Stephane Dion displays a truly remarkable ignorance of recent history.
He describes the Canadian Forces' operations in Bosnia in 1994 and in Afghanistan today as "peace-restoring" missions aimed at helping "a weakened government re-establish security over its territory." He goes on to write that Canada "participated in the Bosnian intervention as it had a good chance of ending the violence and allowing political progress in the country. For these same reasons, we are presently stationed in Afghanistan ... ."
Mr. Dion's comparison of the current Afghan mission to the Bosnian one in 1994 is ridiculous. In 1994 Canadian soldiers were in Bosnia as part of the UN peacekeeping mission UNPROFOR. That mission had no "peace-restoring" mandate and no mandate to support the Bosnian government. It was a neutral force that tried to protect civilians in the three-sided civil war involving Serbs, Croats and Muslim Bosnians.
UNPROFOR ended as a horrible failure with the July, 1995 massacre of several thousand Bosnian Muslims by the Serbs in the "UN Protected Area" at Srebenica. NATO then conducted an aerial bombardment campaign against the Bosnian Serbs. This, combined with successful ground attacks by Croatian government forces, led to a ceasefire in early October and then the Dayton Agreement in November, which effectively ended the civil war.
In December, the NATO IFOR force of some 60,000 entered Bosnia to ensure adherence to the Dayton Agreement. It was in effect a true "peacekeeping" force as it was enforcing an agreement that had already ended hostilities and never needed to engage in combat itself -- unlike the situation facing NATO forces in Afghanistan today. The Canadian Forces also took part in IFOR.
That Mr. Dion can in any way equate the completely different missions of the Canadian Forces in Bosnia and in Afghanistan now indicates that he is as unfit to be the Liberal Party's foreign affairs critic as Ujjal Dosanjh is to be its defence critic. He certainly is not fit to be leader. How low has a once great party fallen.
Mark Collins, Ottawa.
