CANADIANS SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE WAR ON YUGOSLAVIA

["MR JAVIER BERNAL" <988005350@98.LINCOLN.AC.UK>]

From: Marjaleena Repo/Campaign for Canada 
Subject: CANADIANS SPEAK OUT AGAINST THE WAR ON YUGOSLAVIA: 
PRESS CONFERENCE #4
Date: Monday, April 26, 1999 


AD HOC COMMITTEE TO STOP CANADA'S PARTICIPATION IN THE WAR ON 
YUGOSLAVIA

STOP THE BOMBING OF YUGOSLAVIA: PRESS CONFERENCE IV, Part 1
(question period to follow)
Prominent Canadians Speak Out Against Canada's Participation in an Illegal and Unjust War; 
press conferences convened by David Orchard, author, farmer, leader of the fight for 
Canada's independence from the U.S., candidate for the leadership of the Progressive 
Conservative Party Of Canada in 1998 (placed second)


Vancouver, B.C., Friday April 23, 1999

DAVID ORCHARD: We have several speakers here today. Our first speaker is Mr. Fred 
Cooper who has 35 years with the federal civil service in both the military and a civilian 
capacity; for 3 years he chaired NATO's industrial planning committee.

FRED COOPER: Thank you. I didn't really expect that this would be the result of the letter I 
wrote to Maclean's magazine that appeared in this week's (April 26, 99) magazine.

When I watched what was going on I felt obliged to write a letter because I'm deeply 
ashamed of being a Canadian for the first time in my 66 years. I can't believe what is 
happening over in Kosovo. I cannot believe that the Canadian government has allowed itself 
to become involved in this. I think that what is taking place at the present time is immoral, 
unjust and probably illegal under the charters of both NATO and the United Nations - and I 
see it as one more example, which we were very familiar with when I was at NATO, of being 
led by the nose by the Americans: what the Americans want at NATO always happens and 
what they don't want doesn't happen.

I worked there for 3-1/2 years as chairman of the Industrial Planning Committee. I was the 
Canadian delegate to the Industrial Planning Committee and in my job, in emergency supply 
planning, I was responsible for committees for food & agriculture planning, and for petroleum 
planning. And in all that time it became abundantly clear that when the Americans wanted 
something to happen, it happened; and when they didn't want it to happen, it didn't happen. I 
don't understand why we have allowed the Canadian government to get us into this situation. 
We don't belong over there. NATO has no right under the Charter, as I ever understood it, 
to be engaged in attacking a sovereign country. I don't care what the country did in terms of 
its internal strife. We could use any one of a dozen other examples. We could have gone into 
parts of the former Soviet Union if we're going to use what's happening in Kosova as an 
example of justification. We didn't go into Russia. We didn't go into East Timor. We didn't go 
into any one of a dozen places around the world: why are we doing this now? I don't know. I 
don't understand it. It is wrong and I am deeply ashamed of the fact that I spent all those 
years working there.

I spent 3-1/2 years with the Air Force in the Air Division in France serving with NATO, and I 
was proud of it! I'm not so sure any more because NATO is doing something which I believe 
is fundamentally wrong. And the Canadian government is doing something which I believe is 
fundamentally wrong. I simply cannot believe that we have allowed our government to 
unilaterally determine that we are going to be engaged in what is a war. They can call it what 
they like; they didn't call Korea a war either until it was over, and many years after it was 
over they decided that maybe it was a war. And I just find this whole thing repulsive and 
wrong from every aspect that you can look at it. There isn't one thing that I can think of - and 
I've thought about it quite a bit - that possibly justifies the fact that the Canadian government 
is involved in this.

Now they're talking about sending in ground troops and I would like to know something: I 
would like to know how many of Mr. Chretien's children, how many of Mr. Eggleton's 
children, how many of Mr. Axworthy's children, are going to get sent over there if we sent 
troops over in a ground war that will be a total disaster. We are going to be going into a 
country that has a long, long history of guerilla warfare, and they're very good at it ... and it's a 
terrible, mountainous country where we're going to go in and we won't win - we can't win.

And I just wish somebody would get the Canadian government to explain to the people of 
Canada how they're doing this, and how they're doing this with no vote. In fact, Mr. Chretien 
has already said that if the subject of sending in ground troops comes up that it will be done 
and there will be no vote. To me that is fundamentally wrong. I think that one could make a 
case for the fact that our Prime Minister, our Minister for External Affairs, our Minister of 
National Defence could be described as war criminals at the present moment - and may very 
well be by international court before this is over. And I, for one, am totally, fundamentally 
opposed to it, and I will remain that way no matter what they say in justification, because 
there is none. Thank you.

DAVID ORCHARD: Thank you very much, Mr. Cooper. Our second speaker is Roland 
Keith. Rollie Keith has a 32 year military career. He's a retired college history sessional 
instructor. He's a lifelong student of conflict and conflict resolution and he recently completed 
a tour of duty in Kosovo where he was the director of the Kosovo Polje Field Office of the 
Kosovo Verification Mission. Mr. Keith just returned three weeks ago from on the ground in 
Yugoslavia. It's a pleasure to have you here.

ROLLIE KEITH: Well, thank you very much, David. Like the other speakers here today I 
have been trying to put some balance on what I think is a media disinformation, or media 
ignorance, campaign in the rationality and the justification for the hostilities currently taking 
place in Yugoslavia.

Now, as David said, I just spent 2 months as director of a field office just outside the capital 
Pristina - very intense 2 months, very interesting, with a great deal of anxiety I might add. But 
in my opinion what I witnessed and what I saw - and I did go in with some knowledge of the 
history of the problems, the history of the area-I saw nothing, witnessed nothing or heard 
nothing to justify the arial bombardment of Yugoslavia, which I think is completely 
unjustifiable. I saw no mass humanitarian crises, disaster and human rights abuses were within 
the confines, in my professional opinion, of an internal security struggle and a civil war - which 
of course was taking place.

Now, the justification for this war, as I understand it, is that humanitarian disaster was 
occurring. I think the information is very clear to all: there were no 600,000 international 
refugees fleeing across the borders of Kosovo to other countries while we were there, when 
diplomacy was taking place, when the monitoring of the Kosovo Verification Mission of the 
Organization for Security & Cooperation in Europe, was there.

Yes, the civil war was breaking out. Provocations were being committed - primarily, in my 
professional opinion, in my area by the Albanian KLA - and there was a reaction by the 
Yugoslavian authorities and consequently there was some internal displacement of peoples, 
within Kosova itself. But we were dealing with that and we were building on a process to 
rectify it. Had the diplomatic process gone forward I think we could have been a clear 
alternative to the hostilities currently taking place.

So, we have justified these hostilities on humanitarian problems and concerns which, in my 
professional opinion, were not occurring until the bombing commenced. So it doesn't take a 
rocket scientist to realize that the consequences that we are now justifying the war with are 
the result, either directly or indirectly, of the aerial war that we are perpetuating. And like the 
previous speaker, Fred Cooper, I was very proud to have served in Canada's first peace-
keeping mission as a young soldier in the Suez in 1957. I was proud of our foreign minister, 
our External Affairs Minister at that time, Lester Pearson. I was proud of Canada's role. And 
I also have served as a military officer in NATO and I was proud of the defensive alliance 
that has now become an aggressive alliance, unfortunately.

These acts that our government and other governments are justifying on misinformation and 
disinformation with the moral certainty, I think should make all Canadians be skeptical of 
what we hear and what we are told. Just let me comment on the diplomatic alternative - the 
Rambouillet and the subsequent Paris negotiations that took place in February and March. 
We are told by the leadership of our countries that there was no "give" by Milosovec and the 
Yugoslavian delegation. Well, I would like to say that in my opinion - and I have read the 
documents, I've studied them - these were not an agreement documents, these turned out to 
be an ultimatum. And the ultimatum to the Yugoslavian government was surrender or be 
bombarded. Well, he didn't surrender so he's being bombarded.

But we could have had an alternative in my opinion, alternatives that required the Russians to 
be nvolved, alternatives that required the United Nations to be involved. And I think as 
Canadians we should reinvest in the United Nations' diplomatic alternatives and demand that 
our government work for an alternative to this obscene bombardment of a country that is 
basically defenceless to the high-tech weaponry of NATO. Thank you very much.

DAVID ORCHARD: Thank you Mr. Keith. Our next speaker is Mrs. Kinuko Laskey who 
is a founding member of the Canadian Association of Atomic Bomb Survivors. Mrs. Laskey 
is a peace educator and a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. Mrs. Laskey.

KINUKO LASKEY: Thank you very much for having me here today. I see every day on TV 
news and it just makes me cry, for those survivors and people who lost homes and losing 
contact with families ... and much more than what you see on TV screen. I know what's going 
on inside over there, and it just makes me cry everyday. And like I always say, for the sake 
of the future children's happiness we must learn. No more war in this world, that's the only 
way. And to be able to do that we have to refresh our memories past not a hundred years or 
thousand, but from the beginning of this world, how we could keep peace. We should be 
smart enough to know by now - not have war.

And small children are all the same: we smile the same, it doesn't matter where you were born 
or what colour you're born - we smile, laugh and giggle in just the same way, and they are all 
peaceful individuals.

I feel it is very important to have a mother and a father's love from a very small, young age. 
And that's something we're missing today, very much. So children don't really understand 
about the peace. We must teach them how to control themselves, how to respect each other. 
It's very easy to say in a war, like I have trouble with my English, but I could say-"Respect 
each other", but to do that is very hard and the only way to do is to share with your love and 
understanding. And the love you have to have more than enough for yourself to share with 
others. And understanding only comes by talking to each other.

War comes because you threaten the other countries. And other countries are just the same 
country. If doesn't suit you, it shouldn't suit other people either. So if you talk about the 
human beings' rights, you want happiness and peace, which God has given us, this beautiful 
world in which we live - and peace isn't here and many children don't believe we have peace 
already. But God is giving us a beautiful country, beautiful sky, beautiful earth to live on, and 
we must protect what God has given us. And the men create many things because we make 
changes, and some people don't like change. And God's creation cannot change. But we can 
always change man's creations: if not good enough for you, shouldn't use for other people.

Survival is a very, very hard thing to do but, like me, I think I had something, a gift from God. 
My angel which is my husband, he brought me to Canada and gave me all the care, all the 
needs I have to have and showed me how beautiful Canada is. And in Canada there are so 
many people mixed together, as you know, but we are keeping this harmony together 
because we respect each other - and all the different people respect each other and keep 
harmony and keep peace and happiness. But if you say, "I tell you to do this and you must do 
this" and then start threatening other people, then you get threatened back because everything 
that goes around comes around, comes back to you, so you must learn to love and 
understanding. That's the only way for our peace. And nourish that love, start from individual, 
start to be in a happy and loving place. Thank you very much.

DAVID ORCHARD: Thank you very much Mrs. Laskey. Our next speaker is Harry Rankin. 
He is a distinguished Vancouver lawyer and Queen's counsel. He's a World War 2 veteran, 
twice wounded and a 25 year member of Vancouver City Council. Harry Rankin.

HARRY RANKIN: Well ladies and gentlemen, friends, I come at this war from the point of 
view of the dizzy ranks of a Corporal in the Canadian army. I didn't ever get much above that 
- Lance Sergeant once in a while, dealt with a platoon on the ground with a little aerial map 
saying go up to the next place and see what you can do and sometimes the map was good 
and sometimes it wasn't and sometimes I didn't understand it and certainly I don't think that 
many of the people that were with me were professional soldiers in the way that we know it 
today.

We didn't have a vast war machine, we had to build one when the War started. And we had 
a definable objective: to destroy Nazi Germany. I call it the Last Just War and maybe there 
are no Just Wars even in that context because it had a history of the humiliation of the 
Germans, the picking up their debts, making them crawl, and of course people aren't going to 
crawl forever - somebody comes along and inflames them and they want to go along and 
fight. Well I used to think fighting was, you know, a nice uniform, maybe some medals, 
maybe red blood on a bandage. Well, bandages don't have red blood on them, they have 
brown blood on them, they're caked.

There are no medals, there are no nice uniforms. You just stagger along. And this jingoism of 
war of course is a very simple thing. Every generation has it and you have some atrocities to 
put forward. The First World War would be a baby impaled on a German sword. The stories 
are multitudinous, they're all the same.

But I think there's a difference today. People are better educated, they know more, they're 
driven down by more propaganda, by more lies, by the whole structure of a war machine that 
the world has never seen before: it's called NATO. I don't know whether NATO was ever 
any good. I take the word from my friends that it did perform some useful roles. I would 
rather it had never been born, it had been strangled in the crib. So I differ to that extent with 
my friends: war machines are war machines. What we need is a peace machine.

And I want to just deal with our Parliament. You know, for 5-1/2 years we fought a war - no 
conscription, because the French Canadian government - I don't mean the people, there were 
all kinds of French Canadian soldiers in the Army - didn't want conscription. The result of that 
was we had half-platoons, we never did have 35 men to a platoon, we'd have 17 or 18. That 
causes more casualties when you have less men. We staggered through and the country kept 
together based on the fact that there was a policy of government and there is a lot of 
screaming going on. I wasn't a party to the screaming because I wasn't here, but certainly this 
country was wracked with discussions as to what should be done. This country was wracked 
with discussions as to how to deal with the Japanese Canadians. How did we deal with them? 
Much like a "humanitarian" German would deal with them. We had nicer concentration 
camps, but there they went.

So all these things have happened before. The only thing is we had a Parliament that at least 
discussed them. And the issue I want to deal with is: where are my MPs? where the hell are 
they? They mutter and they talk; they have no knowledge of what's going on. Not a single 
party has come out, not a single MP has come out and said "This war is an atrocity and 
should end!" Not one of them! People that I fought and had voted for and worked for all my 
life are silent or they agree with the war! Not a debate in Parliament, not a single debate that 
means something.

And we're going to go into a land war, they say: you've already agreed to an air war, so now 
you've got to agree to the land war. Maybe there'll be a little muttering back and forth, but I'd 
like to see one MP stand up and say what my friends here have said. We may have some 
disagreements in this issue or that issue. You know, when somebody talks about the 
atrocities: war itself is obscene, war itself is an atrocity - and you can't start to figure out the 
little bits and pieces that make it that way. Somebody gets even with somebody or other. All 
kinds of things occur - that some woman is raped... I don't know whether the Serb army is 
raping women. I never had time in the War I was in, and I didn't see anybody else who had 
time. Now I'm not saying that didn't happen, but I'm simply saying to inflame people on minor 
issues - and they're not minor in the sense of it happening - and to ignore the major issue, 
what is this war about? What are its objectives? What starts it?

Right now I listen to Tony Blair on the air and I am infuriated by his sickening smile as he 
describes the question that Serbia, Yugoslavia, has got to back down - a little tinpot fellow, a 
Social Democrat - unfortunately - who says that they've got to back down completely and I 
support my boss Clinton in Washington and this is the way it's gonna happen. And then I hear 
that the Serbs have said we'll discuss an international force here, an international force, by that 
I mean I guess the United Nations - that's what I always thought was the "international force." 
And they're pooh-poohing that, they're pushing it to one side, ignoring it, as though they want 
this war to continue.

And I listen to these NATO people, with their glasses on, people around 30 or 35, as 
bloodthirsty as hell. I've never seen a soldier as bloodthirsty as those people! Not one of 
them will, and somebody's said that here, will ever send their own children. The American 
Army is a conscript army - economic conscripts, racial conscript of black people: people 
who can't get into the system can go into the Army. Clinton himself dodged the war. Now 
that shows some intelligence, but he dodged it for the wrong reason of course, not because 
he's opposed to war: he's opposed to himself going to war, but not to other people going to 
war. At the end of the day, you pick up ordinary young people and you send them into a 
hostile country and the people in that hostile country are going to go and fire at them and 
they're gonna know the terrain, etc.

If we think we're in a bad shape now, we're in an indefensible shape, when we decide that 
we're going to go in there. Who are the greatest leaders of intervention with a land force? 
Chrétien! Sure, he won't go to war. I'm sure his children won't go to war. I'm sure none of his 
relatives will go to war. I'm sure they will eat well, they will have a bed to sleep in, the rain 
won't be pouring down on them, they won't be digging trenches for people to dump into, they 
won't be putting tents up. None of that will happen to them. They talk of this war as though 
it's an academic thing. Well I've got news for everybody: it's not academic when you go 
there! And when you lay out in the rain and the cold and the snow and the sleet and when 
somebody's firing at you and you think the whole bloody army's dumping their shells on you 
personally - you get a little paranoid at that stage.

I don't know whether any of these people have any idea of what's going on. But the thing that 
inflames my anger is that not a single MP will stand up and outline and discuss these things 
and say what are our objectives, what is happening? Even that term "ethnic cleansing" leaves 
me. I'm sure that it's something less than genocide, we were discussing that briefly. Genocide 
is the German policy that you kill people because they're Jews, you kill them because they're 
Gypsies, you kill them because they're homosexuals, you kill them because they're mentally 
defective: you make the plan, you carry it out. Now they're not talking about genocide here.

Ethnic cleansing may well be the result of a civil war where people start to speak out. One 
side takes one thing, one another, they get pushed around, a police station is bombed, the 
police come out and kill a few other people - well, you see, that's happening all over. I never 
heard a word about Rwanda. A million people died. Are black people less likely to bleed 
than white people? That's what it sounds like. Or down in East Timor - are brown people less 
likely to bleed red blood than white people? Has it just got to be something that happens to 
whitepeople? You see, the whole thing is crazy. Nobody is getting up and logically discussing 
with the people of Canada, and the people of Canada may be the best educated people in the 
world but they are also the best in being deluded and bombarded by the massive propaganda.

And the propaganda is endless. And we hear Clinton on the radio and TV endlessly. And we 
hear the people from NATO kind of fat faced, they're all well-fleshed people, you know - 
with glasses, and they're studious, and they're telling us what can happen. And generals get 
up. You know, I know of some generals. There's one or two I knew personally. They led, 
because they were commanders, on the Front. The rest of them are flabby people that sit on 
their ass miles back and direct other people to die. They did it in the First World War in great 
numbers; they did it in the Second World War; and they did it in every other war that's along. 
You see, Patton come off with his six guns, you see McArthur "I will return." Why didn't he 
goddam well stay there instead of returning?!

You know, all of these people - the hypocrites that pass all my understanding, everything I 
understand about, they're total hypocrites. Nobody can understand war except through their 
Members of Parliament debating it so that the thing comes out and there's some logic and you 
understand where we're going and why we're going there.

The reason there's no debate is, there's really nothing to debate that's in our favour! Did you 
ever think of that? The reason there's no debate is they can't muster a real argument. They 
can only become jingoistic and people decide that, you know, they're going to - "my country 
right or wrong" - they're going to stand up and talk about it. And somebody goes here and 
somebody goes there. I listen to people who I thought represented me. And I am disgusted, I 
am ashamed, I am absolutely outraged that they should not now get up and raise the issues. 
They can say, when the thing started, well, I wasn't prepared, I didn't know what was 
happening - that does happen. I've been on councils where you're stampeded into a debate. I 
don't want to tell you that every motion of Council's is something I look back on with 
nostalgia: we make errors. The thing that separates human beings from numbskulls is that they 
don't continue on with their errors. And I want my Members of Parliament, every one of them 
no matter what spectrum they come from, to tell me what we're doing there and what are the 
objectives and what evidence do they have as to what is happening. And until that happens 
we're going to flounder on and on and on. The only guarantee of peace in this country is the 
people of this country. And if we forget that, we forget everything.

DAVID ORCHARD: Thank you very much, Mr. Rankin. And I'll just make a short 
statement and then we'll take questions.

Our country has launched an unprovoked and an illegal attack on a small nation. This is an 
attack that is illegal on a whole number of fronts. It's illegal under the U.N. Charter which 
guarantees the security of nations. It's illegal under NATO's own charter which states that 
NATO is a defensive organization to respond to an attack on a member state. Yugoslavia has 
not attacked any member state or threatened any member state of NATO; in fact, Yugoslavia 
has not threatened any other country at all.

The Nuremberg Trial ruled at the end of the Second World War that to initiate a war of 
aggression is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime. And this is 
exactly what our country has done.

We are told that we are bombing the Yugoslavian government to get them to sign the 
Rambouillet peace agreement. First of all, as was pointed out by Mr. Keith, the Rambouillet 
agreement was not an agreement, it was an ultimatum. And the Vienna Convention, article 52, 
states that "the use of force or the threat of force to obtain a signature to a treaty renders that 
treaty null and void" - so that's the fourth ground on which our actions are illegal. And the fifth 
is that we're using outlawed weapons in this war on Yugoslavia. We are using cluster bombs, 
NATO has admitted as much. We've dropped cluster bombs on Pristina and other places in 
Kosovo. And we are using missiles that are coated with depleted uranium. The US aircraft, 
the A10, the so-called "Warthog" is firing missiles coated with depleted uranium: upon impact 
these missiles burn and the radioactivity is released. So we're leaving a legacy of death and 
destruction and misery over Yugoslavia that will last for decades to come.

We're told that we are involved in an action that is just targeting military targets. That is pure 
nonsense. The military targets that Yugoslavia had, the bulk of them were taken out in the first 
few nights of bombing. We are now systematically targeting civilian targets. There's been over 
150 schools and churches hit. We've blown up chemical plants, releasing toxic fumes over the 
city of Belgrade and other cities. We've blown up over 100 factories that provided the 
workplace, jobs for over 500,000 people. We're now blowing up their television stations 
because apparently we can't even stand another view of the war being released to the people 
of the world.

We're bombing essentially a helpless population. Yugoslavia has admitted they no longer have 
the capacity to even set off an air raid warning when a bomb attack is coming. So we're 
essentially bombing an open, helpless city.

And like Mr. Rankin, the implications for democracy are something that bother me 
profoundly. Anyone can be bombed at any time. In fact, as the Archbishop of the Serbian 
Orthodox Church said the other night, the message of this bombing of NATO is that the only 
sovereign countries left in the world are those that have nuclear weapons - because they're 
the only ones that cannot be attacked with impugnity. And I think that's the message that 
we're putting out.

Mr. Clinton yesterday responded to the tragedy in the school in Colorado. And he said, We 
have to teach our young people to solve their conflicts with words not weapons. Well for any 
thinking person who can watch him and Tony Blair and Mr. Chretien and Mr. Axworthy on 
the television night after night exhorting our people to hate the Serbian people and drop more 
bombs, at the same time deploring the violence in schools-to me this action in the schools is a 
direct outcome of the kind of lawlessness that is being visited on us by our leaders.

So we are calling today for an end to the bombing and a return to the rule of law.

That's the call that we're making across the country. And we're asking everyone if they'll 
contact their Member of Parliament in no uncertain terms and tell them that we want the 
bombing to stop and we want Canada to return to the rule of international law.

QUESTIONS (transcript to follow)

-- 
***************************************************
CITIZENS CONCERNED ABOUT FREE TRADE/ CAMPAIGN FOR CANADA
P.O.Box 1983, Saskatoon, Sask., S7K 3S5
Saskatoon: (306)244-5757 Fax: (306)244-3790
Toronto: (416)922-7867 Fax: (416)922-7883
Vancouver: (604)683-3733 Fax: (604)683-3749
e-mail: ab217@sfn.saskatoon.sk.ca
website: http://www.davidorchard.com 
***************************************************