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TERRY GLAVIN ON MALI AND PEACEKEEPING.

With the announcement this week that Canadian peacekeepers will be headed to Mali perhaps as soon as August, Canada has finally come around to something like a consummation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s election campaign vow to revive this country’s purportedly starring role as champion and avatar of the United Nations’ blue-helmeted peace warriors.

With the long-awaited decision finally made, it should be useful to step back a bit for a clearer reading of the UN’s peacekeeping mandate, Canada’s peacekeeping legacy, and the strange way Canadians tend to rhapsodize about it all.

It is widely accepted that it is a sorry state of affairs that of the more than 90,000 personnel currently assigned to UN peacekeeping missions aroundtheworld,amerefew dozen of them are Canadians. This is routinely attributed to the warmongering frame of mind that Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper brought to questions about defence policy and troop deployment during his decade in office.

Maybe so, but during the Harper years the thing the UN wanted most from Canada was not a peacekeeping commitment but rather a contribution of battle-ready soldiers for Afghanistan. Besides, when Harper took over after 13 years of the Liberals in power, a mere 130 soldiers could be counted in a total UN peacekeeping deployment of 70,000 soldiers. Out of 193 UN member states, Canada ranked 51st in the list of contributing nations.

Canada’s peacekeeping paltriness is drawn into especially sharp relief in Cyprus, the arena of Canada’s longest-running and perhaps toughest conventional peacekeeping endeavour. I got an up-close look last summer during a visit with Major David Marcotte, Canadian Contingent Commander, United Nations Peacekeeping Force in Cyprus, Operation Snowgoose. By the time of my visit, Major Marcotte was not only the commander of the Canadian contingent, he was the sole member of the Canadian contingent.

Major Marcotte was kind enough to give me a guided tour of his section of the 180-kilometre demilitarized zone that bisects the entire country, separating the Republic of Cyprus from the Turkish-occupied zone in the northern third of the island. In Major Marcotte’s sector, the zone was untroubled but for the occasional trespass of Cypriot bird hunters.

This isn’t to say the UN’s presence on Cyprus is a trivial matter. Canadian soldiers arrived with the first contingent of UN peacekeepers in 1964, invited in by the newly-independent republic when civil war broke out between Greek Cypriots and the island’s ethnic Turks. After a coup d’etat and an invasion by Turkish troops in 1974, Canadian peacekeepers found themselves in the thick of it. Three Canadian soldiers were killed and 17 were wounded. All told, 28 Canadians were among the 160 UN personnel killed on Cyprus over the years.

These days, roughly 1,000 UN personnel from a dozen countries patrol the island’s time-warp Green Zone, which marks the extent of the Turkish incursion by the time of the 1974 ceasefire. When Major Marcotte arrived at the UN gates to pick me up in Nicosia last summer he was driving a ramshackle Renault Clio 2000 with a cracked block and 137,000 kilometres on the engine.

And now we’re off to Mali with about 250 troops and air crew for four CH-146 armedescort Griffon helicopters and two CH-147 Chinook helicopters for logistical support and medical airlifts. It’s a year-long commitment in a country torn apart by a variety of militias and jihadist forces. Mali is the most dangerous of the UN’s 16 peacekeeping missions. A House of Commons debate this week is expected to proceed with boring predictability. The Liberals say it isn’t a combat mission, the Conservatives say it will be, the New Democrats say it better not be. There will be the usual back-and-forth about rules of engagement and what have you.

If it strikes you as odd that armed UN forces tend to be wholly absent from active war zones where the presence of international soldiers might go a long way in restoring something approaching peace, bear these things in mind.

UN peacekeepers are sent only where the 15-member UN Security Council allows. The Security Council’s five veto-holding permanent members are the main countries that won the Second World War — the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Russia and China. What this means is that three out of those five vetoes are held by the three most ravenous vultures gobbling at the remains of the world order at the moment: China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and the United States’ Donald Trump.

The UN’s peacekeeping function was almost entirely an exercise in patrolling Cold War truce lines to begin with, but along the way, owing to Prime Minister Lester Pearson’s interventions at the UN in 1956 in favour of a peacekeeping force as part of the resolution to the Suez Crisis, Canadians tended to fashion fetish objects out of the UN’s blue helmets. Peacekeeping ended up being seen as some sort of morally unblemished Canadian innovation, in contrast to the warfighting habits of the beastly Americans.

Among Canadians of a certain age, the UN took on the aura of a sacred space, and Stephen Harper’s failure to procure a UN Security Council seat was taken as a failure to acquire the status to which Canada, by its ordinarily superior virtues, was entitled. Justin Trudeau’s 2015 campaign placed peacekeeping alongside his determination to win a Canadian place in the UN Security Council’s cheap seats. It was all bound up in the “Canada is back” rhetoric of self-flattery and an imaginary return to “Canadian values” in a meta-narrative of the most uplifting kind.

But the price of a seat with a useless vote at the useless UN Security Council comes with the surcharge of conscripting Canadian soldiers in UN peacekeeping operations undertaken only in those hellholes that Xi, Putin and Trump have chosen. So, forget about Myanmar’s genocidal campaign against the minority Rohingya, which Beijing is content to enable and applaud. Never mind about the vast mortuary the butcher Bashar AlAssad continues to make of what remains of Syria, which the Kremlin is happy to compound. Forget about Turkish caliph Recep Tayyip Erdo an’s rampages in Afrin, which Washington is happy to overlook, even as the Turks slaughter America’s own erstwhile Kurdish allies there.

It’s been more than four months since Trudeau’s big reveal at last November’s UN Peacekeeping Defence Ministerial Conference in Vancouver, which was that he had nothing to reveal, after all. There was nothing by way of a fulfilment of his 2016 pledge to contribute an additional 600 troops and 150 police officers to the UN for peacekeeping operations.

Instead, there would be rapid reaction force of 200 soldiers, six helicopters and a couple of transport planes, but no decision as to which of the UN’s 16 peacekeeping theatres they’d be dispatched. That decision finally came this week. We’re off to Mali.

Major Marcotte’s assignment in Cyprus ended in July. The new commander of the Canadian contingent in Cyprus is Captain Soo Kyong Choi, the only member of the Canadian contingent in Cyprus.