John Ciaccia signs copy of his new book for former labour leader Michel Chartrand yesterday.

Quebecers have not learned from the Oka crisis, which began 10 years ago today with a failed attack by the Surete du Quebec that left one police officer dead, says John Ciaccia, Quebec's native affairs minister at the time.

In an interview coinciding with the launch of a book recounting his version of the events, Ciaccia referred to outstanding Indian land claims as "a festering wound."

In The Oka Crisis, A Mirror of the Soul, Ciaccia says he often felt isolated during the crisis, as his efforts to negotiate a land-claims agreement with Mohawk moderates were ignored.

He says he considered resigning and cried when LaSalle residents pelted with stones a convoy of Mohawk women, children and elderly fleeing across the closed Mercier Bridge, fearing an attack by the army.

Mohawks in Kahnawake closed the bridge after Cpl. Marcel Lemay was fatally wounded at Kanesatake, the Mohawk community neighbouring Oka, in a dawn raid by the SQ on July 11, 1990.

After the police were routed, members of the Warriors' Society, who included heavily armed Mohawks with combat experience in Vietnam, destroyed police vehicles and built military-style fortifications at both Kanesatake and Kahnawake in what became a 78-day standoff.

Ciaccia saw a land-claims settlement as a way to defuse an escalating military confrontation, as the Canadian army replaced the Quebec police at the barricades and members of the militant Warriors' Society pushed aside Mohawk moderates. "What started off as a demand for a few acres of land escalated into a demand for full sovereignty," Ciaccia said.

Ottawa only strengthened the Warriors' hand by refusing to discuss land claims until the armed standoff ended, Ciaccia said. But Bernard Roy, a Montreal lawyer and federal-government negotiator during the crisis, said yesterday that Ottawa wanted the armed standoff to end first, fearing that Mohawk casualties would set off new confrontations between aboriginals and non-aboriginals across the country. "If there had been one drop of (Mohawk) blood, I fear for what would have happened," Roy said.

"What started off as a demand for a few acres of land escalated into a demand for full sovereignty," Ciaccia said.

Roy said he agrees with Ciaccia that aboriginal land claims must be resolved but at the time of the Oka crisis

Ottawa could not give the contested land to the Kanesatake Mohawks because the town of Oka would not budge.

At the centre of the crisis was land next to a golf course where the town council wanted to expand the course and build a high-ticket residential project. In response, the Mohawks of Kanesatake occupied a pine forest and were reinforced by the heavily armed Warriors' Society.

The last block of land at the centre of the crisis was only transferred to Kanesatake last month, Ciaccia said.

"If it had been done in June 1990, there wouldn't have been an Oka crisis."

Ciaccia, who retired from politics in 1998, said yesterday that the remaining land claims at Kanesatake and other aboriginal communities across the province are a festering wound that could provoke new crises unless they are resolved.

Ciaccia said he was appalled by the hawkish reactions of his colleagues and the police a decade ago. On hearing that the thunderous noise of low-level military reconnaissance flights could lead to stillbirths, a cabinet colleague suggested the number of flights planned be doubled.

The director of the SQ said casually that the Mercier Bridge, controlled by the Mohawks and wired with explosives, "would go down" as a consequence of a new attack on the Mohawks. The attack did not go ahead.

The SQ director also proposed offering "ladies of easy virtue" to the Warriors, as a negotiating ploy.

Ciaccia has been criticized for signing an agreement with a masked Warrior early in the crisis.

In his book he said he weighed the possibility of not signing the accord, but signed believing the agreement to allow food and medicine into the barricaded communities would advance the peace process.

"There were people on the other side who wanted to be martyrs," he recalled.

Ciaccia made a fortune as a real-estate lawyer for Steinberg Inc. founder Sam Steinberg in the 1950s and 1960s. When he agreed to become assistant deputy minister of

Indian Affairs in Ottawa in the late '60s, he took a 75-per-cent pay cut from his job with a corporate law firm.

On entering politics in 1973 with the Quebec Liberal government of Robert Bourassa, he was given a mandate to negotiate the James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement with Quebec Cree.

Defending that agreement, Ciaccia said yesterday that the Cree would not be contesting it today if the government had lived up to its commitments.

He subtitled his book: A Mirror of the Soul, saying the way someone reacts to Oka, "tells us who you are."

Ciaccia thinks Quebecers can reach realistic agreements on land claims and economic development if non-aboriginals become "more idealistic" and idealistic aboriginals become "more pragmatic."

"I think we could teach each other things," he said.