Further to the return of Canadians on the Bosnia-Herzogovina mission after 19 years. I received this very interesting letter this am from ED in NB
Adrian MacNair: Back to the good old days of peacekeeping failures
Posted: March 30, 2010, 1:40 PM by NP Editor
afghanistan, Adrian MacNair
A Coyote armoured recon vehicle in Bosnia-Herzegovina, 2001. Photo by Brian Walsh.
It would probably please Robert Fowler to hear that Canadian soldiers may go from fighting in Afghanistan to a more traditional UN peacekeeping mission in Africa after 2011. You remember the more traditional peacekeeping missions, dont you? Watching scores of people get slaughtered while standing behind United Nations barricades with strict rules of engagement.
But then again, deploying our military to where it can be least effective in curtailing human rights abuses seems to be what pleases Canadas troops out crowd the most. Canadas military just finished a 19-year deployment in Bosnia-Herzegovina with little fanfare back here at home. Indeed, you would be hard pressed to find Canadians who actually knew that Canada was involved in a UN/NATO mission in Bosnia at all.
If youll recall, Canadas forces were part of UNPROFOR, the UN peacekeeping force in Croatia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the Yugoslav wars in the 1990s. All the kings horses and all the kings men were still unable to prevent incidents like the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, the second genocide in as many years under a UN command. Yet Canadians are urging our military to return to missions like these. [For the record, Canadians didn't fail to prevent the massacre. The UN botched the mission by declaring Srebrenica a safe area under UN protection in 1993, but a 400-strong contingent of armed Dutch peacekeepers wasn't enough.]
Now the military is quietly looking at the command of the UNs largest peacekeeping mission in the Congo. The Congo mission is a nice, safe job for Canada, where there are already 20,000 international soldiers from 50 countries on the ground. Theres no nasty insurgents to root out, or enemy positions to strike, or IEDs to roll over. A perfect place to station our troops where they can be least effective.
The United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo (MONUC) was established in 1999. It is described as having entered a peace enforcement phase of operations. This sounds like a perfect fit for Canadas mushy middle, who understand the need for having a military, but dont want to see any soldiers actually get killed in combat.
According to the UN website, human rights are abused with impunity, corruption is endemic (and) heavily armed rebels continue to challenge state authority in the east. Jeez, it sounds almost exactly like Afghanistan, but that point will likely escape most of the troops out crowd. Another objective is to improve the lives of the civilians there and stop the widespread rape of young women and girls.
Well, as we leave Afghanistans young women and girls to the Taliban threat, Im sure theyll take great comfort in the fact well be trying to help women in the Congo. Besides, well be much less likely to try and and colonize the Congo, and we wont need to pay the blood and treasure required to make us feel good about the belief were helping people in a country far away that we dont otherwise give a damn about.
National Post
Adrian MacNair is a Vancouver writer and blogger.
Thank you for such an interesting Blog entry.
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Robby
