Proceedings of the Standing Senate Committee on
Foreign Affairs
Issue 42 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Wednesday, June 9, 1999
The Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs met this day at 3:39 p.m. to examine the ramifications to Canada of the changed mandate of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Canada's role in NATO since the demise of the Warsaw Pact, the end of the Cold War and the recent addition to membership in NATO of Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic; and of peacekeeping, with particular reference to Canada's ability to participate in it under the auspices of any international body of which Canada is a member.
Senator John B. Stewart (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: I call the meeting to order. Our witness this afternoon is Dr. Gwynne Dyer. Dr. Dyer was born in St. John's, Newfoundland. He has served in Canadian, United States and British naval reserves. He has lectured in military history at the Canadian Forces College, and was a senior lecturer in war studies at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. His degree from the University of London is in history. He was an Associate Fellow in Mid-East Studies at Oxford University.
Yesterday we were told by a witness that it was very important that the people of Canada generally understand more about the peacekeeping work of NATO. Dr. Gwynne Dyer anticipated the advice that we received yesterday because, for many years, he has produced, hosted, written and directed CBC and National Film Board films with regard to peacekeeping topics such as the series Protection Force, an examination of the United Nations actions in the former Yugoslavia. As many of you know, his principal current activity is with regard to his twice-weekly syndicated column on international affairs.
Dr. Dyer, we have been examining various aspects of peacekeeping but, almost inevitably, the Yugoslavia-Kosovo example comes to the fore. Our mandate is almost too timely. We have looked at the question of the propriety of NATO's operation in Yugoslavia-Kosovo and at the question of the propriety of the Government of Canada having Canadian forces participate in that operation without specific parliamentary approval. We have asked questions with regard to the situations in which peacekeeping has a chance of being successful. I say that to let you know some of the area that we have already ploughed and harrowed. Please proceed.
Dr. Gwynne Dyer, Journalist: Your inquiries are, indeed, too timely. At this point we do not even know the immediate outcomes of the intervention in Kosovo, let alone have any clear idea of the settlement that will emerge from that at the United Nations and elsewhere, or what the long-term implications of that settlement may be.
With your permission, I will start at the small centre, Kosovo, and move outwards in expanding circles to touch on the question of the impact of this on, at the largest level, United Nations peacekeeping and the international order. Along the way I will deal with the relations with Russia and the impact upon NATO.
At present there is no cease-fire in Kosovo. We do not know, in full, the terms which have been agreed between the G-8 countries and put to the Yugoslavs, the Serbs. We do not know what arrangements are being made for the rapid withdrawal of Serb forces. Bombing continues as we speak, but it seems safe to say -- otherwise nothing else we say will have any foundation to build upon -- that the war will come to an end within a week or so in a fashion that more or less satisfies NATO's declared objectives as of, say, one month into the war. There will be a complete or virtually complete withdrawal of Yugoslav forces from Kosovo with the return subsequently of "some hundreds," I believe the phrase was, to guard Yugoslav monuments and to be a presence at the frontier, but not a controlling presence in terms of being able to say which Kosovars can and cannot return.
It seems likely that the peacekeeping force which goes in will be NATO directed as we have always agreed, and that there will be a Russian component of 10,000 or under. I am not sure they can find, equip and sustain 10,000 people to send there, the state of the Russian Armed Forces being what they are.
The key consideration in assuring the return of all the refugees to Kosovo and avoiding partition, was to ensure that a separate Russian zone was not set up against the Serb frontier which would have produced, almost inevitably, a de facto partition, leaving a Russian-controlled zone in which the remaining Serbs of Kosovo would congregate. We do not know, partly because we have not been told, partly because I do not think the arrangements are yet complete, what the disposition of forces within Kosovo, among the various occupying peacekeeping forces, will be. I think it is clearly understood by NATO that we do not want the Russians on the border. The latest leaks suggest that there will be five zones. The Germans and Italian will be near the Serb border and the British will probably be with us in the centre, based in Pristina. The French and the Americans will have zones on the south along the Macedonian frontier, with the Russian peacekeeping troops in the American zone, with a checkered bordered so that there is no particular area where they have sole control. The command and control arrangements will be more or less comparable to those of S-4 in Bosnia, where the Russians do not officially recognize that they are part of NATO command and yet, de facto, they operate more or less as if they were. There is a Russian general on the staff and the orders go to Russian troops through him.
On these assumptions, there is one immediate, regrettable consequence of these arrangements. I do not think this can be avoided. We probably will see the flight of the remaining Serbian population from Kosovo. There may be as few as 100,000 Serbs left in Kosovo. The population was between 150,000 and 180,000, and it has been draining away for years. At the beginning of the bombing campaign, many had already left. It seems very likely that most of the rest will leave with departing Serb troops.
We have an analogy for this, by the way, in 1995 when Sarajevo was returned to a single, central control under the Bosnian government with S-4 troops. The areas inhabited by the Serbs in Sarajevo were all evacuated, sometimes with a good deal of coercion on the part of Serb paramilitary forces, in order to demonstrate that Serbs cannot possibly live under "Muslim" rule. There is no Serbian quarter in Sarajevo as a result. It has been completely evacuated, though neither the Bosnian government nor ourselves had a hand in that process.
That is likely to happen again. This is unfortunate because the objective was to defeat ethnic cleansing. In a way, inevitably and however reluctantly, we have been instrumental in an act of ethnic cleansing, although it was not conducted with the violence and terror surrounding the ethnic cleansing of the Kosovars. Nevertheless, it is most unfortunate. In Serbia that will play as: "Us the victims yet again," just as the evacuation of Krajina and the evacuation of Sarajevo already plays in Serbia.
I do not think, therefore, that we can guarantee the fall of Milosevic as a consequence even of this defeat, which is his fourth or fifth defeat in 10 years, depending on how you count. He has lost every war he started. He has been a catastrophe for the Serbs in terms of lost territory. The only analogy that I will explicitly make, Milosevic has been as great a catastrophe for the Serbs as Hitler was for the Germans. In the name of nationalism and of in bringing all Serbs within one border, he has now managed to lose 30 per cent of the traditional Serb lands of Yugoslavia, which is approximately the proportion of traditional German lands lost as a result of Hitler's wars and aggression.
However, seen from within Serbia, this is not the analysis that will necessarily be called into play. The man still has cards to play. If he remains in power, then the situation in the Balkans will not rapidly stabilize.
Since we are already more or less publicly committed to not sending aid to Serbia so long as Milosevic is in power, we have the question of how we reopen the Danube to navigation since it is blocked by a number of bridges at the moment. Romania has lost about 80 per cent of its exports to Germany because they always went up the Danube. Many other people are suffering economically as well. It would be a great deal of help to us all if Milosevic were to fall, but we are not publicly nor even privately committed to bringing this about. I do not think we can assume that the Serbs will do it for us. They may, but it is not by any means a foregone conclusion.
We may well have our forces in Kosovo, a Kosovo emptied of Serbs, next door to an extremely hostile, armed Serbia for some considerable time to come.
The costs of this occupation therefore, quite apart from the enormous costs of reconstruction -- assuming even that we do not have to reconstruct Serbia right away because we are not sending aid there -- will be very large. This is an operation that will last a long time. I do not think this comes as a surprise to anybody. It is the least bad the outcome, however, that was available once we began the bombing. We need not go into the rights and wrongs of that. You have discussed it from every point of view already. Given the bombing campaign, this is the least bad outcome that one can readily imagine. We did not have to go to a land invasion which would of course -- though it might have been necessary -- have caused even greater loss of life than the bombing campaign.
We have gotten away with it without a complete break with the Russians, which brings me to my next topic, relations with the Russians. Again, we have been very lucky. We began a war badly, conducted it badly, but had the good fortune to win it, assuming we have. We have managed to maintain reasonably decent relationships with the Russians, despite the fact that they were essentially outraged by what we did, both on the sentimental grounds of their relationship with Serbia, and on the more traditional grounds of being treated as though they had no say in an area which had traditionally been right on the edge of their sphere of influence.
There is a great deal of grievance in Moscow which is being played out in public as anti-NATO, and anti-western propaganda, comment, sentiment. This provided considerable growth of popular support, at least in the short term, for parties and individuals belonging to what is commonly known as the "red-brown coalition." That is the coalition of communists who have become nationalists, and communists who have not formally become nationalists but, nevertheless, consistently ally with them in Parliament, the Duma, both of which take an anti-western stance.
We were rescued from the difficulties we were in with the Russians over this action primarily by Yeltsin's decision to replace Primakov as prime minister, and to replace Primakov with Chernomyrdin as mediator with the Serbs. That has a lot to do with internal Russian politics in the sense that Primakov was a far more independent man who was widely seen, by early this spring, as the likeliest candidate to succeed Yeltsin as President in the elections that are due in the spring of next year, a challenge that caused Yeltsin some concern.
Primakov was also, in domestic terms, allowing investigations to go ahead into Yeltsin's private affairs and his family's financial affairs, which threatened the man and his family. There was an internal perceived need on the part of Yeltsin to stop that. Primakov was, so long as he was the mediator, a staunchly pro-Serb figure. I am not suggesting that Primakov is either genuinely pro-Serb or, indeed, genuinely anti-western. He is a much subtler character, but the perception of his political chances -- he was a man running for office -- required him to have that stance in public if he wanted to be elected President next year.
Yeltsin's decision to sack Primakov changed the internal situation dramatically because the investigation against him stopped. His decision to replace Primakov in the mediation role with Chernomyrdin gave us the opening to create the kind of G-8 deal we have now more or less completed and sent to the United Nations, which may yield a retrospective validation by the United Nations for actions undertaken without UN authorization last March.
Chernomyrdin is a man who essentially is completely dependent upon the maintenance of the present Russian orientation, both in domestic and in foreign policy. This man is literally a billionaire, thanks to the privatization of gas property, the old Soviet gas monopoly. He is a man with a finger in a great many pies. He is a man who would not expect to survive without perhaps criminal proceedings, certainly extensive investigation, and possibly confiscation of his assets, a serious shift in the government in Russia that would bring for example a red-brown coalition to power. He is committed to the Western relationship almost by definition, certainly by interest. That is what has given us the deal we have got with the Russians. Also he is not running for office next year so he can afford to take some liberties with Russian popular opinion.
In the short run at least, we have gotten away with it with the Russians.
There will be, however, both parliamentary and presidential elections in Russia next year. It is not yet clear what impact the events of the past three months will have on those elections. If, on the one hand, everything comes to a more or less quiet and stable state in the Balkans within the next two or three months, that is to say the peacekeeping force goes in, the Yugoslavs either manage to remove Milosevic or he goes into appeasement mode, refugees begin to return, Russian troops are successfully integrated into the K-4, the peacekeeping force we are sending into Kosovo, then this issue may be sufficiently off the international agenda eight months from now that it will not be a major issue in the Russian elections. They do have other things to deal with in Russia.
If, on the other hand, there is continued trouble within Kosovo because the KLA has not been properly brought under control, if there is trouble on the border between Kosovo and Serbia is still under Milosevic's control, and if all of this is still in the headlines eight months from now, we will have a completely different situation in terms of Russian public opinion and its concerns about the West and about NATO. However, it could all go away or mostly go away. After all, Russian elections -- like most elections, except very rarely -- are settled on domestic issues. Lord knows they have enough domestic issues to concern them.
Implicitly, NATO has committed itself to further expansion as a consequence of this campaign. Certainly, the promises that we have made to the Romanians, the Bulgars and the Macedonians, plus perhaps the Albanians, imply that these people have now gone to the head of the queue in terms of further expansion of NATO.
There may be some trade-offs here. There have always been trade-offs in the sense that Eastern European countries emerging from Soviet rule -- or indeed from the Soviet Union itself in the case of the Baltic states and Ukraine -- have always been willing to settle for either NATO membership or European Union membership, something that integrates them into the larger and more prosperous Europe. In fact most, given the choice, would take European Union membership which has much larger, positive, economic connotations than NATO membership, but they want to be in one of these two clubs.
It is imaginable that we might actually persuade them to join the EU not NATO if we feel that we do not need a whole Balkan contingent in NATO, but how do we persuade the European Union to accept that? We did not manage it the first time around with Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, which were economically much more plausible candidates for European Union membership than the current crop.
In order to line them up in support of the war, in order to get air bases and to reach a general consensus within the Balkans outside of Yugoslavia that we were doing the right thing, we made promises. These are promises of the sort that can be broken in the sense that they are verbal and a bit fudged but, given that we will be in this area for quite a long time I suspect with troops in Bosnia, Kosovo and so on, we will not find it easy to walk away from these promises. Therefore, another round of NATO expansion seems to me very likely, if not nearly inevitable.
However, it is a round of NATO expansion that, in its essence, should not upset the Russians as much as the last lot. It does not bring us any nearer to them. It shifts the focus in fact south and away from what they regard as the direct approach. We do not of course have any NATO members on Russia's borders anyway. The Baltic states and Belarus are a good 250-mile-wide buffer between the easternmost NATO territory and the westernmost Russian territory. However, what we have done has certainly made them unhappy. I will not discuss the rights and wrongs of that. I am sure you have done so already. I am trying to read Russian opinion, given what we are going to do next.
The expansion into the Balkans, however it takes place, bringing in certainly Slovenia, and I imagine it will bring in Slovakia at the same time -- you cannot make them wait longer than Romania, and Bulgaria, and for heaven's sake Macedonia and Albania who are pretty implausible candidates for membership on anything but this sort of repayment basis -- should not upset the Russians too much. There will be rhetoric of course, but it does not certainly endanger any of their interests.
There will be another round of NATO expansion.
Then there are the concerns about the cohesion of NATO as it is with 19 countries, and the impact of this campaign on the whole out-of-area debate. On the cohesion issue, NATO did, with this lowest-common-denominator approach to the campaign -- do not do anything that would drive any member into open opposition -- hold together remarkably well.
Approximately 90 per cent of Greeks hated what we were doing, however, the Greek government consistently supported our actions, not with their own air force of course, but agreeing to allow British, American and other troops, who might well be part of a ground invasion, to pass through Thessaloniki up to Macedonia. The Italians, who were very unhappy about all this, provided air bases for hundreds, indeed almost a thousand, NATO planes to bomb Serbia every night. The Hungarians, who have a large minority in the north of Yugoslavia, 300,000, nevertheless provided air bases for refuelling and later for F-16s.
As a test of NATO's cohesion, despite all the bickering and the endless talk of splits, this alliance held together remarkably well, given the controversial nature of the war, and given the clumsiness with which it was fought -- clumsiness deriving from taking the lowest-common-denominator approach, no ground troops, no casualties on our side at all.
The obverse of that is that, if we had actually not managed to get a reasonably satisfactory short-term result in Kosovo, it would, in many senses, have been the end of NATO, not that the various members would have stomped out and handed in their membership cards, but in the sense that they would have ceased to invest any belief in NATO's promises of protection. Particularly in Eastern Europe, they would have begun to make deals on the side secretly, to the extent that the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe was justified. The most plausible justification was that it keeps the Poles from making secret treaties with the Ukrainians about Russia, and so on. Instead of them making all these private deals, which are inherently unstable and they worry the hell out of the Russians, at least they are coming into NATO. We have made them settle all their border disputes on the way in. There is something to be said about that, although it may not be enough.
Had we failed in Kosovo, and had we demonstrated that, when push comes to shove we would not commit any western troops whose lives would be in danger, then the NATO guarantee would have been worth nothing to them, and we would be back to the private arrangement sphere.
Cohesion held and I think it will continue to hold through whatever further excitement we have in the Balkans as we sort out the consequences of this rather confusing victory we have had.
Finally on NATO, the question of "out of area," or as some people would say, "out of business." I do not think this settles out of area because out of area was not really conceived solely as a Balkan operational capability. Out of area, in its bolder formulations -- what does NATO do now that it does not fight Russians -- was conceived as an intervention capability out of Europe. Of course in a way, it has done that once. The Gulf War was NATO and some Arab friends operating way out of area, so the real precedent for that is the Gulf War. Though it was not officially a NATO operation, it was NATO armies operating under NATO doctrine several thousand miles from their customary homes. Kosovo neither adds nor subtracts from that precedent. The issue is still open. We can talk more about that.
I will have a word about strategy and the impact of this war on strategy before I go into the question of peacekeeping and so on, because there are implications.
Those who believed before that you could win a war using exclusively air power will feel vindicated by the outcome of this war. I did not believe it before, and I do not believe it now. I believe that the reason we finally got Milosevic to sign was three factors in addition to the bombing campaign. The bombing campaign alone could have gone on for months without causing Milosevic to flinch, but three factors had to be taken into consideration. First, Chernomyrdin replaced Primakov and the Russians ceased to be a de facto Serbian ally and began cutting a deal with us. We isolated them.
Second, the indictment of Milosevic and eight senior commanders by Louise Arbour was a significant additional pressure. Milosevic is a man who is very concerned about power, but he is also concerned about his own survival. This meant that Milosevic could not afford to lose power because to lose power would result in going before the tribunal. He recognized that he better make a deal while he still had a chance of retaining power.
The third and key factor that brought him to the table was that, in the preceding two weeks, we finally began to talk seriously about ground forces. To ward off the ground attack which would have left him almost certainly out of power at the end, he made the deal. The implication, however, for those who support the idea of what you might call "immaculate coercion" -- no casualties on our side, bombing from the air only -- will be to confirm them in their belief that this is a useful way of exerting military power at a distance and a useful way of doing "peacekeeping" or "peacemaking" to use the 1990s phraseology, that is to say coercion of those who will not, on their own, keep the peace.
This issue will impinge upon my final topic which is the future of peacekeeping and of the relationship between the United Nations, other organizations capable of exerting international force, like NATO, and the character of the emerging global order. It is a large topic. Much can be said about it, but I will try to say very little because I do not want to go on too long.
I will not deal with the question of the legitimacy from a written or customary law point of view of NATO's intervention in March in Kosovo, because I am sure you have discussed this. I will deal with where it fits into a larger set of issues that has been emerging through the 1990s and may now be coming to head.
At the end of the Second World War, the biggest war in history, there were 45 million dead, most of the larger cities on the planet were in ruins, and people were very frightened. Therefore, they created the United Nations to prevent not one but two calamities from occurring again. The greater calamity was international wars of aggression, the violation of borders by states, and so the United Nations Charter, written in 1945, is all about sovereignty, the inviolability of sovereignty, the absolute impermissibility of any state crossing any other state's boundary for almost any reason other than a threat to the peace. In other words, de facto, states are free to do whatever they wish to their domestic populations or portions of them because sovereignty must be sacrosanct. If that is not the case, alliances will be made, wars will occur, whereas, if you can rely upon the United Nations through the Security Council acting on the basis of the Charter to guarantee each state's sovereignty, then that may suppress international war.
The other situation we wanted to prevent occurring again in 1945 was the holocaust, genocide, the organized extermination of millions of people for political reasons. The same people or many of the same people who wrote the Charter of the United Nations in 1945 also signed the Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and the International Convention Against Genocide in 1948, both UN documents which erect an entirely separate pillar of international law which prohibits whole categories of behaviour by national governments without specifying how this international law might be enforced. It is nevertheless international law of an equal status with the Charter and the sacrosanct sovereignty of 1945.
The problem is, of course, that there is a self-evident contradiction between these two pillars. If all states have absolute sovereignty, how can you enforce the law on human rights, the law against genocide? Basically, everybody knew -- they were not stupid <#0107> that they were creating two contradictory pillars because both these things were necessary and they were of the opinion that life would sort out how we could reconcile them. Life in fact became the Cold War and left the sovereignty pillar as the only visible one for the next 30 years.
The threat of nuclear war was such an overwhelmingly terrifying prospect that the prevention of international war, and therefore the sovereignty pillar, completely blocked out the view of the other pillar of international law built after the Second World War. The thought was: "If the penalty for getting this wrong is nuclear war, then we will concentrate on peace, international peace and sovereignty, and we will not attempt to do anything about what states do domestically to their own population, certainly not powerful states."
The end of the Cold War has begun the process of retrieving the other pillar from the shadows. We have seen it stealthily re-emerging into the international light of day through the 1990s. This is not the first time that the UN has ratified -- indeed it has not been the UN this time, though it will retrospectively be the UN when we get a signature on a Chapter 7 resolution authorizing peacekeepers in Kosovo -- interventions in sovereign states against their will on behalf of human rights in the 1990s.
The first time was in Haiti. What we did was to declare Haiti a threat to the peace in order to justify a resolution authorizing military intervention in Haiti against the will of the government. It was not a threat to the peace. Haiti could not threaten Puerto Rico. It did not threaten anybody. What it was doing was oppressing its own people and creating floods of refugees which gave the Americans an incentive to take action, so the United Nations fudged it. It was really acting on the human rights pillar, but it designated this action as being under the sovereignty pillar, that is, the threat of war. What justifies intervention of sovereign state? The answer is: Only a threat to the peace.
We have seen several such interventions under fudged circumstances since, which are essentially humanitarian or human rights interventions. They have not been happy occasions. Somalia comes to mind, and the very belated intervention in Bosnia comes to mind.
However, if you look back from the perspective of Kosovo, you can see us creeping up on this, half wittingly, through the 1990s. Now it is out in the open. We have undertaken a war in defence of human rights. There is a huge paradox here somewhere which we can dwell upon if we wish, or at least an irony -- a war in defence of human rights. I find it hard to conceive of any other credible reason for this intervention. One can talk about the war being fought to preserve NATO's cohesion after it had issued so many hollow threats, but why was it issuing those threats if not because of the public concern about human rights in NATO countries? The motivation was, essentially, not of the traditional raison d'État, order.
Now we find ourselves in a situation where, within the next week, if the Chinese do not veto it, a group of nations may be acting unilaterally in defence of their definition of human rights, their definition of a need to prevent genocide, unable to have Security Council authorization for military intervention, have intervened militarily anyway, waged a campaign involving a thousand bombers and the loss of at least 1,200 civilian lives -- the best figures I can get out of Serbia -- plus up to 5,000 Serbian soldiers lives, with of course the ancillary but very prominent fact that 900,000 or a million Kosovars are driven from their homes by the Serbs who are doing it anyway, but it certainly speeded the process up. All of this was under the United Nations auspices in defiance of the will of at least two permanent members of the Security Council, those being retrospectively ratified and brought under Chapter 7. This is Haiti, cubed. In the legal sense, we authorized an intervention in the sovereign state of Haiti on the grounds of human rights but said it was about being a threat to the peace. We are now doing the same thing, not after a bloodless intervention, but after a three-month war.
Where does this leave us both in terms of the international order and in terms, specifically, of peacekeeping and Canada's role in peacekeeping? Damned if I know. In a way it is too early to know. There are too many imponderables. We have opened the can of worms. It probably needed to be opened. The law of absolute sovereignty is a bad law in a globalized world, in a democratic world, in a world where everybody can see what everybody else is doing to their populations. It is a necessary law in the sense that it is all that stands between us and naked aggression across borders, but we need that other pillar out in front too.
How we integrate them, how we reconcile respect for sovereignty with the international right to act in defence of human rights when gross violations like those in Kosovo are occurring, I do not know. I do not think anybody knows. We are playing this one by ear, but that is how the game is played now. Peacekeeping may take on some very funny shapes in the next five or ten years.
Let me leave you with an optimistic scenario, I do not know if it is true. The law on the absolute sovereignty of states and the obligation of all UN members to come to the defence of that sovereignty when it was under attack was tested for the first time in only five years, after the UN Charter was signed, in Korea in 1950. By a fluke we managed a UN resolution because the Russians were boycotting the Security Council at that time. We fought a three-year war. It killed 2 or 3 million people including about 2,000 Canadians and 55,000 Americans in defence of the absolute sovereignty of a pretty shabby state, South Korea. We did not have to fight such a war again for 40 years, until Kuwait in 1990-91. That was the next time, outside of the Arab-Israeli sphere, which is a global exception, that somebody actually ran tanks across an international border with no provocation and attempted to occupy a neighbouring state. It did not happen for 40 years after Korea. The optimistic scenario I will leave you with before we get to argue about this is that perhaps a similar consequence might flow from this Kosovo intervention. It may not be that you must do it again every year once you have demonstrated that, under some imponderable set of circumstances, you might do it; and that it might, retrospectively, be ratified by the international community. Together with the emergence of the international tribunals, which will gradually be subsumed into the international criminal court, for which we can take some credit in this country, that may mean that we will find a way of bringing human rights law into the centre without having to fight a war about it every year.
That is as much as I can think of to say at the moment.
The Chairman: You say that in the Yugoslavia-Kosovo instance we were not respecting the concept of state sovereignty; rather, NATO justified its intervention on the basis of the human rights declarations and so on. That is an ingenious argument. How well does it stand up, taking into account our failure to intervene in other sovereign states to defend human rights there? We can all think of the examples.
Mr. Dyer: From Kurdistan to Timor to wherever.
The Chairman: Yes. Do you have any comment on that?
Mr. Dyer: There is the basic realism of not intervening in states which are too big to take on. Nobody will take on the Tibetan case because China is just too damn big.
There is the further complication that it is much more complicated to deal with human rights abuses in countries that happen to be friends and allies than it is in countries with which we have less close links. Turkey falls into that category.
My general response would be that, most of the instances to which you refer are fairly long-running situations of human rights abuse, a decade or more old in most cases, which were already well-established before any possibility emerged -- as it did only after the end of the Cold War -- for someone to take an interest in human rights issues of this sort and begin evolving the kind of body of custom and law that we seem to be evolving in the 1990s to deal with it.
The larger answer is that no law enforcement authority tries to deal with all the abuses. You pick the cases which are closest at hand and easiest to deal with, or most annoying.
The Chairman: What you said in conclusion prompts a supplementary question. It raises the question of the expansion of NATO. You talk about those cases that are closest. As we expand, we bring new situations closer.
Before our meeting I had formulated two questions: First, would an enlarged NATO be confronted with new situations demanding peacekeeping within states? Second, in the wake of the Kosovo experience, how willing and able would NATO countries be to undertake such additional peacekeeping missions?
Mr. Dyer: The first question is the important one, but I think there is a reasonably coherent and reassuring answer to that. We have already required of the Romanians, the Bulgarians, the Hungarians, the Slovaks and so on, that they sort out all of their questions, mutual disputes, about borders, treatment of minorities and so on as a condition of being considered candidates for NATO membership. We use NATO membership as a carrot to accomplish the possibility.
There are not many potential situations of the sort that provoked the conflicts in Bosnia and subsequently Kosovo that would be added to the pot by the addition of those countries to NATO.
Romania and its neighbours is the one difficult case. There are both Hungarian and German speaking minorities in the northwest of Romania, and there are Romanian speakers outside of Romania on the northeast in the Republic of Muldova, which was territory carved out of Romania by the Soviet Union at the end of the Second World War. It is full of Romanian speakers but named a Soviet Republic. There are difficulties around Romania's borders in particular. The other borders in the area are all right so long as Macedonia does not fall apart, and bringing it into NATO is perhaps the best way of ensuring that it will not fall apart. I would not say that we would be taking more on in terms of potential peacekeeping. If any of those situations blow up, we would be involved in any event.
The Chairman: How does the Kosovo experience affect the willingness of leaders, and particularly electors in NATO countries -- I am thinking chiefly of the United States -- and their attitude to taking on similar interventions in sovereign states, particularly in Europe?
Mr. Dyer: I would be very surprised if the net impact of this intervention were to lower the willingness to intervene because it has been so remarkably cost-free, in terms of life, for our side. Basically, nobody got killed in combat. There is not that perception of cost. Though there is a significant financial cost, it tends not to get home to the public. This is part of general estimates and it happens over a period of years. It is not a prosperity-or-poverty issue for any Western country. It will not result in a significant change in lifestyle. It has been virtually a cost-free intervention from the point of view of the public.
The only anguish the public has suffered is having to watch, on television, the bombs explode and the refugees flee and the people being hurt. It does not bite very hard when that is all that the war costs you.
There has not been a significant attrition in the level of willingness to undertake peacekeeping operations provided that they are of this order -- no ground troops.
What would be the willingness to undertake a serious intervention with ground troops? We did not find out this time because it was not done. Some interesting figures out of the United States suggested that the common political wisdom in Washington that the American public will not stand for more than 50 casualties is wrong. I cannot recall exactly how the questions were phrased, but this was the result of a reputable public opinion poller who used a large sample, 4,000 or so, and which asked a set of questions related to what level of casualties would an American voter would accept in pursuit of a just outcome, however you might define that, in an intervention like Kosovo where American interests were not directly involved but issues of justice were involved.
It was quite surprising because a clear majority, I believe more than two-thirds, said they would be willing to accept 500 casualties, "...if we won." That is contrary to most popular wisdom in the United States -- popular wisdom in the media and in Washington. We have not tested it. We do not know. I am glad we have not had to test it, but we do not know whether this myth of the "chicken" American public is true or not.
Similarly, we do not know if the British public is as robust as Tony Blair thought it was, if it had gone into a ground war, though they withstood a couple of hundred casualties in the Falklands.
I do not with to speak callously about this, I am heading to the nub of the issue which is the willingness of western populations to accept casualties even in the best of causes.
There will certainly be a much greater willingness simply to do it from the air, a desire to avoid testing public support with ground forces and casualties in any future intervention. This is unfortunate, partly because we might find that there will be many occasions where the application of air power is both inappropriate and futile. It probably, in my view, would have been futile had we not had the additional factors I mentioned brought into play in the last couple of weeks, even in the Kosovo case.
We are Darth Vader in the eyes of a great deal of the world when we do it from the air impersonally, never getting our own hands dirty, never risking any of our own people, when we are bombing the ants down on the ground. It does not smell good.
The Chairman: I will circulate a story datelined June 9 with regard to the situation in Romania where, apparently, a group of intellectuals are advocating freedom and independence. I will do that after the meeting. I mention it now because it is relevant to the evidence we have just heard.
Senator De Bané: When you were analyzing the objective and the raison d'être, being that of intervention in Kosovo, you said this was the first time we had proceeded on moral grounds. Is that essentially what you said?
Mr. Dyer: If it was, I was overstating the case. I can think of earlier examples, but none is very recent.
Senator De Bané: You told us it was, essentially an ethical question.
Mr. Dyer: Yes.
Senator De Bané: What do you think of the argument put to us by another witness, a professor of political science, who told us that there was no doubt in his mind that the raison d'être for what was done was not to help the Kosovar people, that it was to inflict pain on someone who had launched not less than four wars in the last 10 years and caused immense hardship to the people in Slovenia, in Croatia, in Bosnia, and now in Kosovo. The United States and Western Europe said, "Enough is enough," and "We will inflict pain on him."
As you know, the slaughtering of the Kosovars went unabated for the last eight weeks. Something more could have been done. We were told that soldiers could have been sent in to protect the Kosovar people, but the idea was to inflict pain on a brutal, cruel leader. We were told it had nothing do with ethics; it was a matter of raw power. That is the argument that was put forward.
Of course, other people said that the American Congress would not have allowed ground soldiers to go in. When George Bush decided to send soldiers to the Gulf, the majority of the opinion in the United States was against that action. However, Mr. Bush did point out that it was a necessity, and he had little difficulty justifying that move. You said yourself that 60 per cent of the American people said they would accept a loss of 500 lives. What do you think of this argument that was put to us?
Mr. Dyer: I would not accept it for a few reasons. First, the statistics came from a very recent public opinion poll. It post-dates all the decisions made, both in this instance and in all previous interventions. It was not the Gulf War, but the Somalia intervention which produced what is called the "Somalia line," whereby it was clear that showing twenty dead American soldiers on television is the maximum they would accept.
The rapid extraction of all American forces from Mogadishu and Somalia after that firefight which resulted in some dead American soldiers being dragged through the streets on television was a retreat from intervention on the ground. In Bosnia, when we finally acted, we acted only from the air. We did not commit forces on the ground. The unwillingness to take casualties on the ground, particularly on the part of the Americans, has been pretty well consistent since Somalia, which was 1992.
American casualties in the Gulf War were of about one-third of that 500 figure of fatal casualties. We have not tested that.
On the question of hurting a brutal dictator versus protecting Kosovars, that could have been better done, not necessarily with a ground war, but with the assembly of ground troops in the area who could intervene. We might never have had to do this had we put troops on the border of Kosovo and told Milosevic to stop what he was doing or we would bomb; and a week later we had come in across the borders.
I have been very scathing about this strategy in public. As a military strategy, it stinks. As a diplomatic strategy, it stinks. It was this kind of war or no war at all in terms of the ability to have NATO members go along with any military action against Milosevic, regardless of his 10 years of devastation in the Balkans.
Why was this measure taken over Kosovo when we did not do it over worse situations earlier? Nothing that he had done in Kosovo at the point we started bombing him remotely compared with what he had done in Srebrenica or what his people did at the beginning of the Bosnian war when this ethnic cleansing went right across the north along the Serbian border, or indeed in Vukovar in the war with Croatia earlier. This was a lesser offence.
Why did we do it over Kosovo? I do not agree that it was because we wanted to hurt a brutal dictator. I think it was more a matter of guilt. The people now in power with responsibility for foreign policy in almost all the key NATO countries have both Bosnia and Rwanda on their consciences. They did not do it when they should have in those countries.
In that sense, the psychology is not that we wish to hurt this brutal man, but we must now act to save our souls. We have been shamelessly amiss in our responsibilities through these horrific events in 1994, 1995 and 1996, and here it comes again, not as big as last time, but it is still on our watch. What do we do about it?
The usual law of mixed motives applies. All motives are mixed. One can think of a battery of motives having to do with Mr. Clinton and his place in history. However, I do not accept that it was a strategy chosen in a sense regardless of the effect on the Kosovars. It was, rather, a strategy adopted because no other was possible that would allow action at all. It was a bad strategy, but it was the only strategy we could use which was genuinely motivated by concern for the distress of the Kosovars, albeit the consequences of adopting this "half" strategy were catastrophic for the Kosovars.
Senator Di Nino: An opinion was expressed, one which I think has some validity, that one of the main reasons for the air strikes was to diminish the Serb military capacity so that they would not be able to conduct future wars. What do you think of that?
Mr. Dyer: I do not think so. The Serbian army's ability to attack anybody else was pretty limited anyway. There was no problem killing villagers. However, very little money has been spent on the Yugoslav army for quite a long time. It has no serious offensive capability across an international border. Kosovo was -- unless perhaps you include Montenegro -- the last of the dominoes. There is nobody else left in the old Yugoslavia to have a war with after them.
We are dealing with the Milosevic pattern which is you start a crisis when you run into domestic difficulties. That explains a lot of why Kosovo suddenly became the problem it did as of the spring of last year when he attacked a number of villages for reasons that I think had little to do with Kosovo. From the Serb point of view, the situation in Kosovo was not bad until Milosevic started torching villages. That is what built the KLA into the force it became.
Degrading the Yugoslav army in order to prevent future attacks, I do not really think is a valid point. Had we ever gone to a ground war, it certainly would have been desirable, by that time, to have knocked out as many ammunition depots, as many railway bridges, as many tank repair shops and as many air bases as possible.
Besides, if you have decided to do it solely from the air, you have the problem of what you will bomb. If the point of it is to show that you are serious and he must come around, but obviously you are doing your damnedest to avoid civilian casualties, not only because that is the right thing to do but because every civilian casualty will be shown endlessly on your own domestic television and weaken your own public's will to continue on this policy, what do you bomb? We were, basically, phoning up the Yugoslavs and saying, "It will be the Ministry of the Interior tonight, make sure the watchmen are out." We made mistakes but it was extraordinary, not a single government building we bombed had anybody in it. They had the computers and the files out long before.
Senator Di Nino: You mean it was not all coincidence?
Mr. Dyer: Of course not.
Senator Di Nino: I was just being facetious.
Mr. Dyer: What do you bomb? The answer is that you are only left with military targets, which have a sort of validity, and so you go after them, even though, in many cases, they were not terribly relevant to Kosovo and they were not threatening anybody else. You had to bomb something if you were going to run a bombing campaign.
The Chairman: I said earlier that I thought our mandate was entirely too timely because what is happening is that we are talking about the specifics of the Kosovo situation.
Senator Di Nino: I agree.
The Chairman: If those are the kinds of questions that Senators want to ask, I have no grounds for objection.
Senator Di Nino: Perhaps we should refocus our attention.
The Chairman: We want to focus on the feasibility of peacekeeping.
Senator Di Nino: Our main focus of this study is to look at the role of NATO, and particularly Canada's participation in the NATO of the future. The actions that it has undertaken in Kosovo will obviously have a bearing on what kind of NATO we will have tomorrow. How do you think that has impacted on the NATO of the 21st century?
Mr. Dyer: The real answer is that I do not know. We are in the midst of something, but we must make best guesses.
I do not believe that NATO will evolve into the northern hemisphere's first-choice peacekeeper. It has done it a few times, explicitly as NATO in Bosnia and now in Kosovo. It has done it a couple of times as NATO wearing another hat, including the Gulf War. There is a limit to the number of enterprises outside of the NATO area that you can persuade the Portuguese and the Poles to go along with. It is a pretty short limit.
Interventions elsewhere, under whatever new set of norms and rules we evolve to reconcile those two pillars and deal with human rights and sovereignty issues in other parts of the world, will probably be the role of other regional organizations, if they can organize themselves.
Africa, in this respect, is hopeful, given that most of the wars of the world happen in Africa. The initiatives that have been taken in Africa to deal with this kind of issue, under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity, or by groups of the willing, such as the West African Intervention Forces in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Regardless of whether the intervention worked or not, precedents are being created there for the regional powers to take on some responsibility. That goes back all the way, in fact, to Nyerere's invasion of Uganda to rid Uganda of Milton Obote. It was completely illegal. What was Tanzania doing invading Uganda? However, it was fully justified by the same criteria that we have applied by our own action in Kosovo, and in fact thoroughly justified, retrospectively. in terms of the outcome. Tanzania did not exercise any undue long-term influence or derive any unfair benefit from its actions. They were genuinely altruistic. This was under Nyerere. The regime that emerged, and has since governed in Uganda, has done far better than any previous government.
We had that same regime, under Museveni, intervening in Rwanda to stop the genocide there, and subsequently intervening in the Eastern Congo to root out the remaining "génocidaires" who were taking refuge there and who were being supported by Mobutu. It was a very similar operation to that which we undertook, except that he used ground troops. I would think that other regions will be left to do it for themselves.
Senator Di Nino: Do you see a role for the UN in these kinds of regional interventions?
Mr. Dyer: I think so. It is very striking that, having gone out on a limb here, we are very concerned to get back under the UN umbrella. A Chapter 7 resolution of the United Nations wipes the slate clean. Whatever it was before it is now fully legal and within the UN. It is retrospective. We always needed it and we knew we needed it, but we could not get the Russians to sign up front, and we certainly could not get the Chinese to sign up, so we went ahead and did it anyway. It has been a primary objective, which is what all the diplomacy of the last six weeks was about, to have the Russians lined up on a Security Council resolution that would authorize the action we took. Their coming on board was one of the key factors in determining Milosevic's actions of the last week.
You do need this. The point is not to by-pass the UN. The point is to bring that lost pillar of human rights law, which is UN law, back into the foreground and integrate it into the way we use the UN as we have used it in the past in relation to the sovereignty and threat to the peace Charter provisions. The idea is to do it within the UN.
Senator Roche: What do you mean by, "wipes the slate clean"?
Mr. Dyer: I was speaking ironically.
Senator Roche: This goes back to your opening comment that the resolution now beginning to work its way through the UN Security Council provides "retrospective validation," of what took place. Is this not a very dangerous precedent to consider, namely, that when a military body wants to take an action, for whatever motivation, they can go ahead and do that, irrespective of international law in which the Security Council is pre-eminent in allowing the use of force?
With an eye to the development of the report of this committee on what we should be saying about this kind of situation, I would like, respectfully, to challenge you on that idea. Perhaps you did not mean to go that far. I would like our report to be able to assert and reaffirm the principle that no military body can do an end run around international law as espoused by the Security Council and then come back and get retrospective validation and wipe the slate clean. That is far too dangerous. This committee should be stating emphatically that we do not want to see a recurrence of this kind of action.
Mr. Dyer: I understand why you do not want that to happen. I agree we are in dangerous waters. What we have done in order to bring the question of human rights and the right of the international community to act on human rights back into the foreground is to endanger what little stability we had brought to international affairs by enshrining sovereignty as the sole operational principle of international law, or at least by treating it as though it were the only relevant principle. This is a dangerous operation. We have opened a can of worms. I entirely agree with you.
However, I do not see how we could have avoided opening that can or worms because once we were not living under the threat of nuclear weapons, the pragmatic justification for ignoring human rights law, simply because it was too risky and it might bring down the nuclear weapons, disappeared. Given public opinion in democratic countries and given global communications as they are today, people will not stand for it.
There is enormous pressure to act when something like Bosnia or Rwanda or Kosovo happens. We must find ways to act which do not completely destabilize what little stability we have achieved. I fully share your concerns, but I do not see how we could have avoided embarking on what I am quite sure will be at least a legally turbulent decade or so, while we sort out ways of reconciling this. I hope not turbulent in other ways as well.
We have, by bringing this forward, seriously challenged what little stability we had achieved through our adherence always to the principle of the inviolability of sovereignty. Retrospective justifications are not the happiest kind.
The Chairman: It is the old situation where the good, in this case human rights, is the enemy of the right, meaning the law.
Senator Andreychuk: You said the pillar of human rights started out with Haiti. Is it not a fact that we actually tested it in the Iraq situation? When the withdrawal started with Hussein, there was an immediate call within the UN and other nations that we must do something for the Kurds and in fact we did, but when it seemed it was too much, there was a withdrawal. Was that not really the first testing of this theory?
Mr. Dyer: Yes, I would accept that. It was very early days. The Cold War was over but some were not yet convinced it was. We certainly withdrew our guarantees very rapidly once they became too expensive. We ended up enforcing a no-fly zone under which the Kurds were killed like flies. However, I would accept that. You can see that it will start to happen, as soon as it is not too dangerous to consider.
Senator Andreychuk: We have embarked on this new pillar. I tend to agree with your analysis of that. What will this do to Canadian foreign policy? We have not talked with you too much about Canada's role in NATO and Canada's foreign policy. You have eluded to the fact that we would not sort of touch the giants, and you referred to the Tibet situation and China.
Mr. Dyer: We did nothing about Chechnya.
Senator Andreychuk: We have a pragmatic approach. We will not touch it. However, we did not take that approach when it was safe and NATO was involved. Traditionally that is not how we have been viewed. We have been seen as working throughout the world on international human rights issues through the United Nations, through NATO, in a very safe and secure way. We developed peacekeeping, we did not develop the initiatives. Do you think this will change the Canadian attitude or the Canadian government's position?
Mr. Dyer: I cannot speak for the Canadian government. I think that the evolution of the Canadian approach to peacekeeping will be fairly complex and multifaceted.
We have always done a lot of it through NATO. Cyprus, for example, was a NATO operation from start to finish, with UN authorization. In the situation in Haiti, there were some NATO countries under another umbrella, but it was the French and us and the Americans who really were involved.
Would we now do more or less peacekeeping through NATO than in the past as NATO's role evolves? I would revert to something I said before. I do not think that NATO will be involved in huge numbers of out of area interventions. The problem with Kosovo was it was not very far out of area. It is between NATO areas. The likelihood that we would end up putting more of our peacekeeping eggs in the NATO basket does not seem to be very high.
UN peacekeeping operations however may evolve in unforeseen ways as the process of reconciling these two pillars unfolds. Peacekeeping operations may occur under UN auspices in quite different forms than we have hitherto seen, including some which may well involve the use of force in support of human rights. I mean, in Rwanda in 1994, we had a UN force on the ground and a genocide started. Had we supported Roméo Dallaire, the Canadian commander of that force, by sending in the troops he asked us to send, we would have been doing that in Rwanda five years ago. Indeed, we should have been. Over a million people are dead because we did not do that. We pulled the troops out so we never tried that one on.
There are all sorts of possibilities for further UN peacekeeping operations including armed ones, and relatively few for further ones under NATO's auspices. I really do not believe that NATO has guaranteed its future through this operation. Its future will depend on other factors.
Senator Andreychuk: It seems to me that when the UN started on its pillars, Canada had a rather assertive role in managing that, and we also in NATO have always been in a rather assertive mould, moving some of these initiatives through NATO. We seem to have been sidelined through this last initiative and we seem to have been withdrawing from NATO. Will our position in NATO be seen differently? Will our partners in NATO see us differently in this case?
Mr. Dyer: I would say not. We showed up with aircraft on the first day. Unlike some other NATO members who sent a dozen or 18 aircraft, we did bombing missions. We did not just do reconnaissance and clean hand stuff. By this weekend we will have a battalion of 800 troops there in Kosovo. We have shown up.
Senator Andreychuk: Initially, we were more involved more at the developmental stage of the policy. We seem to be coming on board rather than being part of the initiating team.
Mr. Dyer: On that, I am not privy to discussions between foreign ministers, so I do not know whether or not that is the case. My impression is that our foreign office has been reasonably well plugged in through most of this.
The more fundamental question you are asking is: What does this do to our position within NATO? "Showing up is 90 per cent of the battle," as Woody Allen once put it, and we did show up. In terms of our right to be at the table where decisions are taken, I do not think we have damaged it.
However, there has been an interesting development in Canadian foreign policy over the last two or three years which has been, precisely, an attempt to develop global initiatives outside the NATO ambit. I am thinking of the land mines initiative followed by the international criminal court. What is interesting within the NATO context is that, although both of those initiatives annoy the Americans greatly, we had NATO on side. Everybody else in NATO came along with us. That suggests to me, given the very high profile Canada had on both those initiatives, that our place at the table in NATO is reasonably secure. We were not regarded as foolish outsiders taking lightweight initiatives.
On the contrary, if you think for example of the land mines initiative, the British and the French, who were with the Americans at the start, were with us by the end. This would have been to some extent true in the most recent initiative, had the Kosovo war not pushed it aside, which was the nuclear no-first-use initiative that we were pursuing through February and March where we had the Germans thoroughly on side for awhile, and then they had to backtrack in public, but they were on side.
Canada's ability to use NATO for its own diplomatic purposes, within and also outside the sphere of specifically NATO topics, does not seem to me to have declined.
Senator Stollery: My question turns on your point about the contradiction between the UN Charter of 1945 and the Charter of Human Rights in 1948. The UN Charter was signed in the post-war atmosphere of 1945. In fact the war was still on when they were meeting. The importance of the signing in 1948, for me at any rate, was lost in the vast number of things which were happening by 1948, such as the Berlin air lift and, at that time I thought everybody was out to try to embarrass the Russians and the communists and make them look bad.
I ask the question because I think that contradiction is profound, and I thank you for bringing it to our attention. I do not think the Charter of Human Rights in 1948 ever had in the public mind the weight of the United Nations and the succession to the which had failed so badly, and the spirit which existed in 1945.
I want to know what you think about the creative interpretation of Security Council resolutions, which I had not realized was taking place until I read a very interesting paper that appeared in the American Journal of International Law in January about bypassing the Security Council. A whole series of these resolutions has been interpreted creatively. Some people, I suppose, think that that is how the United Nations operates. In other words, there has been the interpretation of resolutions to accord authority, despite the contrary position of a majority of the members of the Security Council. I find that to be a very serious and profoundly disturbing issue. We hear the Security Council, the Russians and the Chinese have a veto, so therefore we must find some other creative way of doing this, in spite of the fact that we belong to an organization in which the original members have a veto. Where is this taking the United Nations?
Am I overstating it if I say that the United Nations, with this kind of creative interpretation, has really little to offer in the defence of countries like Canada or countries that are not major players in this world of increasing disorder?
Mr. Dyer: I would challenge your last comment about this being a world of increasing disorder. I think that is an optical illusion. It is a world where disorder is brought very close and visible to us by the media, but not a world of increasing disorder. That is not my perception at all. It is a world of increasing democracy and spreading peace and where there are very high profile disasters happening in some places.
The creative interpretation of UN resolutions has been a facet of the 1990s in particular, though by no means is it new to the 1990s. One of the tricks is, if by chance you ever happen to move a resolution through that does serve your purposes or can be interpreted as doing so, never go back and ask them what they meant. Never bring it up again. We did that in Korea for three years. The Russians showed up the day after we received the authorization to use armed force against North Korea. For the next three years they never managed to have a resolution tabled and passed to stop it. This is the game as it is played.
In the 1990s what we have had repeatedly, particularly on Balkan issues, has been NATO receiving an authorization from the United Nations which does not quite authorize armed force and then interpreting it. That also happened in the Gulf and in Iraq.
Senator Stollery: The issue of inspection.
Mr. Dyer: Exactly. You do not go back and ask what they meant, you use that old resolution and interpret it creatively. It is a fact of politics and human life in general, but it is distressing to see it done so much at the United Nations.
On a number of occasions, the resolution is worded so that it does not quite authorize the use of force. It is intended by those who, like the Russians, cannot publicly be seen to be supporting that, to create that possibility for the coalitions of the willing. This is particularly so when, towards the end of the Bosnian war, 1994-95, NATO was becoming ready very slowly and with a great deal of rummaging about, dropped bombs on the Serbs to enforce a peace settlement there. That resulted in the Dayton Accord.
The resolutions that the UN passed never explicitly said NATO could drop bombs on the Serbs. They came close enough that a creative interpretation would allow you to read them that way, if you were ready to drop bombs. The Russians knew that. The Russian foreign minister at that time, who was more pro-NATO than the current minister, fully understood what he was doing when he authorized that resolution, but he could not afford to be seen supporting a resolution openly authorizing the dropping of the bombs.
A good deal is occurring here than the bending of the rules by NATO. There is complicity in that, and hidden complicity by others, the Chinese being a notable case. The Chinese did not have a problem with us bombing Bosnia. That is Europe. It is our bailiwick. They could not be seen publicly, given their political position, to be authorizing intervention in the internal affairs of any sovereign state. Every time issue comes up they are reminded of Tibet. They abstained, and they let it go through, and it is written in a way that allows them to abstain and go through. A lot of that has been happening, not so much over Kosovo where, frankly, we bent the situation a lot more. With Kosovo we have been sailing really close to the wind, if not going right over edge in terms of the letter of the law.
Senator Stollery: I will not pursue it. I am reminded of 1962 and Cuba, where there was a creative interpretation of Security Council resolutions. Given the two contradictions that you brought up during your very interesting presentation, I think this third point is very troubling.
Senator Roche: Throughout the course of the Kosovo War, Russia and China and a few small states have said that, in the face of an aggressive NATO, nuclear weapons capability of the those two countries is all the more necessary now. These may be ill-considered statements. Nonetheless, there is a general view among nuclear experts that nuclear disarmament has been set back through the Kosovo War. Meanwhile NATO has said that it will review its nuclear weapons policies. What is your view of what NATO should now do concerning its nuclear weapons policies?
Mr. Dyer: The greatest setback to the reconsideration of NATO's nuclear weapons policies inflicted by Kosovo was that the issue of no-first-use did not get an adequate airing at the abbreviated NATO summit celebrating the fiftieth anniversary in Washington last April. No-first-use seems to me, in the NATO context, the most eminently logical and necessary first step towards a larger policy of nuclear disarmament in a Europe which no longer has any justification for the presence of so many nuclear weapons. There is not that kind of confrontation going on militarily in Europe, nor politically. Why all these weapons?
As a first step at least, adopt the no-first-use principle which the Soviets did adopt in the last days of the Soviet Union and, at least in the declaratory manner, the Russians have now stepped away from it again. I do not for a moment believe that any sane Russian commander or political leader would attempt the first use of nuclear weapons, given the gross disparity now between NATO's forces and those of Russia, if indeed at any time in the past such a commander would have done so.
It is important that we have the principle out front. No-first-use is such a common sense principle, and one which has at no time ever been to NATO's disadvantage, though we pretended it was at a time when we pretended we were inferior in ground troops.
As to the impact on other countries of the nuclear weapons policies of the Kosovo intervention. I think it will be quite limited, indeed so small as being virtually impossible to measure. Countries often make these kinds of declarations just to show that they are very cross or to create the public impression that something terrible has happened when you do not approve of what has happened. The Chinese and the Russians of course are both nuclear weapons powers and have been for a very long time and have shown no signs of disposing of their nuclear weapons. I fail to see what damage has been done by Kosovo there.
I simply do not believe that, because of what happened in Kosovo, smaller states would suddenly say that they need to get nuclear weapons.
After all, what has happened in Kosovo is not out of the ordinary in terms of a large state using military force against a small state, or an alliance using military force against a small state. The motives, the political context, and the implications are very different, but in terms of big states whacking small states sharply, this does happen and has already happened repeatedly.
Countries that really believe they need nuclear weapons will go and get them, for example, Pakistan. They are very likely to know already if they need them or not. This will not change much.
Senator Prud'homme: I have been waiting for six years, and I am not yet a member of the committee. We sometimes have great difficulty putting our house in order, and that has made me very bitter.
Dr. Dyer, I am an avid reader of your articles. I have also had the privilege of hearing you make presentations before. You always provoke a response from your audience. Today, however, I think you may be holding back a little.
Is the public's attention always focussed on the latest CNN commentary or news item? Is that what gets our attention?
Since early on in my political career I have been involved -- some say sadly -- in the Middle East question. I pay for that decision, but I do not mind. We have forgotten about the two million people who have been rotting in refugee camps for 52 years. Nobody cares. As soon as you talk about Middle East here in Washington or anywhere else, people start talking about the World Series, religion, or sex, but nobody dares touch on the subject of the Middle East. I find that difficult to understand.
Are we not now in danger of entering into this same pattern? The refugees from Kosovo may find themselves in a hell of a lot of trouble trying to move back to Kosovo. I do not think the terrorist organizations will be all smiles to them. Those terrorist organizations will not disappear overnight. They are becoming known as the "whipping boys of the Americans," and those are "whipping words." Will they profit from this? If that were to be the case, of course the Serbs would react in one way or another.
My colleague who was in Algeria knows what I am talking about.
Mr. Dyer: I am sorry I have been insufficiently provocative. You are not paying me enough. You are not paying me at all.
Do I understand your question to be about the KLA's role subsequent to the ceasefire?
Senator Prud'homme: It is very important to move them inside the tent, so to speak. We have been using them militarily, over the last month in particular, basically to draw the Serbs out of their hides and bases so we can bomb them. There is no question about that. They attack, the Serbs come out, we hit the Serbs.
There has been a good deal of coordination with the use of satellite communications and so on. All of it is unacknowledged because we are not supposed to be fighting this war for the KLA, we are supposed to be neutral as between them and the Serbs in so far as the dispute over the sovereignty of Kosovo is concerned. Besides there is no war.
Mr. Dyer: Assuming that there is a settlement this week which causes the Serbs to withdraw from Kosovo and allows us to go in, getting the KLA out of the hills, keeping them away from Serbs who wish to remain in Kosovo, and taking away their heavy weapons is a very high priority. The possibility otherwise is that they will become a political force in Kosovo which will prevent any genuine democratic expression, and which may well provoke further violence with Serbia through its mistreatment of the Serbian population that remains behind.
Essentially, in the deal we have committed ourselves, not to their disarmament which was what was in the Rambouillet deal, but to their demilitarization. It is an interesting verbal difference. I interpret "demilitarization" to mean we will bring the Kosovo Liberation Army down out of the hills and make them the police force, or at least those who do not go home to their families. They have grown 10 fold in the last 10 months. Many are young men who fled across the border. They were either press ganged or they volunteered to go into the hills. They are not professional guerrillas. "Cannon fodder" is probably a better name for them. Many will go home.
Certainly a core of people must be accommodated in the system, but preferably not under the self-nominated, political leadership of Kosovo-Albanians. The situation we see emerging is that we will bring these people in; send many of them home; have the heavy weapons belonging to the remainder locked up, and they have acquired a lot -- not directly from us but certain Middle Eastern countries have been shipping them in -- and then give the rest police arm bands. How many options do we have here? I would hope we do this in shared patrols with our people on the same patrol as them.
That is the logical solution, and what I would do if I were the commander there. The words I see in the deal suggest to me that they have their heads around this one. It is the best we can do. It may or may not work. It certainly will not work in every village in the first week.
Senator Prud'homme: If these police are Kosovar, I hope they will be escorted by American counterparts. With a little bit of imagination, if I were a Serb, I would shoot the first person who I believed was not a Kosovar in order to deepen the rift.
Mr. Dyer: You are assuming a stay-behind Serb resistance. If there is such a thing, we will have that kind of trouble. There has been no Serb stay behind in any of the previous Balkan wars. Let us start with Krajina and Eastern Slovenia, the two areas which were ethnically cleansed by the Serbs of Croats at the beginning of the 1991-92 war. When Krajina finally fell to the Croat army in 1995, not a single Serb stayed behind. There was no guerrilla activity.
The same is true of the areas in Bosnia that were retaken by the Bosnian government army and the Bosnian-Croatian forces later that year. There were no stay behinds. When Eastern Slovenia was finally, by UN mediation, evacuated, all the Serbs left, there were no stay behinds. That has been the pattern.
We have this image of the Serbs in their second war role as the world's finest guerrillas or at least the world's most highly promoted guerrillas. That was two generations ago. These guys have medallions around their necks. They are not the same folks. I am not saying that they cannot fight, but they are not sturdy peasant stock, guerrilla fighters by nature, and they have not stayed behind anywhere else. There has been no guerrilla activity in any territory lost to the Serbs throughout the whole period of the Balkan wars. I am not expecting it in Kosovo.
Senator Robertson: This question is almost supplementary to that asked by Senator Andreychuk. In looking to the future and at what is occurring now in NATO and at the United Nations, will Canada's foreign policy be more affected by NATO direction or by United Nations direction?
Mr. Dyer: The United Nations is heading into a period of very rapid change. We have to some extent a choice as to where we put our bucks, our man hours and woman hours, our time, and our effort, and all of that is limited. Whatever we do we will annoy somebody, but we also have a choice of who to annoy.
The action over the next two to five years will not be in the restructuring of NATO. It will be in the restructuring of the UN, quite possibly in the sense that the Security Council is well overdue for and scheduled for a debate about the whole question of who has the veto and how may it be used, the residue of 1945. Certainly there will be a change in the way that things are done internationally, particularly with regard to this whole business of reconciling human rights concerns with traditional concerns about sovereignty. There will also be major changes in international law flowing out of the findings of bodies such as the international criminal court.
I predict the Americans will eventually be along on that. They will bring up the rear just as they did on law and many other matters. There is a pattern whereby, 10 years later, they sign on. So there will be a period of fairly feverish activity in terms of creating, not necessarily a body of codified law, but new precedents, and then working out the implications and complications of those precedents.
Certainly, I would be putting our effort there, and that is probably where it will be put. There is not much of another game in town. NATO may, probably will, expand to take in those Southern European countries I mentioned at the beginning simply because we promised we would. However, that is not enough to keep a body or keep the mind alive for two or five years. This is not the big game.
Unless the Russians go bad in a big way, I cannot see that NATO is the place where most of the action will be in the next five years. It has broken a lot of new ground with this, some of it perhaps with less consideration than we might have preferred, but the action now moves to the UN. I am referring to the action in terms of how we reconcile what the UN is about to justify respectively with all the other body of UN customary codified law. That is where this must happen.
NATO will not be doing this every year. I do not think it will do it again.
The Chairman: We have been given a great deal of information to digest. At this point we should terminate this meeting. I would thank Dr. Dyer for a well-informed and articulate presentation.
The committee continued in camera.