The Written Word
for November 17, 1999

A couple of things on my mind today. There is this chap Richardson who has been ordered deported to the United States to do the jail time he ducked out of some 30 years ago. One cannot help but feel sorry for a man who has behaved so circumspectly since he came to Canada but the fact is he escaped jail and I question our right to question the American authorities who want him back.

Ah, but one intrepid politician comes to the rescue of this admitted criminal – John Reynolds, Reform senior justice critic and MP for West Vancouver.

Now I could understand how any MP would take up the cudgels on behalf of a constituent. Perhaps write some letters to American authorities and that sort of thing. But try to prevent Canadian authorities from returning this man whence he came so he can make peace with the law? Surely that oversteps the mark.

But of interest to me here is the outrageous hypocrisy of Mr Reynolds. Is not this the same Mr Reynolds who, before a word of evidence had been heard, immediately branded the "boat people" of last summer as criminals? Yet if the "criminal" actually is one so found by a court of law, Reynolds to the rescue! If, on the other hand, it is a refugee claimant – off with his head!

On another matter, is it not timely that we review our involvement in Kosovo? Clearly the story that there had been 10s of thousands of Kosovo Albanians killed by Serbs was a gross distortion. Now I don’t want to get into a numbers game here – any assassination is terrible. But Canada joined the American led Nato not because there were some atrocities being committed but because there was a holocaust going on. That’s what we were led to believe … it was wholesale slaughter and we had to stop it.

The question is, how do we judge these matters?

Clearly we judge them not on degree of wrong being done but whether or not we can pull it off. Added to that is the requirement that intervention be, at least on our part, bloodless.

Canada hasn’t called for any armed intervention in China over Tibet … or atrocities in Rwanda … or in Turkey and Iran to save the Kurds. But we have gone into Kosovo and effectively re-arranged the national borders of Serbia by –and the formality of this is just around the corner – taking away her province of Kosovo.

Now one can have heaps of sympathy for peoples who want to govern themselves … except we’re not too keen on stepping into Ireland … or Spain … or Italy … or Roumaina … or Bulgaria … or the old Soviet Union … or any one of dozens of countries around the world where there are minority populations. The question is, when do we intervene as part of Nato?

When there are deaths? They happen everywhere. It seems that where we intervene depends upon how easy intervention is.

On thing has come very clearly through from the Kosovo situation – in war, the first casualty is the truth. The insurance policy for those who don’t tell us the truth is that we may not remember.

The trouble in Kosovo is not going to go away. For the United Nations is like Bre’er Rabbit and the tar baby. They are stuck. And the harder they try to get free, the stucker they become.

Perhaps one can twist the old aphorism about marriage and say – intervene in haste and repent at leisure.