Future peace keeping likely means more combat, experts say

Col. Pat Stogran, who led the 3rd battalion of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry into Afghanistan in 2002, is a serving officer seconded temporarily to the peacekeeping centre. He agrees that there's a new world to be dealt with.

"We used to fight wars in three ranks and colourful clothing, then we went into trenches and then we went into mechanized warfare," he said.

Now the world sees insurgents able to use the Internet and stage attacks unthinkable a few years earlier.

"The world has changed and the nature of the threat has changed. You can't hope to go back to the old way of peacekeeping when conflict has changed so much."

Lew MacKenzie, the retired major general who led Canadian soldiers to occupy the Sarajevo airport in the 1990s, said the players have changed, as well as the methods.

He noted that a senior UN official said recently that the world body simply is incapable of running a major mission where deadly force is required. The UN has always had problems with its member states when it comes to authorizing the use of any force beyond simple self-defence.

Where the UN once negotiated with countries, MacKenzie added, today's peacekeepers must deal with far more shadowy groups.

"The change after the Cold War was that factions were involved," he said.

"They don't have a flag in front of the UN building. They don't have a delegation. If you make a deal with them and they break the deal, where do you go to find them? They've disappeared."

But whatever the methods, it will still be peacekeeping, said Mo Baril, a retired general, former military adviser to the UN secretary general and onetime chief of Canada's defence staff.

"War has changed and we still call it war," he said. "We haven't invented a new word.

"It seems because peacekeeping has changed some would like to give it another name, some would like to call it war.

"Well, it's not the same. You go to war to win a battle and win whatever aim you have.

In modern peacekeeping, he said, you may have to fight insurgents to a standstill, but that's not fighting a war.

One challenge, these experts say, is getting the Canadian public, which is caught up in what MacKenzie calls the peacekeeping myth, to recognize today's efforts are as important and praiseworthy as those of the past.

"Successive governments have perpetrated this peacekeeping myth, that it's No. 1 in our priorities, for government self-interest because you can chop defence budgets if you think it's just blue berets and pistols."

Chief Superintendant Graham Muir of the RCMP, who has served with the UN mission in Haiti, agreed that Canadians have to learn about the new model.

"They still effectively are consumers of yesterday's message."

He pointed out that when it comes to UN peacekeeping missions - outside of Afghanistan, which is a United Nations-sanctioned mission under NATO - Canada has more policemen serving than soldiers.

In the early 1990s, thousands of Canadian troops were serving in UN missions. Today there are fewer than 100.

Some of the students taking part in the Pearson exercise said they learned a great deal about running a peace mission in an unstable country.

For one thing, anything that can go wrong, will. The scenario is littered with figurative booby traps that pop up just as things seem to be going well: aid trucks are hijacked; avian flu breaks out; convoys are attacked.

"Every time we start to address one problem, something else comes up that's more pressing or seems more important," said Carrie Dyson of Toronto, a student at Humber College.

What has shes learned?

"There has to be greater co-ordination between military and humanitarian NGOs. What we are learning is to combine both efforts as much as possible."

Clayton Dennison from the University of Calgary said Canadians have to understand that peacekeeping may involve fighting.

"People think we're peacekeepers, that's been our tradition, but we have to understand that the world has changed and in a lot of regions of the world you're not going to have the armed combatants agreeing to let peacekeepers in.

"But we still have to go in anyway."

Stogran said he's confident Canadians will understand the new world.

"Canadians throw themselves into things, the First World War, the Second World War, NATO and the watershed peacekeeping missions of the 1990s because they're interested in keeping the peace, in international stability, being a part of it."

Read the full article here

Broken Link? If the link to the original article is broken or has been altered you can view the article by clicking here.