Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe

I want to begin my remarks by offering congratulations to the Chairman-in-Office, Flavio Cotti, who has served this organization so well during the most challenging year in its history. And I welcome the new Secretary General, Giancarlo Aragona, and Mr. Petersen and his team who will be taking over next year.

When we met in Budapest two years ago, the prospects for European and Atlantic integration still appeared part of a distant future. Now, integration lies at our doorstep. We have before us a unique opportunity to remove old barriers and to eliminate tensions and divisions that have hampered our stability and development for more than fifty years.

In this decade, we have reoriented our thinking about security in Europe.

We have made fundamental changes. NATO has become a forum of cooperation. Today it is running a peacekeeping operation in Bosnia. Militaries from North America, from both western and eastern Europe are working shoulder to shoulder with one another, and with soldiers from every other part of the world. Who would have imagined this in 1990?

Nowhere has this transformation been greater than in the OSCE.

We have transformed it into an action-oriented organization. An organization that is running elections in the most difficult of situations. An organization that is involved in some of the most effective crisis prevention work ever implemented.

This dynamism and flexibility are, I believe, the OSCE's greatest virtue. We must ensure that we do nothing to limit its potential.

We must never forget that the real strength of the OSCE is its respect for the rule of law, democracy and human rights. We must ensure that each one of us apply these principles. In this regard, I congratulate the Chairman-in-Office for the reminder on Belarus in his press release of November 30.

Canada has been active in this process. We will continue to do so. Our engagement in Europe is an essential element of Canada's security.

However, the very definition of security has changed. Today we no longer think in terms of walls, barbed wire fences, rows of tanks and missiles.

Often threats to a country's security are inside, not outside its borders. Human suffering frequently caused by civil ethnic conflict is our greatest enemy and constitutes the greatest challenge to the values for which we all stand.

Today the image is not of armies of soldiers but of armies of displaced people and refugees, of the hungry, the sick and the stateless.

Does our thinking about security and its moral underpinnings reflect this reality?

I believe that security is no longer primarily a function of events in the Vancouver to Vladivostok area. We live in a world of increasing interdependence, of increasing integration, of globalization where no country, even one as well situated as Canada can remain unaffected by events occurring well beyond its borders.

The situation in the Great Lakes area of Africa is a case in point. For years, the international community has looked on as matters lurched from predictable crisis to predictable crisis with enormous loss of life and human suffering.

Better mechanisms of conflict prevention and a stronger will on the part of the international community to intervene in an area where few national interests were at stake might well have headed off these disasters.

Just two weeks ago, Canada took the lead in organizing an ad hoc coalition of willing countries to come to the aid of the refugees caught in the crossfire.

This in large part precipitated the chain of events allowing the massive departure of refugees to Rwanda.

The crisis is not over. We remain committed to working with our partners, many of whom are represented around this table, to ensuring that the humanitarian agencies have the tools to finish the job.

I raise Zaire, fully aware that the OSCE is not empowered to operate outside its geographic limits.

However, there must be lessons which we can learn from the way crises of a similar nature have been dealt with within the boundaries of the OSCE to apply to the wider world.

An example is the former Yugoslavia in the early days when blue helmets acted under a chapter six UN mandate to bring assistance to the civilian population.

We should also draw lessons from our experiences outside the OSCE area, such as in Somalia and in northern Iraq where UN-authorized coalitions deployed military force to support humanitarian missions.

We should dedicate ourselves to find better ways of ensuring that ad hoc solutions do not have to be relied upon in the future.

Better ways must be found to ensure that the military resources of the international community are mobilized to alleviate the suffering of civilians in zones of conflict and instability.

Governments and the military approach humanitarian crises differently. So do the NGOs and the humanitarian agencies. These differences appear large, but I am not sure they are real.

We need to harmonize our way of dealing with crises. We need to do that because we are in a partnership with each other. Our goals are complementary, our bottom-line is greater security.

We need to recognize that in the future we will turn to our militaries for assistance in these crises again and again.

I propose that the OSCE collaborate with other security institutions to address this problem as a matter of priority. We need to put into place the mechanisms that in the future will allow us to respond to the next Zaire in a faster, better organized manner.

Return to regular web page:
http://www.pco-bcp.gc.ca/default.asp?Language=E&Page=archivechretien&Sub=Speeches&Doc=speeches19961202348_e.htm