger. Politicians today pay much more attention to CNN than they do to what the ambassador might be saying. There's no question of that.

I delivered messages. I was the last western ambassador in Belgrade. I was able to convince Barbara McDougall to keep me there when all the other western ambassadors had been pulled out. I was going to see Milosevic every second day, making a rapprochement of one sort or another, but I was just delivering messages, basically, and reporting back.

Recommendations and reports from ambassadors may or may not be read. I doubt very much if they're taken into account very seriously. I'm afraid what counts is what goes on CNN, on the news.

The Chair: And what happens in this committee, of course.

Mr. James Bissett: Yes, I hope what happens in this committee counts.

The Chair: My members look skeptical.

Mr. James Bissett: I hate to say that about my fellow ambassadors, but I'm being honest with you. You have very little impact.

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I was in Russia in the first Chechen war. I saw the dreadful atrocities that were taking place there. I was heading an organization that had the job of going into Grozny and trying to take out elderly Russians who were left in the city, because all the Chechens had left and the Russians were bombarding the city, and the elderly people had nowhere else to go. They had no clansmen or tribesmen to go to. There were terrible atrocities there, and it has been repeated again. But again, I'm afraid we can't do very much about that.

Part of the problem with all eastern Europe, particularly the Balkans, is that we forget that they had 50 years not only of the Iron Curtain, but of a really dreadful system. It's not simply Milosevic; most of these leaders who have emerged to jump on the ethnic bandwagon are old party apparatchiks. They're interested in prestige, privilege, and power. They couldn't care less about the people, and as long as they can stay in power by inciting ethnic violence, they'll do it.

The people in the Balkans are not savage barbarians. They've lived together peacefully for many years. Belgrade is a very sophisticated city, but they've been held down for so long, and all these ethnic aspirations that were kept down have suddenly emerged. The real diplomatic challenge for the west after the fall of the Soviet Union was how to meet the challenge of ethnic aspirations, in places like the Balkans, without violence.

Unfortunately, our intervention there increased the violence and made bloodshed and violence inevitable. I can give you all sorts of examples of that, but the first one is the premature recognition of Croatia. Tudjman, who denied the Holocaust, whose party took on all the apparatus of the Oustachi fascists who had slaughtered Serbs by the thousands in the Second World War, came to power in Croatia.

Before recognizing him, the western powers should have said, look, you have to guarantee civil rights to the Serbs there, and their human rights. He had taken away their civil rights. We should have insisted that their human rights be respected. We didn't do that. The Serbs felt abandoned. Their fathers and grandfathers had been butchered. They armed themselves.

We, including Canada, rushed to recognize Croatia without any guarantees being given. That meant civil war in Croatia, absolutely. Germany wanted Croatia recognized for political reasons at home. It had nothing to do with the Balkans. The Germans were able to bribe the British and the French at Maastricht by giving them concessions to go along with the recognition.

I could go on, but my point is, we've failed in dealing with those problems because we don't know the situation on the ground. We don't have any really objective views about the real merits of the cases there. We intervene for our own domestic political reasons or for other foreign policy objectives that have nothing to do with the situation in the Balkans, and it only incites people to violence and killing.

The Chair: Both Mr. Fawcett and Mr. Mendes want to add to that, but the time is up for this period. You'll have to be quite brief.

Mr. John Fawcett: Yes, I think I can be.

The last two questions lead down to how they balance the creation of international law and pragmatism on the ground. By now, we've been in the Balkans for 10 years, and we don't have to go back through centuries of lessons learned. We can see what has happened in the last 10 years.

I want to address quickly the concept of partition of Kosovo. Five, six, or seven years ago, we heard all the realpolitik people saying partition Bosnia because they'll never get on. Tudjman dies, there are two elections in Croatia, and all of a sudden the Croat-held areas of Bosnia are talking about reintegrating with Bosnia. Had we made this realpolitik decision five years ago, it would have been over.

The point I'm making is, with the top-down leaders of the states, we're seeing nothing, no chance of movement in Kosovo with Slobodan Milosevic in power in Belgrade. Our focus should be on him and his regime, how to get them out of power, just as it should have been on how to get Tudjman out of power. That's what the problem is. It is not “Can we make some little manipulation on the ground because these people can't live together again”. Focus where the problem is. Dive at it.

The Chair: Mr. Mendes, very quickly.

Prof. Errol Mendes: I want to say that I think it's even possible to affect the behaviour of a power like Russia, and I refer to Chechnya and specific events in the Chechen war.

One, if you remember, at the time of the OSCE meetings, all the OSCE leaders blasted Russia for its human rights record in Chechnya. After that, there was an avenue opened out of Grozny to allow civilians to escape. The Russians were going to attack it and wipe it out completely. That's one example of international condemnation having an impact on the lives of people.

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Secondly, there were the media reports of the massacre in a village outside Grozny, where forty people were essentially executed. I think just those alone gave Russia second thoughts about repeating that in other places. So even with a major power with nuclear weapons, it's possible for the west and others around the world to have an impact.

What we have to do, and what I think your task is, is to find out what Canada's role is in providing that type of pressure point for everybody, from Russia to the Kosovo-type situations.

The Chair: Thank you. That's helpful.

Mr. McWhinney, sir.

Mr. Ted McWhinney (Vancouver Quadra, Lib.): I respect the witnesses we have invited. I think Lenard Cohen is the top North American specialist on Yugoslavia, and then there's Ambassador Bissett. But because of the time factor, I'm going to direct all my questions to David Matas.

I took note, by the way, of the International Commission of Jurists' colloquium last August, in which you and Leslie Green presented arguments somewhat similar to those you have presented today. Incidentally, Senator Gerald Beaudoin made a very impressive intervention too.

We come back to this issue of jurisdiction. You are aware that for most of the post-war period, Canada argued for a very broad interpretation of jurisdiction. That was Paul Martin, Sr.'s position, and we only departed with the Arctic Waters Pollution Prevention Act. We tended to change to another position, much to Paul's unhappiness, which he expressed to me and others privately.

The other thing I'd mention is that the International Court of Justice, partly as a result of the views of Judge Manfred Lachs, Judge Nagendra Singh, and Judge Taslim Olawale Elias, took a very facultative view on jurisdiction until very recent years. In fact, on very flimsy grounds, the court exerted jurisdiction over France in the first nuclear weapons case and over the United States in the Nicaragua complaint. In fact, the Americans got so upset that they walked out and withdrew from the court's jurisdiction.

So there are conflicting positions here, and you are right to remind us that while the court denied Yugoslavia's request for jurisdiction on the provisional measures case in relation to Canada, the court has indicated that this will not bind it on a substantive ruling, which is the one coming up.

What I'd like to ask you is whether you have asked the legal division of the foreign ministry to consider waiving the jurisdictional ground. I asked Prime Minister Mulroney if we would put in a brief on the nuclear weapons advisory opinion, and I think we got very close to it, but he said no. It was then a bit too late when there was a change of government.

So have you asked the foreign ministry, and what was their response? Secondly, what matters would you envisage that we might raise? For example, there's the legality of aerial bombardments against the additional Geneva protocols of 1977 and collateral damage; and there are the rights of non-UN-charter organizations—and NATO is one of these, not a regional security organization in the charter—to use armed force and under what conditions.

I think the third point, which you raised—or was it Ambassador Bissett?—is the respective roles of the Security Council and the General Assembly. Could the General Assembly, by a two-thirds majority on the aligning of a peace resolution, have exercised the powers that it was feared the Security Council would not? Have you considered any range of matters that, if you approach the foreign ministry, you would like them to raise?

Mr. David Matas: Have I raised this with the foreign ministry and the legal advisers? The answer to that is yes.

I was actually in The Hague, at the court, at the time this case was argued. I was listening to the case, although not the whole thing, because I was there for some other reason. I went there for a day or two and heard part of it, and I talked to the legal advisers. What did they say?

Mr. Ted McWhinney: That was Philippe Kirsch.

Mr. David Matas: Sabine Nölke was there, and there were several other people there, but Philippe Kirsch was indeed arguing the case.

What did they say? Well, Philippe Kirsch has not appointed me as his spokesman on this issue, and I really am in no position to speak for the Department of Foreign Affairs. I would invite you to do so, but I would say they were diplomatic and guarded about this.

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Let me speculate about what I think was going on—and I'm not putting words into the mouths of the department officials. I don't mean to suggest that they did say this; I'm just thinking about what might have been happening.

As I mentioned before, if you look at the jurisdictional arguments, one of them is just unacceptable and has no basis. The other two are quite arguable, and we could accept them or we could argue against them. I don't think what you called this facultative approach was necessarily implicit in these other arguments. I think there are some really debatable issues here on jurisdiction, ones that we might win or we might lose. I don't see our interest in trying to win them, though. That's the point.

Why did we argue them? The way I see it, as I mentioned in my paper, we were arguing partly because the United States was party to this litigation at the time, and the United States did not want to give the court jurisdiction because the Americans did not want to give status to the institution, partly for the Nicaragua case but for other reasons as well. There is a lot more hostility to international institutions in the United States than there is in Canada. I think that goes without saying. So the Americans were not inclined to concede jurisdiction.

Of course, there had to be a common position, and indeed the United States was the lead in this. The United States is not part of this any more because the courts said there's clearly no jurisdiction, so there's no need to work out a common position with the United States at the next stage. We don't have to worry about U.S. fears of giving credit to an institution that the Americans do not want to credit, because the Americans are not part of this. On the other hand, Canada on the whole likes to give credit and status to international institutions, so I think we're in a position where we can exercise what you had previously called Paul Martin, Sr.'s position.

If we got to the merits, sure there are lots of important legal issues, some of which we've discussed here and which you have alluded to. But I don't think that if we were to go to court on the merits, we would inevitably lose. I think we could say—“we” meaning Canada—the Security Council and the General Assembly are ineffective, that they're immobilized, that any attempt to use them would have failed.

Mr. Ted McWhinney: You say both the Security Council and the General Assembly were immobilized?

Mr. David Matas: Yes, that's what I said, because one of the options is what Truman did for the Korean War. The Security Council—

Mr. Ted McWhinney: The “uniting the peace” resolution.

Mr. David Matas: Right, so I think Canada would have to take the position that this sort of resolution would not have succeeded in the General Assembly as well.

Mr. Ted McWhinney: It required only a two-thirds majority under General Assembly rules. In the Korean case, the majority was 52 to 5, with two abstentions, which is an overwhelming majority.

Mr. David Matas: It succeeded then, but I think we could argue that if we went to the General Assembly it might well not have succeeded in terms of Kosovo. I believe that's so. I don't think we could have gotten a resolution through the General Assembly on armed intervention in Kosovo.

In any case, I think we can argue that it was unlikely to happen and that there's no point in trying to seek out a remedy that we know in advance is going to be ineffective, as I'd indicated earlier. There is a doctrine of humanitarian intervention in international law, and we cannot stand by when institutions are ineffective.

Minister Axworthy gave a speech that was reported in the paper just a couple of days ago, and which I have since read. He set out a number of principles for humanitarian intervention. To my mind, that is a perfect statement of what our legal position should be in court. I think the principles there are sound principles, I think they're legally valid as well as politically valid, and I think we could go to court and ask the court to adopt them. That's what I think we should be doing.

Mr. Ted McWhinney: Would that be your substantive recommendation to the legal division, that we seek a ruling on the present-day ambit and the processes inherent in the claimed right of humanitarian intervention? That there is a larger substantive issue?

Mr. David Matas: Yes, I guess you could use the ambit at the time of the bombing. I suppose a lot hasn't evolved that much since then, but certainly that would be my recommendation.

Mr. Ted McWhinney: I would just say the Institut de Droit International has established two commissions that will deliver a preliminary report by August 2001 on aerial bombardment in the contemporary law in light of the Geneva protocols of 1977, and also on the role of non-UN-charter security organizations such as NATO, and their legal powers. In some ways that would meet some of the issues that you're raising.

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Mr. David Matas: Absolutely. There are a lot of bodies looking at this, including this committee and the Security Council, but it's not going to have the same legal force as a judgment of the court. With a court, you have not only status but presumably the leading international legal scholars in the world as well. They have the issue before them, and it would make eminent sense, if we want the issue resolved, to ask them.

The Chair: Thank you.

Members, you might be interested to know the speech to which Mr. Matas referred has been circulated. There are three positions on when intervention should be exercised. They are quite helpful.

Madam Marleau, five minutes. Then we're going to go to Mr. Martin, who asked for the floor again. Then we'll have to close right at 10.30.

Hon. Diane Marleau (Sudbury, Lib.): At 11.30.

The Chair: At 11.30.

Ms. Diane Marleau: Mr. Bissett, I've been very disturbed by some of the statements you've made. Basically you ended your last statement—or one of your last statements—by saying that CNN in effect had an undue influence in the NATO bombing. I want to know if this is really what you've said. It boggles my mind. We were given facts and figures about the atrocities that were ongoing. Are you now saying that what we were given was really not based on fact and that CNN was filming and reporting things in such a way that it placed undue pressure on the countries to bomb? What you're saying is very disturbing.

Mr. James Bissett: I didn't quite say that, but I certainly agree with that. I said that CNN had much more influence than I did as an ambassador. In other words, the political leaders pay more attention to what the media says than what their own ambassadors might be reporting to them in official dispatches. That's what I said.

As for CNN's influence, certainly in regard to Kosovo I would agree with what you said. Yes, I think there was a lot of misrepresentation, a lot of duplicity, in the reports that we were receiving from our political leaders about what was going on in Kosovo. As I said in my statement—

Ms. Diane Marleau: But for what reason?

Mr. James Bissett: —Secretary of Defense Cohen claimed that 100,000 people perished in Kosovo. Tony Blair said a genocide was going on. That obviously did not happen.

Ms. Diane Marleau: Can you imagine why these kinds of statements were made?

Mr. James Bissett: Yes, to justify—

Ms. Diane Marleau: What were the reasons behind them?

Mr. James Bissett: —bombing. How otherwise could they justify bombing Yugoslavia? They had to get public support. The way to get it was to say that atrocities are going on there, that genocide is taking place, that we must intervene there, that we can't stand by as we did in Rwanda—and we intervened by bombing. You still get that justification today. The foreign minister argues this: that we intervened to stop ethnic cleansing.

The Chair: Implicit in your statement, though, Mr. Bissett, is that both Mr. Blair and Secretary Cohen were bald-faced lying when they said that, that they said this for that reason.

Mr. James Bissett: Yes, that's right.

The Chair: That's what you're telling us.

Mr. James Bissett: Yes, I'm saying that.

Ms. Diane Marleau: But what was—

The Chair: Okay, we just want to make sure we know that's your position.

Ms. Diane Marleau: —the big reason for the lie, then? If you're saying they were lying...?

Mr. James Bissett: Yes, I'm saying they were lying.

Ms. Diane Marleau: Why would they want to bomb so much? I mean, come on, this is not a game. There had to be legitimate explanations.

Mr. James Bissett: I'm afraid in many ways it was a game. Certainly it's not beyond comprehension that some of our political leaders will tell lies, is it?

Ms. Diane Marleau: But to bomb? I have a very difficult time believing that. I must say that I realize that the NATO countries and the allied countries were certainly not prepared for the result of the bombing, which was the massive outflow of Albanians and Kosovars—

Mr. James Bissett: But all of their security reports told them that was going to happen if they bombed. It is certainly clear that Clinton was advised that if he started bombing it would mean a massive exodus and ethnic cleansing of Kosovars out of Kosovo. Simply as a military tactic, the Serbs would have to get rid of the population there because of the anticipation of a NATO invasion. They were given warnings of that. That's on the record now.

Ms. Diane Marleau: These are very serious allegations you're making, I must say.

Mr. James Bissett: Well, I think they can be backed up. We know what Secretary of State Cohen said. He said that 100,000 people had perished. We know what Clinton said and what Blair said.

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Still one of the issues that is disputed.... And again, I'm afraid we get down to numbers, because they do in a sense become important. A lot of people argue that we bombed to stop ethnic cleansing, but the figure from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on the number of people displaced in Kosovo before the bombing was about 200,000. Most of those were internally displaced because of the fighting that was going on in the villages and because of the retribution of the Yugoslav security forces, which would bomb their villages.

The record shows that over 800,000 people were cleansed out of Kosovo after the bombing. All of the evidence seems to indicate clearly that the bombing really triggered off the ethnic cleansing and probably a lot of the atrocities too, but we were being told at the time of the bombing that these things were happening and that these atrocities were taking place.

Ms. Diane Marleau: Yes, we were told that.

Mr. James Bissett: Yes.

The Chair: And some people believed.... I think we're unfortunately going to have to stop this now, because we have to be out of here at 12 o'clock sharp. The Bloc caucus is meeting here.

We do have one more witness, but I want to ask a wrap-up question of Mr. Cohen. I'll tell you why. I understand the purpose of reviewing the history, because if we don't understand where we're coming from we won't know where we're going to, and there are all the other reasons.

But we in the committee hope that at the end of the day we'll come up with some concepts and ideas that will be helpful to restructuring and to how Canada can participate in that area, that unfortunate area, in a way that will be conducive to creating the multi-ethnic democratic state we all wish to see. If we're just going to sit all the time saying, well, should you have bombed or shouldn't you have bombed, we'll revisit history, and the historians will love us for it, but will it take us to...helping for the future?

To that end, Mr. Cohen, I want to ask you this, because Professor McWhinney said you're an expert in the area of Yugoslavia. Everyone before the committee tells us that nothing will happen as long as Mr. Milosevic is still in power. Can you (a) help us with that proposition and (b) tell us what your prognosis is of a democratic change taking place within the former Yugoslavia, in Yugoslavia itself, in time to enable us to resolve some of these terrible problems we're trying to grapple with?

Prof. Lenard Cohen: It's an awful challenge when I get a compliment from my former colleague that I have to live up to. I've been hoisted on his petard, I guess.

Let me say that John Fawcett was quite right: Milosevic is a major impediment to change. We all know that. The Serbian cases, as you've now asked me about, deserve a great deal of concentration. My own expectation is that if this committee holds hearings one day on post-Milosevic Serbia, as I expect it probably will, you'll find that the post-Milosevic Serbia will be an exceedingly turbulent landscape, turbulent because their forces there will be fighting out, really, the succession contingencies to Mr. Milosevic for succeeding to power. That's a very complicated story right now.

You know that on January 10 the parties from the Serbian opposition signed another agreement to try to work together against Mr. Milosevic to prepare for the next elections and so on. That's very promising, because since that period of 1996-97 when they had the street demonstrations, they really haven't maintained any kind of cohesion. There's a tremendous rivalry between the two leading personalities from the two leading parties, Mr. Djindjic, from the Democratic Party, and Mr. Draskovic, from the Serbian Renewal Movement.

When I say it will be turbulent, I'm expecting that the consensus that now exists about holding elections.... And there's no certainty that we're going to have those elections. We know Milosevic's days are numbered. We don't know the number, we don't know when those elections will occur, and we don't know if there will be international supervision in those elections, but there's an expectation that the consensus in the opposition will break up again, during the elections, before the elections, or after the elections. I expect to see considerable turbulence, if not violence.

In fact, as I go down the various options, such as more Milosevic, another international intervention, and so on, the various scenarios for change in Serbia, I expect we'll see a lot of civil strife, if not open violence, in Serbia in connection with this.

The opposition is poised now to try to hold elections and work together. Milosevic now will try to stand against them. If nothing happens by March or April, the opposition says they're going to go to the streets together, both Djindjic and Draskovic. Draskovic's people haven't gone to the streets as yet. Only the Djindjic people have been involved in these mass demonstrations and rallies. Draskovic refused to participate, hoping to pick up the kind of mantle of power that the rallies dissipate. They did dissipate, but now there's a promise of the Serbian opposition to go the streets in March or April or in the summer.

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Milosevic will have to counter that the same way he dealt with the 1996-97 problem, and he'll have to use his police. Remember he pulled most of his security personnel out of Kosovo more or less intact, as we found out as we were counting them on the way out. He's having difficulties now, we see, with assassinations and maybe underground movements within the police that are involved in this Arkan matter and the assassination of the defence minister, Mr. Bulatovic. We're not clear who's responsible for that. So we don't know if those police will be reliable for Milosevic come the spring or summer when those rallies begin. But you can see what I'm moving towards, that I expect there will be civil strife, civil violence and turbulence in the Serbian future.

I think when John thinks of...and I'm not saying this is what he meant, but when you think of a post-Milosevic peace for Serbia, you think of Bosnia, or you think of Kosovo, you think of a protectorate situation. We're not going to have that kind of situation in Serbia. Maybe that's good, maybe that's bad, but that's not going to be the situation. The Serbs will be left to their own devices to try to work out their own political development, and that could in the short run be very difficult.

The Chair: I'm not sure that helps us. It helps us understand the problems, but it doesn't help us understand any solutions.

Prof. Lenard Cohen: More hearings and more answers.

The Chair: Maybe we all have to go to Montenegro with you on the next trip. That would be attractive.

But I think we have to wrap this up, because we've got the ambassador waiting.

I want to thank you all very much for coming. Obviously it's been very helpful for us in understanding, and we obviously disagree, but I want to assure you, Mr. Bissett, that your point of view was one that all of us were wrestling with when we were debating this matter in the House and in this committee on a regular basis. Madame Lalonde was here and Mr. Martin. From all sides of the House we were very conscious both of the UN—I mean, if you look at the speeches, and I listened to them myself—and how do we deal with the UN issue.

When Kofi Annan said, look, the answer for him was whether the OAU would have intervened in Rwanda if it had had an army and would we have stood back and not let it, etc., these were all issues we had to come to grips with. We did wrestle with them and now it's part of history, but I think part of the committee's role is to look into the future as well and see how Canada can be positive in contributing to a solution there, and certainly the comments today are helpful for that.

So thank you all very much. We appreciate it. It was a very good panel.

Now we're going to ask our present ambassador to the Republic of Yugoslavia, Mr. Girard, if he'll come forward.

Members, don't go away because we really must be out of here in 25 minutes. I'm going to ask Ambassador Girard to keep his comments short and not to be terrified by the CNN factor or to feel irrelevant.

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Ambassador Girard, I'm sorry I have to ask you if you'll start in less than propitious circumstances, but you're an experienced ambassador so you'll know how to talk well.

Mr. Raphael Girard (Canadian Ambassador to the Republic of Yugoslavia, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade): Thank you very much.

I have a text of my statement available in both English and French.

The Chair: Ambassador Girard is giving his evidence. If you're having a conversation, please take it outside the room. Thank you.

Mr. Ted McWhinney: Why don't you begin, Mr. Chairman?

The Chair: We have. We've tried to.

Mr. Ted McWhinney: Ask the ambassador to speak.

The Chair: He started, but there was so much noise, Professor McWhinney, from all the conversations that I asked him to stop.

Carry on, please.

[Translation]

Mr. Raphael Girard: With your permission, I will speak in English, to simplify matters for the interpreters. I will be more than happy to answer your questions later in whichever language you prefer.

[English]

I was appointed Canadian ambassador to the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in July 1997 and I was resident in Belgrade until the temporary closure of the embassy on March 24, 1999. I remain Canada's ambassador, but I haven't been back to Belgrade since the temporary closure.

In this statement I'd like to give some first-hand impressions of what was happening on the ground in the months that preceded the NATO bombardment of strategic targets in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

During my tenure as ambassador, the embassy tracked the Kosovo crisis very closely. I spent a great deal of time in Kosovo. I had regular contact with the principal personalities on both sides of the conflict, including the political leadership of the Republic of Serbia, of the Albanian parallel government, the civil and security forces in Kosovo, and the command of the Kosovo Liberation Army, the UCK.

Our military attaché, his assistant, and other attachés at NATO missions in Belgrade systematically monitored events and shared their findings with all the heads of the NATO missions that participated in the joint coverage of the mission.

From August 1998, I was provided with a foreign service officer who was assigned to Kosovo full-time, and additional military from DND were also assigned there. They were members of the Kosovo diplomatic observer mission. After October 1998, in the agreements that were reached between NATO and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, these people were integrated into the Kosovo verification mission under the supervision of the OSCE.

All this to say that we at the embassy knew as much as anyone about what was going on in Kosovo and probably a lot more than most. We also had a good sense of the strategy and tactics of the combatants on both sides.

Based on this knowledge, there's no doubt in my mind that the primary cause of the crisis was the abject failure of Yugoslav policy that was designed to suppress the continuing demands among Albanian Kosovars for self-government and their own institutions. President Milosevic was repeatedly assured by his security chiefs—interestingly, not the military chiefs, but the chiefs of the security forces—that they could wipe out the so-called UCK in a matter of a few weeks if they were given a free hand and they could thereby neutralize support among ordinary Albanian Kosovars for independence.

The campaign that gave meaning to this policy began in March 1998 with the attack on the compound of the Jashari family in Kosovo, some of whose members were reputed to be UCK leaders. Up until that time the UCK had been a very shadowy organization that controlled no territory. It was guilty of harassment of the police and several murders, but certainly not on a scale that would justify reprisals against the entire Albanian community.

That attack—and I visited the site the day after—killed between 50 and 60 people, mainly women and children. And it gave rise to a wave of indignation that brought an enormous volume of money and recruits to the UCK. It's very significant. That event turned Albanian resistance to the excesses of the Serbian regime from a passive Gandhi-like movement to one of armed militancy. That was the watershed. It was also a watershed for the international community and its policy.

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At the March 9 meeting of the contact group there was a consensus that the Kosovo crisis was perilously close to what had happened in Bosnia. The foreign ministers of the six members, including Russia, at that time endorsed a policy of seeking a diplomatic solution to the growing crisis, backed up if necessary by the threat of the use of force.

All through the spring and summer months there was a steady parade of high-level visitors to Belgrade seeking to broker a compromise between Mr. Milosevic's regime and the Albanian leadership.

On two occasions, in late May with Richard Holbrooke and in June with President Milosevic's summit with Boris Yeltsin in Moscow, Milosevic appeared to be ready to negotiate, but on both occasions he reneged. In fact, the campaign against civilians by the security forces grew in intensity through that time, with the toll of dead and injured mounting week by week.

This was not a Chechnya-style military action against rebel militia. There were no pitched battles. The Serbian paramilitary police conducted a systematic campaign of terror against civilians, openly burning and looting in front of our observers as they went. The weapon of choice was a can of gasoline and a match.

The Yugoslav army, interestingly enough, did not participate but adhered to its constitutional duty to protect the borders of the country, and only in that regard did it encounter the UCK, when the latter attempted to infiltrate fighters and weapons into Kosovo from neighbouring countries.

Very reliable estimates of what happened in that campaign tell us that 23,000 dwellings were either wholly or partially destroyed and about 400,000 people were displaced from their homes, most internally but also significant numbers in Albania and Montenegro. Other estimates tell us that there were about 2,000 fatalities. Among these, more children were killed than police. Many times more women were killed than serving military. There is no doubt in my mind what the Serbian police had set out to do.

That campaign, which began in the summer, ended in late September after the passage of Security Council resolution 1199, which demanded an end to the violence and the immediate negotiation of a political settlement between the two parties. This provided an opportunity for a peaceful settlement, but, as we know, it did not succeed.

By the end of October and after the SC resolution, the Serbian security forces and the Yugoslav army pulled back to agreed positions and in the numbers required pursuant to agreements reached with NATO. An observer force was charged with verifying compliance on both sides, which was deployed by the OSCE. It is perhaps worthy of note that those accords were between NATO and the government of the Yugoslav republic. The UCK was not a signatory.

Two things occurred that jeopardized the fragile ceasefire: the UCK used the interval to very visibly take control of large swaths of territory in rural areas. The other element was that the ambitious timetable for a political agreement never did take hold. You have to apportion blame to both sides.

It was readily apparent that the Serbian authorities had no real intention of assenting to majority rule. They had done other things. They had delivered quite a bit of rhetoric on equality, but certainly majority rule was not something that was on the table.

On the Albanian side there was no evident interest in a deal that did not ultimately provide an avenue to complete independence.

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The initially cordial relations that existed between the OSCE and the Serbian administration in Kosovo quickly soured. After a bloody campaign that had cost them a lot in international prestige, the Serbian authorities ended the year holding less territory and controlling fewer people than they had at the beginning. They blamed the OSCE for failing to keep the UCK at bay.

Scarcely 10 weeks after the October agreements, the Serbian side abandoned all pretence at compliance with the limits on their offensive capacity in Kosovo. On January 15 the paramilitary police attacked and killed 45 unarmed villagers at Racak, an event that was later condemned by Dr. Ranta, the Finnish forensic pathologist in charge of the investigation, as a crime against humanity. Concurrently, reinforcements of men and equipment, including heavy weapons, began to move into Kosovo from southern Serbia. The paramilitary forces also began to increase their numbers.

This turn of events in January 1999 led the Contact Group to the conclusion that a new and probably more violent offensive against the Albanians was in the making and that if there were going to be a political solution, it could not be negotiated but would have to be imposed, given that the minimum positions of the two contenders to that point were mutually exclusive.

The basis for the political accord was a document that had been negotiated and renegotiated since June of the previous year under Contact Group and EU auspices, led by U.S. Ambassador Chris Hill. Neither side had accepted this document outright, which retained Serbian institutions in Kosovo but did make way for local government to be run by the majority. Ambassador Hill was of the view that the formula underlying the document was one that would provide the best chance for ensuring the retention of the Serbian minority in Kosovo once majority rule by the Albanian community was achieved. Constitutionally, Kosovo remained in Serbia.

As everyone is aware, the contenders were summoned to Rambouillet on February 15. They weren't invited; they were summoned. On opening, both were told that the package could be modified through negotiation but that the principles of both the political framework, which they had all seen many times before, and the supervision of the implementation of the accords by armed NATO troops in Kosovo were not subject to change. We also know that this approach did not succeed.

Nothing had occurred to indicate that President Milosevic was interested in a negotiated settlement that would lead to majority rule. He had steadfastly insisted with me and with many others that the Albanians were not a majority in Kosovo and that many of those Albanians physically present had no right to be there.

Subsequent briefings after Rambouillet that we received from Ambassador Hill, who led the negotiations at the Rambouillet table, also confirmed that the Serbian side did not bring anything to the table. The only point at issue for them was the presence of armed NATO troops in Kosovo to support the implementation of the accord.

We all know that the talks broke off in mid-March. There were last-ditch attempts to negotiate directly with Milosevic through another visit by Richard Holbrooke.

In the interim, the security forces mined all of the approaches to Kosovo and further augmented military capacity. They brought in M-84 tanks from south Serbia.

Milosevic replaced those members of the military high command who had declined the year before to become involved in the terror campaign. So to seasoned observers it was abundantly clear that once again President Milosevic had opted for the solution offered him by the hardliners, that is, the overwhelming use of force. Evidently, he was ready to risk bombardment. Even during the talks as they proceeded at Rambouillet and at the subsequent meeting in Paris, his security forces moved against UCK positions in north-central Kosovo, around the town of Podujevo, burning and displacing people in earnest, as had happened the year before. This occurred even with the U.S.-OSCE observers on the ground cataloguing the incidents.

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I have no doubt that had NATO failed to act we would have witnessed an episode of cleansing on at least the same scale, if not greater, as that which eventually took place in April and May last year.

Once the bombing had started, Milosevic's strategy was to divide the alliance and to obtain an end to it before he would be required to agree to specific terms. His objective was to be the final arbiter of who and how many among the Albanian deportees would return to Kosovo in the post-conflict period. I have no doubt that in this situation he would have manipulated a result that would agree with the position he had held all along, that the Albanian Kosovars did not constitute a majority in Kosovo.

The argument that not enough time was allowed for a diplomatic solution overlooks the fact that unparalleled diplomatic efforts had been underway for almost 12 months without any indication that President Milosevic had accepted the basic premise that Albanian Kosovars were entitled to a substantial degree of autonomy within the territorial confines of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.

In addition, it was also very clear by January that the ceasefire that had been negotiated in October had broken down and there was a very clear threat of an early return to the unacceptable levels of violence against civilians that we had witnessed the year before.

Despite Security Council resolutions 1199 and 1203 of September and December, Milosevic had also steadfastly rejected the jurisdiction of the ICTY to investigate the growing list of atrocities that had been well-documented by the Kosovo diplomatic observer mission and by the KVM.

The bombardment didn't stop the cleansing, but it did create the conditions for the return of the hundreds of thousands of ordinary Kosovars who had been expelled. Had NATO not intervened, it is more than likely that those expellees would still be in Macedonia, Albania, and Montenegro. The international community would also be grappling with the humanitarian crisis of an even greater proportion than that which we have to deal with now, which we are aware of in Kosovo itself, in Serbia, with the victims of the latest round of expulsions from Kosovo by the Albanian militants and in the surrounding countries.

I'll conclude my remarks there, Mr. Chairman, but I'll be glad to answer questions if there's time.

The Chair: We have about seven minutes, so we'll see what we can do.

We'll hold you to three minutes, Mr. Martin. We have the Bloc who want to come in for their caucus meeting.

Mr. Keith Martin: Ambassador Girard, thank you very much for coming in front of the committee today. It would have been fantastic to have you on the previous panel as a counterpoint to what we heard, and the discussion would have been fascinating.

Briefly, do you think that Rambouillet was an accord that the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia simply could not sign? It would be a document that no sovereign state could sign, as Ambassador Bissett had asserted in the last committee.

Secondly, under the ICC rules that are currently being configured, could Canada be held accountable for genocide or the crimes against humanity, for the bombing that took place?

Lastly, has the bombardment actually exacerbated things and ensured that we have an independent Kosovo state that will ultimately be annexed to Albania?

Mr. Raphael Girard: On the first question, could they have signed at Rambouillet, yes. The deal that was offered at Rambouillet shared the pain equitably between the two groups. It certainly did not give the Albanians everything they wanted. And for the Serbs, it retained Kosovo as part of Serbia and it retained Serbian police, Serbian courts, Serbian education, and a Serbian health system in Kosovo as at least a minimum guarantee for the Serbian Kosovars who as well had lived there for generations and could rightly expect to continue to live there even under a different form of government.

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I'm not a lawyer. I can't answer the question about the ICC. I do think it's rather a hollow argument to try to argue that the international community could not intervene to prevent what was obviously going to be a further gross episode of human rights abuse, simply because there were legal obstacles. What I know about law tells me that anybody who invokes law to protect their interests has to come to the court with clean hands. Anybody who thinks Milosevic came to the court with clean hands at that time has to be really warped.

Could you repeat the third question, please?

Mr. Keith Martin: Certainly. Did the bombing merely leave us with a state that will ultimately separate from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia? In other words, what we did was we actually ensured that the pendulum swung the other way. So by driving out the Serbs you have a Kosovo state that will actually be annexed to Albania to form a greater Albania.

Mr. Raphael Girard: The aftermath of the campaign left a vacuum in Kosovo, which was a far worse situation than the accord that was available through Rambouillet. There were not only no Serbian institutions left in Kosovo to maintain order, but there were also no institutions left of any kind. All of sudden you had a very rapid return of almost three-quarters of a million Albanian Kosovars, no government, no rule of law, no court system, and no early arrangements for elections to bring forward leadership.

So you have a very volatile situation with the extremists in the chair, and they are diehard independentists. The jury's still out on whether or not we will be able to pull them back from that through time and through efforts by the UN. All I know is that it is a far worse situation today than could have been the case had there been a negotiated settlement.

The Chair: Madame Lalonde.

[Translation]

Ms. Francine Lalonde: UN Security Council Resolution 1244 is certainly difficult to implement. The UN has a mandate to maintain security, by no means an easy task, and to assist with the rebuilding of the country's administration, something that will require the cooperation of the Albanians. As Mr. Axworthy and I were told during our mission, the government worked well before. Furthermore, no changes have been made since 1989, when the Albanian government was pushed aside, leading to major repercussions the effects of which are still being felt today. Finally, the people need to be prepared to take up the reins and circumstances are such that it hasn't yet been possible to register everyone.

All of these factors, coupled with fewer financial resources than promised and with a smaller international police presence than originally committed, have combined to produce a troubling mix. It is also difficult to achieve the objective of maintaining a multiethnic society, given that only 50,000 Serbs remain in Kosovo, compared to the 200,000 prior to the bombings. What future do you see for Kosovo?

Mr. Raphael Girard: It's hard to be optimistic, but we have to work with what we have. Even Mr. Koushner has said to us on several occasions that achieving a stable, multiethnic society was a very long-term objective. In the meantime, the best we can hope for is for the peaceful coexistence of ethnic populations in Kosovo, because right now, the two communities are very wary of each other. There is no way of bringing together objective persons from either side to negotiate practical agreements so that the two populations can co-exist.

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At present, both groups tend to live separately for the sake of their physical safety and in order to establish their institutions. We need to accept the fact that the UN will have to manage the situation in Kosovo for some time to come, maybe for the next five or even ten years or more, if we want to successfully stabilize the situation.

Ms. Francine Lalonde: Thank you very much.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Ambassador.

Have you have any comments or questions, Mr. Paradis?

Mr. Denis Paradis (Brome—Missisquoi, Lib.): I have, Mr. Chairman.

This morning, we are confronted with two opposing views: on the one hand, we have the territorial approach, of which former diplomat Mr. Bissett spoke, as I recall, and on the other hand, we have the humanitarian approach.

Given your experience as a diplomat and as an ambassador, how is the humanitarian intervention approach perceived by the international community?

Mr. Raphael Girard: This is a relatively new concept. Traditionalist believe that state sovereignty must be preserved at all costs. However, according to more modern thinkers, we cannot, in this, the 21st century, allow any state to violate the human rights of its citizens for political or security reasons.

Canada and several other countries, including certain Nordic nations and Czechoslovakia, are in the forefront in advancing these views and are firm believers in the doctrine of human security. This is certainly a radical viewpoint quite removed from the traditional concept of sovereignty.

Mr. Denis Paradis: Thank you, Mr. Girard.

Mr. Chairman, with your permission, I'd like to table to the committee the notes of an speech delivered by the federal Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mr. Axworthy, in New York last February 10 as part of the Hauser Lecture on International Law at New York University's School of Law. The title of the lecture was Humanitarian Interventions and Humanitarian Constraints.

The Chair: By all means. Thank you. The text of the Minister's speech has been e-mailed to members.

Mr. Denis Paradis: I have a copy of the Minister's speech.

The Chair: A paper copy. Everyone then should have a copy, either an electronic one, or a traditional one.

Ambassador, thank you very much for your presentation. As my colleague Mr. Martin said, you have managed to put into some perspective the comments we heard during our first sitting.

We will now adjourn until 3:30 p.m. this afternoon at which time we will hear from representatives of the international Red Cross. While this subject is not on our agenda, perhaps we will have the opportunity to ask them some questions about Kosovo, if we feel the need to do so.

The meeting is adjourned.