With public support evaporating, Canada’s new Parliament opened an anguished debate Tuesday over whether to pull this nation’s peacekeepers from war-savaged Bosnia.
While the UN quarrels over the value of air strikes against intransigent Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canadians are questioning the West’s entire 21-month operation to keep peace in a land of ancient blood feuds.
More ominously, the debate comes in a country that helped to invent modern peacekeeping and prides itself as the world’s leading peacekeeper. And it underscores growing frustration among the major powers, including Britain and France, who have contributed the bulk of UN peacekeepers to the former Yugoslavia.
“At what point will the danger to our troops outweigh the benefits of our presence there?” asked Foreign Affairs Minister Andre Ouellet, opening a rare free debate on Bosnia involvement in the House of Commons in Ottawa.
“The killing won’t stop. It won’t stop whether we stay or whether we leave,” declared Bob Mills, a member of the opposition Reform Party, which is pushing for a pullout.
Jack Frazer, a Reform Party spokesman on defense issues, urged the Liberal government of Prime Minister Jean Chretien to call a conference of peacekeeping countries next month leading to an ultimatum to the warring factions: Reach a peaceful settlement immediately or face complete UN withdrawal.
“We sent our troops to do peacekeeping, but they are in a war zone. The hotter that zone gets the cooler the temperature of the Canadian people gets about keeping those troops there,” said John Wright, senior vice president for national pollster Angus Reid Group in Toronto.
Its poll released Tuesday found that while 76 percent of Canadian respondents support United Nations peacekeeping efforts, they’re evenly divided (49 percent on either side) over Canada’s continued role in those efforts.
Nearly six in ten Canadians polled (57 percent) said Canada should withdraw from Bosnia when the nation’s UN commitment there ends in April.
Coming from Canada, such figures are startling.
This is a nation that has sent nearly 100,000 troops over the years to participate in virtually every UN peacekeeping operation around the globe since 1947-more than any other nation.
Canadians take great pride in the fact their former prime minister, Lester Pearson, won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1957 after proposing the plan for a UN peacekeeping force to help ease British and French out of Egypt following the Suez crisis of 1956.
But in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the nearly 2,000 Canadian troops are being subjected to a growing number of attacks, leading Chretien to order a rare one-day debate to assess Parliament’s mood before his government decides whether to wash its hands of Bosnia or remain.
“It would be unseemly of us to give up at this juncture,” said opposition leader Lucien Bouchard, who heads the separatist Bloc Quebecois in the House.
A pullout, Bouchard warned, would mean more massacres, ethnic cleansing and a widening war in the region. “It would really be all-out war with the very real possibility of sucking in, in a much deeper fashion, allies from both camps, such as Russia and Turkey, who are already on the backstage.”
In related developments Tuesday, Russia called for an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council foreign ministers in Geneva to discuss the war, as France appealed for an imposed peace.
