After Afghanistan?

Think of the huge investment made by Canada in the past several years in beefing up its military hardware. To fight an offensive-defensive war in a country far from North America. Those eight years of commitment and loss of young Canadian men and women have been beyond costly. But the military, like all such institutions, is prepared to be re-deployed elsewhere, once the Afghanistan mission is concluded, as the Prime Minister insists it will be, in 2011.

At which time there will be a re-deployment to another far-off country, one that will represent yet another failed state, where Canadian assistance has been sought to keep sectarian, tribal elements from slaughtering one another. And if, as the rumour persists, that new focus of Canadian military will be the Democratic Republic of Congo, one can only sigh with utter frustration. First, that there are so many disgusting places on this Earth where people cannot refrain from victimizing and butchering one another.

And second, that of all the most dreadful humanitarian lapses that occur throughout the world, they seem overwhelmingly to take place on one particular continent: Africa. That huge land mass of diverse populations comprised of many ethnic groups, languages, tribal affiliations and disparate religions represents a boiling cauldron of incessant unrest and human depredations, one upon the other. Murderous tyrants and oppressed, enslaved, starving people.

The hatred that fueled the genocidal conflict in Rwanda that managed to obliterate 800,000 mostly Tutsis, a fewer number of moderate Hutus in the space of a few weeks, spilled over into neighbouring countries and Congo was the recipient of the Hutu militia that had been routed after the massacre. Congo has the fanatical Lords Resistance Army and also a Tutsi-led opposition militia as well to contend with, by a ill-led and -equipped national army and a sparse and ineffectual UN peacekeeping mission.

All of whom use mass rape of women and girls as a vicious weapon of war. And this is the situation that Canadian troops will find themselves in if the Government of Canada agrees to an urgent United Nations request that it take over its mission in Congo as peacekeepers. How can one keep a non-existent peace? How can Canadian troops enter Congo as peacekeepers, effectively non-combatants, when the country boils with murderously rapacious militias?

To face a horror that confronted General Romeo LeBlanc when he headed just such a mission in Rwanda, with Belgium troopers and a small Canadian contingent in the face of the growing certainty of a hatred-fuelled tribal genocide that he could not contain, his appeals for additional troops from the United Nations ignored.