CANADA'S SIXTY YEARS IN CYPRUS
Lessons learned about peacekeeping served us later, writes Andrew Burtch.
On March 15 1964, Georges Vanier, First World War veteran and Canada's first Quebec-born governor general, stood on the tarmac at Ancienne-lorette airport. He was there to shake the hands of soldiers of the Royal 22e Régiment as they boarded RCAF Hercules aircraft bound for a new peacekeeping mission in Cyprus.
The newly independent island in the Mediterranean was split by communal violence between its majority Greek Cypriot population and its minority Turkish population. Greece and Turkey, NATO partners, were on the verge of war. The UN mission in Cyprus was meant to reduce tensions between the combatants and the chances of war on NATO'S southern flank, endangering the alliance's unity against its Soviet adversary.
As Vanier told the troops departing for UN duty, “This task, which demands the highest qualities of head and heart, is not easy.” It wouldn't be. Few in Canada knew that the first flight of Van Doos would establish a presence on the island that would be followed by 58 more rotations — a total of 28 years of a major Canadian contribution to peace and security on Cyprus, and more than 30,000 soldiers eventually serving.
As the years passed and the mission's mandate was extended, and more Canadians rotated through Cyprus, it gained the reputation as an easier overseas mission that for some earned the nickname “Club Med.”
Notwithstanding the suspended conflict on the island, there were opportunities to sightsee at castles, lounge at beaches in Kyrenia, or go scuba diving.
And it might have seemed like a vacation were it not for the dangerous switchback roads, minefields, periodic small-arms fire, tense negotiations at street level between soldiers and belligerents, and long, often dull hours spent in blue-painted plywood shacks that served as Observation Posts, or “OPS.”
That boredom and boots-onthe-ground diplomacy came to a crashing end 10 years into the mission, when a Greek Cypriot-led coup on the island and subsequent attacks on the Turkish enclaves gave Turkish forces cause to intervene. Paratroopers from the Canadian Airborne Regiment, the unit on rotation in Cyprus at the time, watched Turkish airborne troops parachute into the plains outside Nicosia in July 1974 as fighting spread across the island.
With no peace to keep, Canadians and other UN contingents made spontaneous decisions to save lives and keep key infrastructure from being used to heighten the island's misery. The invasion ended with Turkey having seized the northern half of Cyprus, which it declared a separate republic. The Canadian Airborne Regiment suffered two killed and 17 wounded during that fighting and its aftermath.
Though the lines of confrontation had changed, Canadians continued to serve in Cyprus as tensions spiked and eased for another 18 years. On the mission's 20th anniversary, Lt.-col. Jim Kempling was serving in Cyprus with the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry. He voiced his doubts about the wisdom of staying on the island for so long. Tensions were high but the chances of a renewed conflict were low. But he still acknowledged: “What the United Nations is doing here is preventing the stupidity from getting out of hand.”
Long hours in slow OPS presented a challenge of another kind: keeping soldiers attentive and boredom at bay even when the sun was high and the Greek and Turkish Cypriot fronts were quiet. As another officer pointed out, there were only so many times you could ask soldiers to repaint an observation post. However, ill-disciplined soldiers on either side of the “Green Line” would often point rifles at the blue berets as they passed. As a padre posted to the island in 1990 suggested, “It takes a lot more guts to be shot at than to shoot.” Some of the soldiers he served with may have disagreed with him.
In 1993, the major Canadian contribution to the mission ended. In the post-cold War world, civil wars, famines and other outrages placed heavy demands on the United Nations, and in turn on the Canadian Armed Forces. The soldiers in Cyprus, the government decided, could best be used in places such as the wars in the former Yugoslavia.
Many of the senior leaders in those difficult new UN missions drew on their earlier experience in Cyprus to make on-the-spot decisions that saved lives. Maj.gen. Alain Forand, for example, earned the Star of Courage for directing a firefight to save wounded Canadians in Cyprus as a young captain in 1974. In
1995, in Knin, Croatia, his troops safeguarded vulnerable civilians within his UN camp during a Croatian government offensive.
Even though Canadians mostly left Cyprus in 1993, Canada's presence there never ended. Canada has continuously maintained a staff officer posting in the mission's headquarters since the 1990s. A new generation of Canadian veterans got to know Cyprus outside UN channels. Beginning in 2006, soldiers were posted to the island — ironically itself still a conflict zone — for rest, relaxation and decompression at the end of their tour in Afghanistan before returning home to their families.
The island's strategic location in the Mediterranean also meant it was used for sensitive operations such as the evacuation of Canadians fleeing war in Lebanon in 2006. It is indisputable that service in Cyprus helped shape generations of Canadian veterans.
This fall, a contingent of such veterans and their families will be returning to Cyprus to mark the mission's 60th anniversary, and to pay tribute to those 28 Canadians in total who gave their lives while serving on the troubled island. Though the nature of peacekeeping has changed remarkably since those early, optimistic days of the mission in 1964, at its core remains the commitment of dedicated soldiers to try to bring peace — even at risk to themselves.
This task, which demands the highest qualities of head and heart, is not easy.