Photos: Air Task Force Mali Arrive in Gao, Mali

Thanks to the Canadian Forces Combat Camera, the first images are surfacing from OP Presence, Canada's contribution to the UN mission in Mali. 

Canada's contingent to the UN Mission in Mali includes a large Female presence. 

Canadian Forces members meet their German counterparts at Camp Castor, Gao, Mali. 

An RCAF CH-147 Chinook arrives at Camp Castor in Gao, Mali on July 15, 2018. Photo: MCpl Jennifer Kusche. Note the door gun MG in the Chinook for suppression during medevac or transport missions.

A CH-146 Griffon with door gunner arrives at Camp Castor in Gao, Mali on July 15, 2018. Photo: MCpl Jennifer Kusche

Opinion: Canada is Sending the Wrong Helicopters to Mali

By: Robert Smol, iPolitics 

In Mali, Canada’s flying pick-ups are no replacement for European helicopters

Canadian Forces door gunner keeps watch as his Griffon helicopter goes on a mission, February 20, 2017 in northern Iraq. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

"Will our next round of UN peacekeepers have to engage, yet again, in that perennial Canadian military tradition of sending our military into harm’s way with far less than what our allies might provide to their forces?"A

For the last four years the German peacekeeping contingents, as well as the preceding Dutch, have struggled though the military and political quagmire of Mali with heavily armed, combat-proven attack helicopters operated by specially trained crews.

Quite appropriate for what is already considered the most dangerous peacekeeping operation attempted by the UN in its 73-year history.

But Canada does not own any attack helicopters. Instead our aging Griffon utility helicopters will be taking on armed escort responsibilities alongside our larger Chinook transport helicopters. Griffons were never designed to be an attack helicopter except in a pinch.

So the question needs to be asked: if Canada is expected to carry on and match the efforts of the Germans and Dutch will we have comparable capability in our improvised “armed” helicopters or will our next round of UN peacekeepers have to engage, yet again, in that perennial Canadian military tradition of sending our military into harm’s way with far less than what our allies might provide to their forces?

National Defence Headquarters, perhaps predictably, would not respond to my requests for information on any possible armament, sensor, and protective devices being installed on our 22-year old utility helicopters. However during the Afghan and Iraqi deployments , when Canadian troops were under the protective shield of US and allied attack helicopters and fighter aircraft, our Griffons were occasionally photographed carrying a door gunner positioned in the aircraft’s opening with a C-134 machine gun.

This haphazard, Vietnam-era “gun in the door” protection is quite consistent with the Griffon’s purpose. The Griffon is classified as a Utility Tactical Transport Helicopter. Its primary role, according to the RCAF website is “transportation of troops and material” making it more of a flying pick-up truck as opposed to highly agile flying tank that is a modern attack helicopter.

We should be concerned because, in Mali we will be away from the protective, largely U.S military shield that our military, not to mention the Canadian public, have come to expect in recent years.

So what did the preceding Dutch and German contingents in Mali have by way of armed helicopter escort? What level of armed, combat capability would our improvised, souped up utility helicopters have to match?

From 2014 to 2017 the Royal Netherlands Air Force deployed A-64D Apache attack helicopters to protect its assets. The Dutch Apache is armed with a 30mm automatic Boeing M230 chain gun that has a rate of fire of 625 rounds a minute. It also has a Lockheed Martin/Boeing AGM-114D hellfire air-to-surface missile with a range of 8-12 km. Also, depending on the nature of the threat, the Dutch Apache can also be mounted with Hydra 70 general purpose rockets and the AIM-92 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

Equally lethal, the standard armament for the German Tiger attack helicopter, currently exiting Mali, include a 30 mm cannon with a rate of fire of 750 rounds per minute. The Tiger can also be equipped 8 HOT Trigat anti-tank missiles, and 4 Stinger or Mistral short range air-to-air missiles. Also standard for the Tiger are two pods carrying 22 SNEB 68mm rockets.

Also impressive are the defensive countermeasure systems that are fitted to these flying tanks maximizing their survivability and effectiveness. These include, on both the German Tiger and the Dutch Apache a radar warning receiver, laser warning, and a chaff/flare dispenser. Crew survivability is also enhanced through the armoured protection given them a chance to make it back safely even after taking on enemy fire.

Could it be that Canada’s modified utility-transport helicopters, being deployed to Mali, are fitted with comparable armament and protection? Since we all know what the answer likely is the question then has to be asked: what level of additional support and compensation for our military weakness and vulnerabilities could we demand from the primary peacekeeping contingents in Mali which today are Burkina Faso, Chad, Bangladesh, Senegal, and Togo?

With Germany and the Netherlands out of the conflict, and the United States disengaged, it is from these country’s militaries that we will have to rely on once Mali’s Islamic militants realize that America’s most humble and obedient military servant (Canada) is facing them with utility transports posing as attack helicopters.



Welcome back to peacekeeping Canada!

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The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

Peter MacKay: Peacekeeping is not Suited to Today’s Conflicts

By: Hon. Peter MacKay, Policy Opinions Forum

The future of Canadian peacekeeping was the topic of a November 2017 conference hosted by the Mackenzie Institute, a not-for-profit think tank on security matters. Its title was “Positioning for Peace Preservation: The New Form of Peacekeeping.”

This theme captures a mature, perhaps overdue admission that the Pearsonian peacekeeping era is well and truly over. That romantic vision of blue-helmeted troops must now join the other cherished military symbols and artifacts in the National War Museum in Ottawa. The principle of standing nobly between hostile forces to prevent conflict seems idyllic but detached from the modern world, where terrorist groups like ISIL, al-Qaeda and Boko Haram behead innocents, kidnap schoolgirls and wreak havoc through murderous nihilist means.


No one wants to avoid bloodshed more than those who have been closest to the sound of the guns. Our country has proudly produced warriors of the highest calibre and ability, who have made significant military contributions in combat to secure a more peaceful world. In addition, Canada has clearly earned immeasurable respect for peacekeeping since its inception. It is indeed part of our storied history that an unlikely hero, Lester B. Pearson, a diplomat at the time, helped negotiate a solution in the volatile Suez Canal crisis in 1956. It included “neutral” Canadian troops standing between potential warring factions until a settlement could be found. It worked. Peacekeeping, as it became known, was born, and Canada and Pearson rightly received much credit; in addition, Pearson won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Canadian peacekeeping’s high-water marks came in Suez and later in Cyprus, a mission that lasted until 1993. However, in recent times, the tragic missions in Somalia (1992-93) and Rwanda (1993-96) drastically undermined the view of traditional peacekeeping. The model is now associated with rising costs, increased risk, ineffectiveness, human rights failures and loss of life. Political and public enthusiasm for Canada to take on more of this type of mission has hugely decreased. The deeply flawed outcomes in Somalia and Rwanda were undeniably a serious blow to Canada’s reputation and the public’s perception of peacekeeping generally. Arguably, both missions were doomed from the get-go. They were ill defined and under-resourced, and they should never have been characterized as peacekeeping. In the midst of extreme poverty, famine and clannish blood feuds, the hostilities were intense, with violence and weaponry widespread. These were horrendous conditions on the ground for Canadians and others to contend with — and the farthest thing from peace. There was simply none to keep. Despite the best efforts of many Canadians and allies, failure was imminent in those two African nations.

Somalia and Rwanda led to a major rethink in most military circles on peacekeeping and on the need to adopt a more pragmatic posture. A new model was offered by NATO and other coalitions of allies, in more muscular missions like Bosnia (1992-95) and Kosovo (1998-99). These were more organized, better directed, had clear rules of engagement, and were certainly safer and more in keeping with traditional military objectives. These deployments had defined orders, discipline, heavy equipment, training and measurable tactical outcomes that were closely coordinated with diplomatic and development goals and among multiple members of allied nations. The best we can sometimes say at the close of a mission is that there is an absence of open conflict and a fragile, tenuous state of stability. Arguably, this is what we sought to achieve in Afghanistan (beginning in 2001), at tremendous cost in blood and treasure. Tragically, recent events show that with its troublesome neighbours and a resurgent Taliban, the future of the country is still far from secure.

I do not mean to diminish or tarnish peacekeeping overall and the ingenuity and valiant efforts exhibited by forces from the 1950s forward. But to maintain the mythology of peacekeeping as the answer to today’s conflicts is disingenuous and, I submit, dangerous. Canada’s glory days of peacekeeping are over, as sure as fixed bayonets and foxholes. To use a sports analogy, peacekeeping is like the era of hockey’s original six teams: while some may yearn for those good old days, the game has changed, and so have the players and the rules. Executing a peacekeeping mission today is more difficult and more deadly by factors of 100.

The Liberal government has been casting about in search of a peacekeeping mission for over two years now. The search appears to be driven more by the goal of keeping an ill-advised campaign commitment than by a genuine concern for ending conflict. For a while the destination of the next mission was rumoured to be an African nation, judging by the travels of the Defence Minister and the comments of the Chief of Defence Staff. Our last UN-led peacekeeping missions on the continent, in Somalia and Rwanda, went horribly wrong. If we replicate this outdated model in terrorist-riddled hot spots, it would be a recipe for disaster that sets Canadian forces up to fail.

Canada’s commitment announcement in November at a UN peacekeeping conference in Vancouver appeared to be a public relations exercise that landed flat and left many disappointed. The long awaited, much hyped roll-out was far less than what was expected. Prime Minister Trudeau had promised in the 2015 election that 600 troops and 150 police would be committed to a new UN peacekeeping mission. Yet all that was announced in Vancouver was the creation at a future date of a “rapid reaction force” of 200 persons (we already have DART, the Disaster Assistance Response Team), but no specific mission was announced for it or even a hint given of when a mission will be chosen. Trudeau committed to making helicopters available, although they are already in short supply for our own needs, and to add training capacity, including a new fund of $15 million for increasing female participation in security roles.


Canada’s commitment announcement in November at a UN peacekeeping conference in Vancouver appeared to be a public relations exercise that landed flat and left many disappointed.

The constant use of partisan language over the past two years, with references to Canada being “back,” and grand pledges delayed until well beyond the next election, are emblematic of a government that is not serious about robust defence and more concerned with re-election. Having backed away from leadership and the necessary heavy lifting, which would entail taking on a high degree of risk, cost and long-term commitment — for example, by taking part in the bombing runs over Syria to suppress the advances of ISIL and curtail the violent Syrian regime — we appear ready to pay others, train others and leave others to the hard, risky work of security building. That is not a return to our traditional role, it’s abandoning and shirking our responsibilities to our traditional allies. Some of the elements of the announcement were laudable: the commitment to include more women in security forces, and making equipment and training available to our allies. Yet it is far short of what was promised in 2015 and what was hoped for by the UN. “Condescending” and “tap-dancing around the difficult issues” was the apt description of one of our finest soldiers and peacemakers, General Lewis MacKenzie.

Another noble, well intended and, again, Canadian-led initiative that has lost some of its lustre is the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, known as R2P. It calls for UN intervention if a nation proves incapable of protecting its own population from harm. The UN version is a watered-down variant of article 5 of the NATO treaty, which binds the alliance’s members to come to the defence of any country that is attacked. Like peacekeeping, R2P is becoming tarnished: overwhelmed by the bureaucratic inertia emblematic of the UN or overruled by deadlock at the UN Security Council. Only robust force, clear red lines and measurable actions have any real meaning in the modern violent and volatile world, where peace can be elusive.

When, where, what and how to deploy should clearly be defined predominantly by the military, overseen and directed by democratically elected bodies. There is no doubt that our extraordinary Canadian armed forces and all our engaged security forces are up to the challenge. Their remarkable abilities have been demonstrated in recent joint operations. Joint Task Force 2 and the Canadian Special Operations Regiment have shown their superior discipline and surgical strike capabilities.

It is when the military operational decisions are thwarted or overtaken by political decisions (often geared to domestic audiences) that the inevitable troubles for those in harm’s way begin. The same can be said of military procurement: witness the Sea King helicopter replacement debacle in the 1990s, soon to be overtaken as the worst example by the current fiasco of fighter jet replacement.

Today’s overwhelming firepower has overwhelming impact; it is highly expensive yet effective. It is speed and lethality in balance that win the day, as in the first Gulf War and Libya. New technology for use in conflict zones — such as highly precise drones, better signals intelligence, life-saving explosive detection and removal equipment, and even missile defence and early warning systems — is a critical area of investment for Canada. Lest we forget, our history, reputation and identity include full-scale fighting when the cause is just, as recently as the last decade. This kind of engagement requires much different preparation than any type of peacekeeping.

Our open society, tolerance and inclusivity are admirable, attractive features of Canadian society, as are our rule of law, human rights protections and welcoming immigration system. All these are still a work in progress. But make no mistake: they also create openings and vulnerabilities for many reasons — reasons to be proud of, even to celebrate — but we must be vigilant in their preservation, for what makes us great also makes us a target. All that we love about Canada leaves us wide open and attractive to attack, especially by battle-hardened ISIL fighters, beaten and returning to the hated Western country they left. They come back with a distorted sense of vengeance and twisted values, and brandishing the deadly knowledge of how to hit soft targets. These are not individuals who can be rehabilitated, as was recently suggested by the Prime Minister; rather, they should be prosecuted and imprisoned, where evidence warrants.

We simply cannot afford to minimize the challenges or be naive about what it takes to create peace in today’s world. Security and defence are not areas where we can afford to cut corners on the significant investment of resources required to keep citizens safe. Our entire security apparatus of CSIS, CSE, the RCMP and all our law enforcement in addition to our military — and, I believe, our legal system, including antiterrorism laws — need vigilant attention, more nonpartisan support and ample funding, like the 2 percent of GDP for defence spending requested by NATO. Virtue signalling on security matters when citizens’ lives are at risk is anything but virtuous. Neglect and putting partisan politics ahead of principled decisions can put many in harm’s way. That is not the Canadian way.

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Hon. Peter MacKay, PC, QC, is the former justice minister and attorney general, minister of defence, minister of foreign affairs and the minister responsible for the Atlantic Canada Opportunities Agency. He is now a partner with the Toronto-based law firm Baker McKenzie.

This essay was originally published by the Policy Opinions Foum on January 24, 2018

Published on CAF Dispatch - June of 2018

Canada in Mali: What Exactly is the Mission?

By Charlie Pinkerton, iPolitics 

The Canadian Armed Forces are just weeks away from deployment to Mali, where they will replace a German helicopter contingent as part of the United Nations’ peacekeeping mission in the country.

Questions have been raised about whether there is any peace to keep in the central African nation. So what is the mission?

Some background: During the 2015 federal election Justin Trudeau promised that a Liberal government would involve Canada in peacekeeping again. In 2016 the government said up to 600 Forces troops would be made available to peacekeeping efforts.

French soldier inside a military helicopter in Gao, northern Mali, Friday, May 19, 2017. is keeping the door open to sending more helicopters to Mali to support Canada's peacekeeping mission there. Christophe Petit Tesson / THE CANADIAN PRESS

The government announced in March that Canada would join the Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (also known as MINUSMA). It has since said that between 200-250 troops will deploy initially. The “flexibility” exists to deploy more, said Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan. “We can go up to 600 and we will make adjustments,” he said in May.

In Mali: Canadian troops will fly two Chinook transport helicopters and four Griffon armed escort helicopters. Forces will be armed on base and, in some circumstances, on board the helicopters. Weapon systems on the Griffons will be similar to those used in Afghanistan, according to Lt.-Gen Al Meinzinger, the commander of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Canada’s Griffons were outfitted with side-door machine guns and Gatling guns in Afghanistan.

The defence minister has not closed the door on the possibility that the number of helicopters that Canada sends to Mali could change.

While serving as the commander of the Canadian Joint Operations Command, Lt.-Gen Stephen Bowes clarified to the House defence committee what Canada’s role in Mali would be, saying that “it’s air medical evacuation, logistics support and transportation.” Bowes has since moved to a position with Veterans Affairs Canada.

Meinzinger said that Canadian troops will be supported by about 500 Germans in the base camp in the Gao region of Mali, where they’ll operate from.

Canadian soldiers are committed to MINUSMA for a year.

Since the mission began in April 2013 it has been the deadliest UN peacekeeping mission. In total, 169 MINUSMA peacekeepers have been killed.

Two German pilots were killed last year in a helicopter crash near Gao. A report conducted by Germany’s Defence Ministry showed the crash occurred because the helicopter’s autopilot had been set incorrectly.

A contentious aspect of the mission has been Forces rules of engagement when encountering child soldiers. The Forces published a joint doctrine last year on how to face young combatants. It was the first time the Canadian military has published a directive that specifically addressed encountering child soldiers.

Bowes told the Commons defence committee in April that Canadian Forces members would follow “Canadian rules of engagement” in MINUSMA.

“They will have the authority to defend themselves,” the defence minister has also said.

Discussion dividing Canada’s government and its opposition has largely been over whether Mali is considered a war zone.
At the G7 summit just weeks ago, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres told CBC News that Mali is a war zone and that casualties are “possible.”

Bowes called it a “complex conflict zone.”

Sajjan has called the conflict “complex and dangerous” and repeatedly said it’s important to consider the “realities” of modern peacekeeping.

Bowes said in April that Canada would begin its involvement in Mali in June with most of its main troops entering before the third week of July and Germany’s helicopters exiting in August.

Sajjan said last month that Forces would enter Mali in July but that they would put safety over meeting deployment deadlines.

On Peacekeeping, Canada is Failing the Global Community

By: Ian J. Keddie, Macleans Magazine 

General Jonathan Vance, Canada’s chief of defence staff, has a confident and relaxed way about him. But when he opened the second day of the Conference of Defence Association in Ottawa last week, and then answered questions from reporters on the country’s peacekeeping operations, the tone seemed wrong for the moment. “The UN has spaces available for nations to contribute to, should they wish. We understand what those spaces available are,” said Gen. Vance, adding that the government is in preliminary stages of planning such a deployment “We are in what I would call the planning stages to deploy forces. We’re trying to match best fit to best missions with the capability that we have. So it’s a work in progress, but it’s going well.”

The optimism of that tone came in stark contrast to the many speakers who highlighted the government’s failure to carry through with a 2016 pledge to deploy up to 750 personnel on international peacekeeping missions in addition to the 112 which were deployed at the time of the announcement. The most recent figures from the United Nations show that Canada’s commitment has reached an all-time low, and now stands at just 43 peacekeeping personnel at present. This represents the lowest number of uniformed personnel and lowest global military contribution for Canada since 1956.

The Liberal government maintains that it is merely awaiting the right opportunity to deliver on 2016’s promises. Gen. Vance’s suggestion that Canada is in the “the planning stages to deploy forces” maintains the idea that the government is still searching for deployments that Canadian forces can support and the Prime Minister’s own speech at the UN Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial in Vancouver in November 2017 outlined the need for Canada to deliver more. “We are making these pledges today, because we believe in the United Nations and we believe in peacekeeping,” the Prime Minister said at the time, as he called for a new era in peacekeeping.

But rather than delivering a reinvigorated peacekeeping effort, two years of handwringing by the Trudeau administration has seen Canada revert to a pre-Pearson era level of deployment. Experts agree that decision-making has become paralyzed and that the Liberal government seems reluctant to follow through on its promises. “Canada has let the UN down,” said Dr. Walter Dorn of the Canadian Forces College. “If you actually look at the pledges we would have more than 750 uniformed personnel and we’re down at an all-time low. It’s a disappointment and at this point, you could say it’s a broken promise.” Dorn puts the blame at desks of the most senior figures in the current administration: “I think it’s at the cabinet level: the Prime Minister, the Defence Minister and the Foreign Minister just haven’t got their act together.”

Even more disappointing is that the original troop pledge was sold as a sign of Canada’s commitment to the international community. “This government came to power with the promise of doing real peacekeeping and then has repeatedly told the UN and lots of countries that might want to vote for Canada for the next security council seat,” said Stephen M. Saideman, the Paterson Chair in International Affairs at Carleton University.

While many of the conference attendees condemned the low number of peacekeeping personnel being deployed, there was disagreement over how Canada should move forward. Dorn suggested that operations in Africa could be more palatable, pointing that peacekeeping operations in Mali are less dangerous and less expensive than most people perceive. “The fatality rate is a factor of five less in Mali (when compared to Afghanistan), and the type of equipment you need is less expensive and the UN pays back a substantial portion of your costs,” he said. But Saideman thinks that missions in Africa would prove challenging for Canadian forces. “As far as I understand it, most of the places that Canada would be asked to go in Africa are actually quite risky. The Japanese have pulled out of the South Sudan because it’s falling apart. The DRC—600 troops would be a drop in the bucket. The people that I know that have gone to Mali suggest that it’s a counterinsurgency war, it’s not a peacekeeping campaign.” Saideman added that Canada already missed an ideal opportunity: “If I was advising the government I would’ve told them to go to Colombia last year, because I think that would’ve been a far less risky endeavour, but that would have made a contribution.”

If the government is going to continue to wait for a less risky peacekeeping opportunity, then there might not be any decision in the near future. If Colombia was the ideal deployment, as Saideman suggests, then it is unlikely Canada will find something suitable in the current trouble spots of the world. Trudeau and his cabinet have made numerous pledges of peacekeeping to the international community but those promises will fall on deaf ears, particularly to countries such as India, Pakistan, and Ethiopia who contribute thousands of troops to UN missions. It will likely come down to voters at home as to whether or not the government should take its pledges more seriously though.

With such a low number of peacekeeping personnel on operations, it is hard to believe the government can ignore the glaring contradiction in rhetoric versus action for much longer. If Canada truly wants to contribute to peace operations on a meaningful scale once again, it comes with an inherent risk. While there may be some missions that are better suited for Canadian expertise and equipment, it’s clear that the government has given every option some consideration over the last couple of years—but any further delay clearly rests on the desks of the Foreign, Defence, and Prime Ministers.

Plan to send Canadian Peacekeepers to Colombia Fizzled

By: Murray Brewster, CBC News 

Canada had a small military team on standby to take part in a high-profile United Nations peacekeeping mission in Colombia, but foot-dragging on Ottawa's part saw other countries fill up the mission's ranks instead, newly released documents reveal.

The army "identified, screened and trained" 19 Spanish-speaking soldiers to act as ceasefire observers in the South American country, which is emerging from five decades of guerrilla war.

The troops were, according to a briefing note prepared for Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, ready to go by October 2016 — just weeks after the Liberal government committed itself to deploying 600 troops and 150 police officers in support of UN-led peace operations.Play

The soldiers remained on standby for months.

A decision to deploy them, however, remained in limbo — until it was too late.

"No [Canadian Armed Forces] nominations were submitted to the UN and, as of March 2017, the mission is currently fully manned with no foreseen additional requirements from Canada," said the March 30, 2017 briefing note, obtained by CBC News under access to information legislation.
Worries about troop security

Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jonathan Vance, the country's top military commander, said the mission was considered — but he had concerns about how well protected the troops would be in the event of trouble.

He said concerns about force security are "a good reason for everything as to why we do, and do not, do everything the UN asks of us."

Chief of Defence Staff General Jonathan Vance. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

Canada did end up deploying two police officers to support the special political mission in that country.

Ultimately, it would have been up to the federal cabinet to decide whether to participate in the mission.

The UN mission in Colombia was one of the more benign deployments available to Canada in terms of mandate and risk.
A lower-risk mission

Over 450 unarmed soldiers, in 40 locations, acted as observers supervising the disarming of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) — a mission that is more in line with the Canadian public's perception of peacekeeping.

The mission certainly presents a lower risk to peacekeepers than the tribal, jihadist-fuelled bloodshed in Mali, or the civil war in the corruption-tainted Democratic Republic of Congo — both sites of current UN peacekeeping operations.

"It is startling that we had the personnel trained and we didn't deploy them," said Walter Dorn, a professor at the Canadian Forces Staff College.

He said Canada's failure to send soldiers to the one of the most auspicious missions on the UN's plate throws into doubt the Liberals' election pledge to return to peacekeeping in a meaningful way.

Since the 2015 election of the Liberal government and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's declaration that "Canada is back" on the world stage, the UN has offered Canada a number of marquee posts and opportunities.
Multiple missions rejected

According to documents uncovered last summer by CBC News, Canada was: offered command of the mission in Mali; asked to deploy troops to replace the Dutch contingent in the same country; bombarded with multiple requests for helicopter support and; asked to establish a police training mission in the volatile Central African Republic.

All of the requests were turned down, much to the frustration of UN officials and diplomats with the European Union who were courting Canada on separate, but complementary peace deployments and training in the region.

"The cabinet is just not able to make up its mind about where it wants to deploy," said Dorn. "It seems there is eagerness at some levels of the Canadian government, but not others."

Last fall, Trudeau laid out the Liberal government's roadmap for rejoining peacekeeping, which includes phased deployments of transport planes, helicopters, military trainers and a 200-strong rapid reaction force over a five-year period.

Where they'll go, and when, is still the subject of discussions.

The federal government also made an important social commitment to deploy more women peacekeepers and to end the exploitation of child soldiers.

Dorn said Canada's contribution to UN missions is at an all-time low.

At the end of December, Canada had only 43 peacekeepers deployed on various missions.

Canada Closes Out 2017 with Reduced Peacekeeping Numbers

By: Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press 


OTTAWA—Only weeks after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canada was prepared to offer helicopters, aircraft and hundreds of troops to peacekeeping, the number of Canadians on UN missions reached a new low, new figures indicate.
Canada had a total of 43 peacekeepers deployed around the world at the end of December 2017, according to the most recent UN numbers, down from 62 in November of the same year.

The decline, largely the result of a reduction in the number of Canadian police officers deployed to Haiti, means Canada has fewer peacekeepers in the field than at any point since the 1950s.

That’s despite the Liberals having repeatedly promised to ramp up Canada’s contributions to UN missions — most recently by pledging equipment, troops and trainers at a peacekeeping summit that Canada hosted in November.

Canadian and UN officials say the two sides are working to identify when and where those pledges will be utilized, but they have declined to provide any timeline for when a decision will come.

Walter Dorn, an expert on peacekeeping at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto who has been tracking the numbers, said the current situation is shameful given the Trudeau government’s repeated promises.

“Canada is at its lowest level since Lester B. Pearson proposed the first peacekeeping force in 1956,” Dorn said. “This is hypocrisy, coming after the promises and lofty rhetoric of the Vancouver ministerial.”

The Liberals promised during the last federal election to renew Canada’s commitment to peacekeeping, and pledged in August 2016 to make up to 600 troops and 150 police officers available for future missions.

Canada had 112 peacekeepers in the field at the time of that promise.

Trudeau announced in Vancouver in November that Canada was offering helicopters, a transport aircraft and a 200-member rapid reaction force for use on UN missions, as well as trainers to help other countries with peacekeeping.

But aside from planning to base the transport aircraft in Uganda, the commitments did not come with any specifics.

Canadian and UN officials sat down to discuss specifics in December, sources have told The Canadian Press, but no decisions were made and Global Affairs Canada and the Department of National Defence are still weighing options.

Chief of defence staff Gen. Jonathan Vance told The Canadian Press in November that the military and government would take their time identifying the right missions for Canada.

Vance compared the process of analyzing missions to building a puzzle, as military planners seek to match the troops and equipment Canada has on offer with the UN’s needs and any potential threats.

The 43 Canadian peacekeepers include 20 police officers, 14 military officers and nine “experts on mission,” which can include police officers, military personnel and civilians.

Six of those peacekeepers are women, including five police officers and one military officer — a problem, said Dorn, considering the government’s rhetoric on pushing other countries to deploy more women peacekeepers.

Canada’s Contribution to UN Peacekeeping Reaches New Low

By: Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press

OTTAWA—The Trudeau Liberals may have promised to ramp up Canada’s role in peacekeeping, but new UN figures show there were fewer Canadian peacekeepers in the field last month than at any point in recent memory.

The revelation comes as Canada prepares to host a major peacekeeping summit in Vancouver next month, raising fears the country will be badly embarrassed unless the numbers start rising — and fast.

The Liberals promised last summer to make up to 600 soldiers and 150 police officers available to the UN for future peacekeeping missions, but have yet to make any concrete commitments.

The intervening year has instead seen a steady decrease in the number of Canadian blue helmets and blue berets deployed around the world, from 112 peacekeepers in August 2016 to 68 last month.

The decline is largely attributed to 44 fewer Canadian police officers being deployed to Haiti, where the UN is closing down its 13-year stabilization mission in favour of a much smaller effort.

Walter Dorn, an expert on peacekeeping at the Canadian Forces College in Toronto who has studied the numbers, says the result is the smallest Canadian contribution to peacekeeping since at least 1990.

By comparison, Canada’s smallest contribution to peacekeeping under Stephen Harper, who made no secret of his dislike for the UN, was 88 soldiers and police officers in October 2014.

“The government is at an all-time low while saying that it wants to re-engage in peacekeeping,” Dorn said. “Its numbers are lower than the Conservatives ever were.”

Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland’s spokesperson, Adam Austen, said the government remains convinced that Canada has an important role to play in peacekeeping and that it is committed to do more.

Defence Department officials have drawn up a list of possible missions for the government to review, sources have told The Canadian Press, one of which would involve sending transport helicopters to Mali.

While the Liberals reportedly hope to make a decision before the upcoming peacekeeping summit in Vancouver on Nov. 14-15, there is no certainty they will.

The government has repeatedly said it will not be rushed into a mission, which Austen repeated on Monday, saying in an email: “We are doing this carefully and thoughtfully, as Canadians expect.”

But the UN expected last year when it agreed to let Canada host the peacekeeping meeting that Canadian troops would already be on the ground.

The summit, to be hosted by Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, is only supposed to be open to officials from countries that have made concrete pledges to peacekeeping missions.

UN officials and foreign diplomats have expressed varying degrees of frustration and disappointment with the Liberal indecision over the last year, which Dorn echoed on Monday.

“Not only has Canada not lived up to its promises, it has actually decreased its contribution,” he said. “Canada is setting a poor example as the host for a pledging conference.”

The fact there are any Canadian peacekeepers in the field may come as a surprise to many people.

While the Liberals promised a return to peacekeeping during the last election campaign and again last year Canada has, in fact, continued to contribute soldiers and police officers to UN missions for decades.

But last month’s numbers continue a trend of declining participation that has seen Canada move from being one of the largest contributors to peacekeeping in the 1990s to the bottom half of the pack today.

There has also been a gradual shift from deploying Canadian military personnel to police officers; of the 68 Canadian peacekeepers in the field last month, 40 were police.

Canada May Be Unwelcome at Peacekeeping Summit which it is Hosting

By: Lee Berthiaume, The Globe and Mail 

There are growing signs that Canada won't meet the criteria for attending a November peacekeeping summit in Vancouver, even though it is the host country.

The price of admission is clear in leaked UN documents obtained by The Canadian Press: Defence ministers attending must be ready to pledge specific forces to the UN, if they haven't already done so.

Canada has yet to make any definite pledge, despite being the host of this year's summit, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wouldn't commit Wednesday to a decision before mid-November.

The uncertainty over Canada's plans before the meeting has prompted renewed frustration and disappointment from the UN and various allies, some of whom are losing faith in the Liberal government's promise to support peacekeeping.

The UN documents lay out the overarching agenda and goals of the defence ministers' two-day meeting, which starts Nov. 14.

Those include looking at ways to better prevent conflict, protect civilians and ensure soldiers and police officers on peacekeeping missions are well trained.

The summit will also put a heavy emphasis on increasing the number of female peacekeepers and incorporating gender perspectives into operations.

Yet the real focus of the meeting will be on taking stock of the specific pledges those countries in attendance will have already made, or are prepared to make, to UN peacekeeping operations.

That is why participation in the summit, the third of its kind after the inaugural event in Washington in 2015 and last year's meeting in London, is only open to those countries that have made pledges.

"The participants of the 2017 ministerial will be defence ministers from all member states that have pledged and progressed capabilities or that are ready to make a new pledge," the document says.

It goes on to detail the specific equipment and troops that the UN needs for various missions, with "critical gaps" in the peacekeeping missions in Mali, South Sudan and Haiti.

Trudeau said Wednesday that Canadians expect his government to take its time before sending troops in harm's way and he wouldn't commit to a decision before the time of the Vancouver meeting.

"We need to make sure that we're doing it right, that we're doing it in a thoughtful way and that it's the right mission," he said in St. John's, N.L. "We will take the time necessary to do it properly."

The Trudeau government announced with much fanfare last year that Canada would provide up to 600 soldiers to future UN peacekeeping missions, but it has yet to spell out any details.

Early signs pointed to Canada sending a large number of troops to Mali and trainers to various other African countries to help their militaries become better at peacekeeping.

But the Liberals have instead waffled for over a year on where to deploy, except to send two police officers to monitor the peace process in Colombia in February.

Multiple officials at the Defence Department have said the file is out of the military's hands and now rests with Global Affairs Canada and the Prime Minister's Office.

The government's foot-dragging has long frustrated UN officials and allies, but there was always an expectation that a decision would at least be made by the Vancouver meeting.

Foreign diplomats in Ottawa and UN officials in New York were scrambling on Wednesday to find out whether that was now off the table, even as they lamented the government's mixed messaging.

"Canada is making one promise after the other," said one diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "But there's nothing on the ground. So Canada is not delivering.

Canada's foot-dragging has hampered mission planning and left critical gaps in terms of personnel and equipment on the ground, the diplomats added, especially in Mali.

And they warned that some countries could end up sending lower-level officials to Vancouver if Canada isn't prepared to make an announcement at the peacekeeping meeting.

Royal Military College professor Walter Dorn, who has done extensive work on peacekeeping, worried that Canada was setting a bad example as the UN tries to rally support for peacekeeping.

"It shows poor performance in delivering on commitments," Dorn said. "And performance is one of the principles this conference is supposed to uphold."

"Peacekeeping" Mission Must Start With Exit Strategy - Warns CAF

By: Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Make sure you have a plan to get out before you actually get in.

That is one of the main messages of an internal paper that military officials prepared last summer as they considered the challenges associated with the Liberal governments' promised return to international peacekeeping.

The paper also warns about the need to clearly explain why whatever mission the government chooses is in the national interest and expresses real concerns about the threat posed by terrorism.

The July 2016 paper was prepared by the strategic joint staff, which provides analysis and advice directly to the chief of defence staff, and was obtained by The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act.

It emerges as the Liberal government continues to dither over where to send up to 600 Canadian peacekeepers, despite pressure from some allies as well as the UN for a decision.

The Liberals had been leaning toward — but have since waffled over — sending troops to the African nation of Mali, where more than 100 peacekeepers have been killed, many in terrorist attacks.

The government won't say when it will choose a mission, or why it is dragging its feet, but the issues and concerns raised in the paper may explain part of the delay.

One is the need to start thinking about an exit strategy even before the first troops arrive.

The paper notes that while countries like Canada often want to make only short-term contributions to UN missions, history has shown that there is often "significant pressure" to stay longer than expected. Canadian soldiers joined a UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus in 1964 and stayed until 1993.

"From the outset of planning, consideration should be given to the sustainment and eventual withdrawal from the (operation)," the paper reads, adding that leaving is often "a delicate mission to execute."

The government was encouraged to essentially line up other countries to step into the breach once Canada's commitment expires — a task that could be easier said than done for a mission like Mali.

Part of the reason Canada has faced international pressure to go into Mali is because some of the European countries already there have had trouble finding replacements.

The paper also says that moral arguments about peacekeeping being the right thing to do aren't a good enough reason for deploying troops on specific missions.

"There is a legitimate moral component to this discussion, namely that Canadian participation … is the right thing for a nation with Canada's good fortune, wealth and means to undertake," the paper says.

"But the discussion must be wider than a moral one in order to define the national interest in more tangible terms and to provide some balance by measuring the risks and rewards."

The Liberals have said expanding Canada's participation in peacekeeping serves the national interest by contributing to a more peaceful and stable world.

But government sources have admitted they must do a better job explaining why the Liberals are intent on peacekeeping — a task that will become even more important once a mission is chosen.

Much of the paper focuses on the new dangers that have crept into peacekeeping, with officials noting that missions "are higher-risk and take place in more complex environments than before."

Special attention is paid to terrorist organizations, which the paper says "pose an undeniable threat in certain locations," especially when it comes to protecting troops and fulfilling a mission's objectives.

This is especially true for UN missions, the paper says, which aren't mandated to conduct counter-terrorism operations.

While Mali isn't mentioned, the findings are particularly relevant to the mission there, as groups such as terrorist groups such as al Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb have repeatedly targeted peacekeepers.

Other factors to consider before choosing a mission, the paper says, are whether it is effective or could be made effective and what impact it could have on Canada's international reputation and national security.

"Canadian participation . . . should be grounded in a well-conceived and articulated strategic purpose, delivered via a strategy nested with other Canadian efforts globally," the paper concludes.

"It must reflect the contemporary operating environment, is mandated to have protection of civilians at its heart and should seek to promote responsible burden-sharing within the international community."

CAF "Peacekeeping" Mission Decision is Delayed for Months

By: Bruce Campion-Smith, Toronto Star

OTTAWA—Canada’s high-profile military mission to Africa appears off the radar for now with a decision on a deployment delayed, perhaps until fall, the Star has learned.

Political upheaval among key allies — notably the United States, France and Great Britain — is cited as the reason why Justin Trudeau’s government has pushed back its high-profile pledge to return Canada to international peacekeeping efforts.

The federal government does not want to deploy soldiers on a potentially dangerous mission only to find other nations have decided their priorities lie elsewhere, leaving Canada “stuck with a legacy mission,” one source told the Star.

One official at defence headquarters offered a blunt assessment of where the peace mission currently stood on the list of priorities. “It’s not on the radar,” said the source.

When asked about the delay, officials point to the political shake-ups around the globe, notably in Washington, where the unexpected election of Donald Trump as president and his unpredictable tenure in office so far has forced Ottawa to rethink priorities on issues from defence to trade.

But political change bubbles in other capitals too. Britons go to the polls in a general election in June. France just saw the election of a new president, Emmanuel Macron, who beat out right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen. That country has a significant military mission ongoing in Mali, one nation cited as the likely destination for the Canadian deployment.

At home, other issues are competing for attention. Next week, the Liberal government will unveil its defence policy review that will lay out a new vision for the armed forces and the promise of additional funding to pay for it.

That vision, expected to provide policy guidance for the coming two decades, will almost certainly include a nod to the record of Canadian peacekeeping around the globe. But it’s not expected to include any new details of forthcoming missions.

The government’s attention has also been distracted as the political front as the man tasked to sell that new vision — Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan — is fighting for his credibility after being forced to apologize for inflating his role as an officer during an Afghanistan offensive.

And within defence headquarters, the fallout from the surprise January ouster of Vice-Admiral Mark Norman, the second-in-command of the military is still being felt.

All that means that a decision on a peace support mission is now not expected for months yet. That timing means it could be more than a year since the Liberal government laid out its promise of personnel and funding for a mission — 600 troops, 150 police officers and $450 million over three years for a new Peace and Stability Operations Program.

An announcement on exactly where Canada would deploy those personnel on a peace mission had been expected by last Christmas. But there was no word and nothing yet in the months since.

Trudeau said in March that his government would not be pushed into making a decision, saying that any deployment had to be done “responsibly and thoughtfully.”

But months later, the government seems no closer to a decision.

“I don’t have a timeframe on that,” Sajjan told the Star in a recent interview.

“All I can tell you is we will make that decision as a government when we feel comfortable that we have all the necessary information, that we have a whole of government approach and definitely from the military side, one that is going to have an impact on the ground,” Sajjan said.

He conceded that the changes around the globe were, in part, the reason for prolonged discussions about Canada’s role in a UN mission.

“We do need to look at . . . the changing environment. We have to make sure that when we add in and say we’re going to do ‘X,’ we have to make sure that ‘X’ is actually going to provide added value to the UN,” Sajjan said.

In the January cabinet shake-up that made Chrystia Freeland foreign affairs minister, one of the tasks handed the Toronto MP was to “increase Canada’s support for United Nations peace operations.”

Alex Lawrence, her spokesperson, told the Star that the peace deployment remains under active consideration. “Our government is committed to international peace operations, and we are currently considering what precise role Canada can play,” Lawrence said.

But Canada’s hand could be forced when Sajjan hosts an international summit on peacekeeping at the end of the year.

Sajjan used last year’s summit in London to herald the willingness of the Liberal government to reengage in peace missions, declaring that, “Canada is committed to leading international efforts in peace support operations.

“Conflicts today are more complex than ever before and we’re serious about being part of the solution — that’s the reason we’re bringing our resources and skills to the table,” Sajjan said in a statement issued for the 2016 summit.

It could be awkward for the Liberal government to go into this year’s summit with nothing to show for the statements it made more than a year earlier.

Defence analyst Dave Perry says the delay in deciding a mission has already likely forced military officers and diplomats back to the drawing boards to update the proposals they first presented to the government.

“I would imagine given how long it has taken since some of those initial inputs were provided that revisiting some plans because events and things on the ground have changed significantly would be part of the delay now,” said Perry, a senior analyst with the Canadian Global Affairs Institute.

“Some of the plans would have been submitted a half year ago. Hard to think they would still be viable today,” he said in an interview.

Is there Canadian National Interests in Sending Troops to Mali?

Globe and Mail Editorial

The federal Liberal government sometimes acts as if it absolutely must fulfil one ill-considered election platform promise from 2015.

During the last election, Justin Trudeau vowed to revive the peacekeeping of the 1950s, which Canada helped to invent. Now in power in the 21st century, the Liberals are tying themselves in knots to find Canada a nostalgic role in what is now referred to as "peace support operations."

The UN's MINUSMA mission is largely a counter-insurgency mission; which might make it a difficult sell when the Government was seeking a return to "Peacekeeping"  especially as the mission has already seen 114 fatalities. 

Whatever we call these operations, it is not clear that they serve the interests of Canada. They aren't the peacekeeping missions of old, in which Canadian soldiers in blue helmets patrolled an international border in support of a recognized ceasefire.

Read more: Dallaire says Canadian troops must be prepared for child soldiers

The modern operations, as described by the government itself, more accurately resemble dangerous counter-insurgency missions. They look nothing like what Canada did 50 years ago.

Nonetheless, Canadian cabinet ministers and high-ranking civil servants are being required to turn themselves into pretzels to give meaning to the government's peacekeeping aspirations – Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, former foreign minister Stéphane Dion, International Development Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau and now Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland have all been involved.

The African country of Mali has become a leading candidate for Canada's first mission. It was part of the former French empire in Africa, and France has been hoping that partly francophone Canada will contribute to the fight against jihadi extremists there as part of the United Nations "peace stabilization" campaign – a.k.a. counter-insurgency – known as MINUSMA.

The Canadian Armed Forces shed blood and lost lives during the decade-long mission in Afghanistan. Sending them into a similar campaign in Mali may further Liberal political interests. But does it serve the national interest? An especially disturbing aspect of the mission is the Malian jihadis' use of child soldiers. The Canadian Forces have no experience dealing with such tactics.

"We know we have to make the right decision for Canada," Prime Minister Trudeau said recently about "peace support operations." Sometimes, the right decision is to stay home.

CDS Flip Flops on African Mission

By: David Pugliese, Defence Watch

Michael Staples at The Daily Gleaner newspaper in Fredericton recently had an interview with Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance, in which some of the general’s interesting views emerged.

During the interview Vance claimed that all the discussion over the last several months about a Canadian military mission to Africa was just an “assumption” based on “people’s own assessments in the media.” “It’s been “over reported,” Vance claimed.

“Right now, I’ll tell you, honestly, there is no such thing as an Africa mission,” Vance told The Daily Gleaner. “It’s been over reported based on peoples’ own assessments in the media, in my view, that if you look at the world, it’s going to be an African mission. It’s an assumption.”

I wonder where all that “over reporting” came from? How did these media commentators ever, ever come to the “assumption” that the Canadian military was going to conduct an operation/operations in Africa?

Could it be in August when Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan told journalists that the Canadian military was looking at a number of countries in Africa to contribute troops?


Maybe.

Or how about this statement back in July?

“Internationally, the Army is at the forefront, managing conflicts around the world, contributing to operations in Iraq, building capacity with allies and partners in Poland, Ukraine, and very soon in Africa.”

Who said that?

Yes, that came direct from…..Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance.

When Should the "Blue Helmets" Walk Away?

Despite the fact that all signs point towards a Canadian deployment to Mali as part of Canada's "Return" to Peacekeeping - I came across this interesting essay about the UN's current operations in the Sudan, and perhaps it is time for the UN to consider other options. Something to consider before Canada deploys peacekeepers?

By: RICHARD GOWAN

The renewed crisis in South Sudan is turning into a decisive test for the United Nations. There is a growing international outcry over reports that local forces raped and killed civilians almost in front of UN peacekeepers. The Security Council has struggled to persuade the South Sudanese government to accept the deployment of an additional 4,000 troops with a robust mandate to stabilize the capital, Juba. Having initially rejected the proposal, which has strong African support, President Salva Kiir now seems willing to at least consider the reinforcements. There are tensions in the Security Councilover how to handle Kiir: the U.S. wants a tough line, but China and Russia insist on respect for that South Sudan’s sovereignty.

Kiir and his advisers profoundly distrust the UN. According to a leaked South Sudanese document they believe that “The UN Secretary General [Ban Ki Moon] has constantly advanced negative views against the Government of the Republic of South Sudan and its leadership,” and even pursued a “regime change strategy.” This is unjust. A few outside analysts have advanced ambitious and probably unworkable plans to turn South Sudan into an international protectorate on the Kosovo model. But the UN is largely struggling to stay on top of the crisis and get aid to the suffering, rather than plotting to overthrow Kiir.

Deployment map of UNMISS, United Nations Mission in the Republic of South Sudan (Map No. 4456R23, July 2016) - ©UN Cartographic Information Section

The grim reality is that, far from being in a position to depose the president, the UN has little choice but to work with him and his allies. The alternative could be a severe increase in violence, with peacekeepers in the firing line. This is neither a new or unique dilemma. In “The Peacekeeping Quagmire”, published by the Georgetown Journal of International Affairs exactly a year ago, I argued that the UN’s “greatest strategic weakness” in South Sudan was its ties to an insecure and often aggressive leader such as Kiir.

Yet, as I noted then, peacekeeping forces have ended up in similarly dangerous relationships with other leaders, including Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Joseph Kabila. While Kiir may be in the news today, there are also growing fears that Kabila’s efforts to quash political opposition and secure an unconstitutional third term as president in the DRC this year will also lead to serious violence – and once again, a large UN peace operation will be on the frontline trying to keep order.

These crises are a reminder that, in trying to understand why UN peace operations succeed or fail, it is necessary not only to look at the technical details of their mandates and functions (DDR, SSR, and so forth) but also at political personalities and dynamics. The 2015 High-Level Independent Panel on Peace Operations (HIPPO) argued that the UN must emphasize the “primacy of politics” in all its peacemaking efforts. But what happens when politicians are fundamentally unwilling or unable to work constructively with international peacekeepers? As I argued last year, and still believe today, there may be times and places where the UN has to walk away from countries where local political elites set ethically unacceptable conditions for keeping blue helmets on the ground, whatever the dangers of retreating.

This line chart shows the increase in the number of uniformed personnel deployed (red line) and UN authorized levels of uniformed personnel (blue line) of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) from its inception (August 2011) to present.

In January 2015, protests broke out in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in response to an attempt by President Joseph Kabila to circumvent constitutional term-limits and run for a third term as head of state. Security forces killed dozens. Kabila backed down but many Congolese and foreign observers thought this retreat is only temporary. The violence raised concerns not only about the DRC’s political future but also about Kabila’s relationship with the United Nations.

The UN has deployed peacekeepers in the DRC since 1999 and in July 2016 had more than 18,000 troops and police on the ground. It oversaw the president’s two previous electoral victories in 2006 and 2011, although his supporters were widely believed to have rigged the latter. UN troops have assisted the Congolese army, which has an ugly track record of human rights violations, in efforts to defeat militias in the east of the country. Yet if the UN and Kabila have developed a symbiotic relationship, it is also an abusive one. The President and his advisers have accused the peacekeepers of failing to fight hard enough in the east and accused the UN of “neo-colonization”.

The UN Stabilization Force in the DRC (MONUSCO) has become an emblem of the flaws of the UN’s broader peacekeeping project. The organization in July 2016 had more than 101,000 uniformed personnel worldwide, a record. Some of the largest and highest-profile UN missions, including those in South Sudan and Darfur, are trapped in quagmires of endemic violence and dysfunctional politics. UN contingents are often under-equipped and under-motivated, reducing their tactical impact. Yet the UN’s greatest strategic weakness in these cases is that it has become entangled in fractious and arguably unethical relationships with national leaders who, driven by greed or fear, have little real interest in stable, open and inclusive political systems.

The DRC is by no means the worst case. In South Sudan, President Salva Kiir has marginalized the UN mission (UNMISS) since the country slumped into civil war in December 2013. In July 2016, the peacekeepers are sheltering an estimated 200,000 civilians on their compounds but can do little more. In Darfur, troops and militias loyal to President Omar al-Bashir regularly harass peacekeeping patrols. UN officials have allegedly covered up cases where government troops have attacked international personnel.

The Security Council has regularly renewed the mandates for these missions and the UN continues to work with Kabila, Kiir and Bashir. Having aspired to instill democracy and good governance in countries like the DRC and South Sudan, the UN has ended up propping up unreliable and even autocratic leaders in the absence of better alternatives. Peacekeepers have to try to defend civilians from precisely the governments and security forces they are meant to partner with.

It might be honest to declare defeat in Darfur or announce that the UN will pull out of DRC or South Sudan if national leaders do not engage in less destructive politics. But the risk of renewed chaos after the peacekeepers hangs heavily over the Security Council: Nobody wants to close a mission and see massacres spread as the last peacekeepers leave. How did the UN get into this mess? Can it ever escape it?

FROM ELECTIONS TO AUTOCRATS?

To understand how the UN finds itself in its current predicament, as argued in previous articles, it is necessary to have a sense of both irony and tragedy. The irony is that the UN’s dilemmas arise from earlier efforts at democratization and humanitarian protection by the UN a little more than a decade ago. The tragedy is that in cases such as the DRC and the Sudans, UN officials, having lost whatever political leverage they initially had, are stuck trying to mitigate cycles of violence that they can foresee but not prevent. Some historical context is necessary here.

Twenty years ago, the UN’s reputation nosedived in the wake of Rwanda and Srebrenica. Blue helmet missions dwindled as alternatives such as NATO took the lead in the Balkans and swathes of Africa, including the DRC, toppled into conflict. Yet from 1999 on, the Security Council and then Secretary-General Kofi Annan collaborated to revitalize UN peacekeeping to manage crises and instill peace, above all in battered African countries such as Sierra Leone and Sudan. The UN also took on small trouble spots elsewhere, like Haiti, Kosovo and Timor-Leste. But Africa has been the priority: over 80,000 of the personnel now under UN command are on the continent.

The new generation of UN missions not only managed to bring a series of bloody conflicts under control but also looked like an effective force for democracy promotion. The peacekeepers facilitated technically impressive elections in cases such as Liberia and the DRC. “Helicopters were deployed, bulletins were printed and electrical generators were sent to remote voting centers,” former UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations Jean-Marie Guéhenno recalls of the Congolese effort in a new memoir, The Fog of Peace. “For the presidential elections, some 50,000 polling stations were opened.” Yet as Guéhenno underlines, the sheer scale of these processes obscured far deeper political challenges to democratization.

Almost everywhere the UN deployed in the early 2000s, it found it hard to grasp, let alone unpick, complex local political alliances and patronage systems. In some cases, power-brokers were able to delay elections for long periods: The UN sent a mission to Côte d’Ivoire with a mandate to prepare for polls in 2004, but was unable to deliver on this until 2010. Elsewhere, national leaders took advantage of elections to consolidate their power and do down their rivals. Guéhenno noted in his book that Joseph Kabila pushed his rival in the 2006 elections, Jean-Pierre Bemba, out of the DRC by force. “At enormous and unsustainable cost,” he adds, “the international community consolidated the presidency through elections and largely ignored the other institutions of state,” limiting parliamentary and legal restraints on Kabila.

This focus on bolstering a leader rather than more credible institutions points to a deeper challenge for the UN. Officials sometimes opt for a version of the Great Man theory of history, emphasizing the personal qualities and weaknesses of the leaders they have to work with. Alan Doss, a UN veteran who led the UN mission in Liberia in 2005-2007 and that in the DRC from 2007 to 2010, concludes that while peaceful states require strong institutions, “strong institutions also require strong men and women capable of making a qualitative difference to the way those institutions function.”

Doss contrasts the “particularly effective” Liberian president and former World Bank official Ellen Johnson Sirleaf (elected on the watch of UN peacekeepers in 2006) with the “reluctant communicator” Kabila. Recent research affirms that leadership is indeed an important factor in shaping weak states. But peacekeepers and aid agencies have arguably invested too much political capital in individual leaders, raising their sense of entitlement and compromising the UN’s impartiality.

Even the widely admired Johnson Sirleaf, a joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, has been accused of taking unfair advantage of her position. She appointed three of her sons to senior positions, including a senior position in the Central Bank. The tensions inherent in peacekeepers’ relations with national leaders were much more brutally illustrated in Liberia’s neighbor Côte d’Ivoire in 2010-2011. President Laurent Gbagbo did a fine job of neutering the UN mission in his country, reducing it to a bit part in internal political dialogues. When Gbagbo lost the long-delayed Ivorian elections in 2010, and the UN validated the results, he took the offensive, unleashing mobs on both his political foes and ill-prepared peacekeepers.

The UN mission came close to collapse in 2011 but, reinforced with Ukrainian attack helicopters, eventually helped to restore order in tandem with French forces. Gbagbo surrendered and was later transferred to the ICC. For a brief moment, the UN’s actions seemed to confirm its credentials as a robust defender of democracy.

Yet the Ivorian crisis may have been the exception to a rule: In general, UN missions fail to respond decisively to national leaders’ abusive tendencies. Leaders such as South Sudan’s Salva Kiir have found more effective ways to assert their leverage.

THERE MAY BE TIMES AND PLACES WHERE THE UN HAS TO WALK AWAY FROM COUNTRIES WHERE LOCAL POLITICAL ELITES SET ETHICALLY UNACCEPTABLE CONDITIONS FOR KEEPING BLUE HELMETS ON THE GROUND, WHATEVER THE DANGERS OF RETREATING.

The case of Kiir is striking because he once looked like a natural partner for the UN. Having first deployed peacekeepers to facilitate the end of the intra-Sudanese civil war in 2005, the UN oversaw an unexpectedly smooth independence referendum in the south in 2011. Almost 99 per cent of voters supported secession from Khartoum. The Security Council gave UNMISS an explicit mandate “to help establish the condition for the development in the Republic of South Sudan, with a view to strengthening the capacity of the Government of South Sudan to govern effectively and democratically.” This sounded like vote of confidence in Kiir’s leadership. But their relations with the authorities in Juba soured. The UN worried that the government was growing rapacious and unaccountable. The government complained that the peacekeepers were not doing enough to stop Sudan aiding to revolts on its territory.

James Copnall paints a nuanced portrait of Kiir’s position. “The man with ultimate responsibility for South Sudan,” he writes, “probably never imagined himself running a country.” John Garang, the charismatic leader of the South Sudanese independence movement, died in a helicopter crash in 2005. Kiir has had to keep his supporters satisfied. “Generals and politicians have built multi-story houses in South Sudan and abroad,” Copnall complains, “and drive cars the size of ordinary people’s huts. Corruption has become a defining feature of the new country.” Catering to such an avaricious political base, Kiir bridled at criticism from UNMISS.

These tensions peaked in 2013, when violence between Kiir’s supporters and backers of his former deputy, Riek Machar, spiraled out of control. Kiir scape-goated the UN, accusing it of bidding to form a “parallel government” while his supporters have harassed UNMISS convoys and allegedly shot down one of its helicopters (Machar’s forces have also threatened the UN, and there is a proliferation of armed groups that answer to neither leader). The government and its regional allies cut the UN out of peace talks in Ethiopia. The Security Council ordered UNMISS to focus on protecting civilians – including those on its bases – monitoring human rights and facilitating aid. The dream of close coordination between Kiir and the UN had given way to a more minimalistic focus on saving lives.

COMPROMISE AND COMPLICITY

It is hard to quibble with saving lives in a crisis. But what should the UN do over the longer term when its relations with national governments have gone off the rails? In many cases, international officials choose to temporize, hoping that they can nudge abusive leaders towards better governance over time. The leaders themselves may find this irritating (Joseph Kabila has refused to meet top UN officials for months at a time) but they do have incentives not to cut off relations completely. The presence of a peacekeeping force offers them some extra security and, perhaps most temptingly, may facilitate international aid. As Giulia Piccolino and John Karlsrud point out, the UN finds itself in a state of “mutual dependency” with these abusive leaders. If Bashir, Kabila or Kiir were to turn against the UN completely, peacekeeping would become impossible. But they would also lose “the opportunity to blame the international peace operation for everything that is not working.”

Nonetheless, abusive leaders can extract a high price from the UN for maintaining even the tenuous cooperation. In the DRC, Kabila has pushed the peacekeepers to assist a series of military offensives against militias in the east of the country. The UN has frequently worried that these are likely to cause unjustifiable human and political harm, and international NGOs have highlighted the presence of notorious alleged war criminals in Congolese officer corps. But UN officials have argued that it is necessary to play along to limit the damage of these adventures. “We were left with no choice, either we were in or we were out,” an anonymous official explained to Human Rights Watch after one notably brutal operation in 2009. “We believed that being on the inside would give us a better chance to protect civilians.”

The UN has tried to place some conditions, such as the vetting of senior personnel, on its Congolese military counterparts, creating new frictions. Kabila’s relations with MONUSCO reached a nadir after the UN failed to halt rebels from seizing the city of Goma in late 2012. The following year, the Security Council tried to regain his trust by mandating a special brigade to neutralize militias in the eastern DRC. Kabila also agreed to enter a regional political dialogue aimed at resolving the east’s problems, and the brigade was initially successful. Yet by early 2015, both the military and political processes were losing steam as Kabila prepared for the 2016 elections.

At least Kabila and MONUSCO remain nominally on the same side. In Darfur, the Sudanese government has sometimes treated the joint UN-African mission (UNAMID), launched with Western backing in 2007, as an enemy. The government views the UN with suspicion, believing that it aims to dismember the state. The International Criminal Court’s 2009 decision to indict President Bashir for war crimes in Darfur further poisoned relations. In early 2014, Foreign Policy released leaked UNAMID emails about attacks by the Sudanese military and pro-government irregulars on its personnel. The army even threatened to bomb a UN convoy. Yet the investigation found that, fearing a rupture, “the UN leadership has routinely withheld information linking Khartoum to threats – let alone violence – against UN personnel.”

UN officials insist that their presence does still provide some security for imperiled Darfuris. But this leaves deeper strategic questions open. At what point do efforts to maintain relations with abusive leaders and regime become morally and politically unsustainable? Does such collaboration contribute to protecting civilians over the long term, or does it simply allow abusive rulers to fortify their positions?

CONCLUSION: TIME TO GO?

UN officials are fully conscious of these dilemmas. They are able to identify how they might have been avoided. If the UN had not rushed to early elections in so many cases, or focused less on national politics and more on local conflict dynamics, it might not be in so many quagmires today. It should not have cultivated certain leaders so naively. The Security Council should never have sent peacekeepers to some places, like Darfur, at all. There are important lessons from these past mistakes for current and future UN deployments. But while the organization has recently been tasked with stabilizing Mali and the Central African Republic, it still has to grapple with its “legacy operations” in the DRC, the Sudans and West Africa.

Having tried to parlay with Bashir, Kabila and Kiir, the Security Council and UN officials are losing patience. While divisions between the West, Russia and China have complicated diplomacy in the Security Council, in March 2015 it established a sanctions regime for South Sudan that could be used to freeze Kiir’s assets. In February the same year, MONUSCO suspended its backing to a Congolese anti-militia operation over the involvement of two generals accused of human rights abuses. The U.S. has also leant on Kabila, with President Obama calling his Congolese counterpart to discuss how his “legacy as a leader who brought the DRC out of war and set it on a path of continued democratic progress would be consolidated by free and fair elections in 2016.” (A date for these polls remains to be set.)

If Kabila ultimately concludes that he cannot run for a third term in office – or hold onto power by a ruse such as delaying the polls – it will send a signal that national leaders cannot ignore international opinion and the UN indefinitely. But there is no guarantee that his successor will be vastly more accommodating towards the UN: the Congolese elite is divided between relatively pro-Western moderates and hardliners who might prove tougher on MONUSCO. If Kabila does go, it will also make Bashir and Kiir even more suspicious that the UN plans to oust them as well.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Kabila and Bashir launched parallel campaigns to downsize the UN forces on their territory in late 2014. The Congolese president proposed cuts to MONUSCO of a quarter (6,000 personnel) or more. Bashir called for plans for a complete end to the “burden” of UNAMID. In both cases, the Security Council responded with smaller cuts, but the UN set up a working group with the African Union and Sudanese authorities to explore exit strategies for UNAMID. It is likely that the UN’s representatives in the DRC, Darfur and South Sudan will face endless negotiations over further reductions to these missions. A series of gradual reductions could render the peacekeepers less operationally and politically robust, leaving them ever more vulnerable to bullying and manipulation.

The Security Council and UN officials should maintain, and be willing to threaten, the nuclear option of withdrawing peacekeeping forces more rapidly in those cases where national leaders grow too confrontational or autocratic. While it may be hard to imagine pulling peacekeepers out of countries where civilians remain at risk, there have to be moral limits to the sort of regimes that peacekeepers are asked to fight and die for. The longer the UN continues to prop up leaders and governments that treat the organization with contempt, the more that contempt will be deserved.

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Richard Gowan is a non-resident fellow at the Center on International Cooperation and a fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. | Twitter: @RichardGowan1

The Problems with Peacekeeping

By: Richard Warnica, National Post 

Jacob Kathman takes a Moneyball approach to political science. He studies huge data sets on things like civilian deaths in civil war and international military intervention. As a political scientist at the State University of New York in Buffalo, Kathman has spent most of the past decade using that big data to puzzle out issues tied to global peace and security. But he keeps coming back to one question: Does peacekeeping work?

It turns out to be remarkably hard to figure out. That’s partially because researchers can’t seem to agree on what “work” should mean. Does success in UN peacekeeping mean ending war? Sustaining peace? Reducing attacks on civilians? Is it about fostering stable government, fighting terrorists or protecting human rights? Maybe it means just not making things worse?

Like a lot of big data analysts, Kathman speaks about his own work with boundless enthusiasm but also endless caveats. He hedges and qualifies, and always makes the listener aware of the limits of what he can know. Still, in his own cautious way, he’s pretty sure he has an answer. “The general consensus,” he said in a recent interview, “is, for the most part, peacekeeping seems to improve the situation on the ground, generally speaking.”

In other words, yes, peacekeeping does work. At least according to the kind of analysis Kathman and his colleagues perform. What they’ve done over several studies is look at UN troop and police deployments, month by month, all over the world for many decades. What they’ve found is that, despite some high-profile failures, peacekeeping does tend to improve things on the ground. “In terms of reducing violence, maintaining stability, improving progress towards democracy and economic stability, peacekeeping appears to be a pretty positive way forward for many war-torn countries,” Kathman said.

Last week, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan announced that Canada will soon commit up to 600 troops and about 100 police officers to a United Nations peacekeeping missionin an undisclosed location in Africa. That would mark the most significant Canadian contribution to a single UN mission in a generation. The deployment would fulfill a major Liberal promise from last year’s election. It would also pivot the country in a rhetorical way toward a more big-L Liberal vision of what Canada should be in the world.

But Canada’s renewed interest comes at a difficult time for peacekeeping. The peacekeeping office, the largest in the UN, is in crisis. It is overstretched, undermanned and beset by serial scandals about sexual abuse, disease and self-serving bureaucracy. The system is in such trouble it could be at risk of a massive failure — a Srebrenica-like moment that could doom peacekeeping for decades, believes Richard Gowan, a peacekeeping expert in New York.

At the same time, research from Kathman and others suggests that, for all its many problems, peacekeeping can pay off. “The UN gets a pretty bad rap,” Kathman said. “But … it’s pretty surprisingly effective.”

And therein lies the problem for Canada. Peacekeeping can be abusive, bureaucratic, buck-passing, cholera-spreading and rape-ignoring. It also works. Can Canada re-engage and still keeps its soul?

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Peacekeeping in the public imagination tends to ping pong back and forth between poles of horror and heroism. The idea was dreamed up during the Suez crisis in 1956 by, among others, Lester Pearson, the Canadian foreign minister at the time. During the Cold War, division on the Security Council kept large-scale peacekeeping missions to a minimum. But after the fall of the Soviet Union, the age of mass peacekeeping began.

It didn’t last long.

A string of horrific failures in the early to mid 1990s soured many in the Western world on peacekeeping. In Canada, members of an elite airborne regiment tortured a local teenager to death while on a mission in Somalia in 1993. Early the next year, the UN failed to intervene in the Rwandan genocide, despite the pleas of Canadian Major General Romeo Dallaire, who was on the ground at the time.

In 1995, in what became the last straw for many in the West, UN peacekeepers allowed the wholesale slaughter of Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica. The attack served as a turning point in UN peacekeeping. “Prior to Bosnia, almost half of UN peacekeepers had been from Western countries,” Jean-Marie Guehenno, who served as the head of UN peacekeeping between 2000 and 2008, wrote in a memoir published last year. “When I left office, the West provided fewer than one in 10 of our blue helmets.”

Postmedia Network fileCpl. Tyler Gallant, of Petawawa, watches from the turret of his Coyote as a patrol of Canadian peacekeeping troops roll through the Bosnian village of Sanski Most in December 2003.

Peacekeeping didn’t stop in 1995, though it did slow down dramatically for several years. When it picked up again in earnest in the early 2000s, the missions looked different. The developed world continued to pay for peacekeeping, in Guatemala, Burundi, Haiti, Sierra Leone, East Timor, and more than a dozen other countries. But the soldiers increasingly came from poorer parts of the world.

By July 2016, more than 100,000 uniformed peacekeepers were deployed on 16 missions around the globe, at a cost of over US$8 billion a year. More than 30 per cent of those soldiers came from just four countries: Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. (Canada currently has a total of 103 soldiers, police officers and official observers deployed to five different missions in Africa and Haiti.)

The missions themselves had morphed, too. In some countries, including the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Darfur region of Sudan, peacekeepers were deployed into combat where “there was little or no peace to keep,” according to a major UN peacekeeping review published by the organization in 2015. They were tasked with broad mandates to carry out over vast geographical spaces with little high-calibre support.

In his book, Guehenno suggests peacekeeping has become, at times, a way for the Western world to deal with problems it cares about, just not that much. In Darfur, “the leading Western countries … wanted ‘to do’ something, but certainly were not prepared to deploy their own troops and did not want to pay too much,” he wrote. The result was an overstretched, poorly manned mission that had little hope of containing the violence across a huge area of land.

Darfur was no exception. The peacekeeping review panel found, in mission after mission, a “widening gap between what is being asked of United Nations peace operations today and what they are able to deliver.”

ED OUDENAARDEN/AFP/Getty ImagesTwo Dutch soldiers riding on an armored vehicle accompanying a Dutch-UN convoy of 56 engineering vehicles on their way to Lukavac in Bosnia-Hercegovina on Feb. 28, 1994

The answer, some believe, is more Western troops and better equipment. Others see a problem of scale and politics. But scope and structure aren’t the UN’s only issues. Scandals, too, have continued to dog the peacekeeping world. In the past several months alone, as Canada has ramped up its peacekeeping talk, several embarrassing, atrocious incidents have come to light.

In June, Anders Kompass, a veteran Swedish diplomat and longtime UN employee, quit the organization in disgust. Kompass blew the whistle on allegations of child sexual abuse by UN and UN-affiliated peacekeepers in the Central African Republic in 2014. For his trouble, he was hounded by his superiors, asked to resign, suspended and investigated as a leaker. Even after a high-level, independent panel — chaired by former Canadian Supreme Court Justice Marie Deschamps — cleared him of wrongdoing, he felt no option but to leave.

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Kompass thinks there’s something fundamentally broken about the UN. There’s an ingrained culture of secrecy and self-protection that allows horrific acts like child sexual abuse to go unpunished at the highest levels. “Instead of protecting the people, they are abusing them,” he said in an interview from his new home in Sweden. “And then no one is saying anything. It’s terrible.”

Kompass sees the same instinct — to circle the wagons — at play in another recent UN scandal. In August, the UN admitted for the first time that peacekeepers had been responsible for the introduction of cholera into Haiti in 2010. The disease has since killed more than 10,000 Haitians and made over 100,000 more desperately ill. The evidence linking the outbreak to a UN camp has been overwhelming, and public, for years, but the United Nations secretariat has, until this summer, done nothing but dodge.

“It was a very similar reaction to what I experienced,” Kompass said. “They just can’t recognize that they had (done) something wrong. They expect the rest of the world to do it, but they (won’t do it) themselves.”

AP Photo/Jason Patinkin, FileIn this July 25, 2016 file photo, some of the more than 30,000 civilians sheltering in a United Nations base in South Sudan's capital Juba for fear of targeted killings by government forces walk by an armoured vehicle and a watchtower manned by Chinese UN peacekeepers. According to reports from victims which have come to light Monday Aug. 15, 2016, South Sudanese troops, fresh from winning a battle against opposition forces in the capital, Juba, on July 11, 2016, went on a nearly four-hour rampage through a residential compound popular with foreigners, and the UN peacekeeping force stationed nearby are accused of refusing to respond to desperate calls for help.

Perhaps the most damaging, and disturbing, recent scandal, though has been playing out in South Sudan. According to a series of reports by the Associated Press, UN peacekeepers there have failed to intervene in a host of rampaging sexual assaults by government soldiers against both local and international women this summer. In one particularly brutal attack, on July 11, according to the AP, government troops broke into a hotel compound popular with foreign aid workers and spent four hours abusing the residents within. One aide worker was allegedly raped by 15 different soldiers.

“They shot dead a local journalist while forcing the foreigners to watch, raped several foreign women, singled out Americans, beat and robbed people and carried out mock executions,” the AP reported. “For hours throughout the assault, the UN peacekeeping force stationed less than a mile away refused to respond to desperate calls for help.”

Taken together, the three scandals would seem to confirm the worst fears of the UN-ophobic. Peacekeeping can appear, and indeed sometimes is, a horrific cluster of the ineffective, the abusive and the self-serving. But researchers, and even some critics, don’t think that necessarily means Canada should stay away. Without the renewed involvement of Canada, some believe, peacekeeping will only get worse.

“I think Canada is doing the right thing by re-engaging,” said Gowan, a non-resident fellow at New York University’s Centre on International Cooperation. But they have to do it the right way.

What that means differs depending on whom you ask. Gowan, for his part, sees the UN peacekeeping system as desperately overstretched, with peacekeepers on the ground in places where they have no credible local partners and no hope of restoring peace or protecting more than a fraction of the civilians at risk. “The system almost lives in denial about the number of civilians who have died on its watch in Darfur, South Sudan and the Congo,” he said.

Alex Urosevic / Postmedia News fileCanadian troops in Bosnia in December 2003.

Canada could make a tangible difference in some of those missions by providing high-end equipment or special forces —”no one wants, frankly, battalions and brigades of standard infantry from NATO countries,” he said. But it could make a larger impact by engaging in the system itself and pressing for widespread reform.

Charles Petrie, a former UN assistant secretary general, who helped write the 2015 peacekeeping review, agrees, to an extent. Petrie thinks the entire system needs to be rethought. The focus, he believes should be more on supporting political agreements and structures. He’d like to see smaller, more targeted peace-building missions, supported by small teams of highly trained soldiers able to react quickly to the worst humanitarian dangers. Canadian soldiers, he believes, could help form those rapid reaction teams.

Based on his research, Kathman thinks any increase in Canadian involvement would help. But if Canada does recommit in a serious way, he said, it would be better off focusing on a small number of missions rather than spreading its soldiers out. “The other thing we’ve found is that the more coherent a mission”— in other words, more troops from fewer countries — “the more effective those missions tend to be,” he said.

The consensus, though, seems to be that Canada can’t just focus on its own UN mission. “I think it’s much more than money and much more than troops,” Petrie said. “I think there needs to be a fundamental rethinking of how (peacekeeping works).”

***

On Thursday, the Canadian government announced a new reconnaissance mission to Mali, home to a large, unusually violent peacekeeping mission. The trip follows an earlier African excursion that saw Sajjan and a team of peacekeeping experts tour the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda.

The government insists that no final decision on a destination for Canadian troops has been made. But the Liberals do seem committed to the idea of sending a new wave of Canadian blue helmets somewhere, at some point soon.

“There’s a sense of incredible vulnerability across the UN system,” said Gowan. “And a sense that the organization has gone beyond its capabilities and some sort of reckoning is necessary.”

For better or worse, that reckoning is Canada’s now, too.