Canadians in the Congo

Talk about a peackeeping challenge:

In his 10 months serving with the United Nations mission in the Congo, Col. Larry Aitken has seen three mini-wars break out in the capital of Kinshasa.

But Aitken, one of nine Canadians assigned to the MUNOC - the French acronym for the mission - takes it in stride.

"I arrived at an interesting time," he said in a recent phone interview. "In August, we had a civil war in the city. In November, we had another one which burned the supreme court building, and in March we had another civil war in the city, a confrontation between government forces and the security forces of a former vice-president.

"It's been gruesome. There's been lots of bullets flying, lots of damage, lots of death."

But Aitken says the UN has made a difference in the country that was Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

He calls it the UN's most successful mission, one that has taken a country wracked by a decade of civil war and tribal strife, disarmed many of the combatants, organized an election acknowledged as open and transparent and started it on the road to stability.

Aitken, a signals officer and former commander of CFB Kingston, is deputy chief of staff for operations and planning for the UN military contingent. Five other Canadians fill staff jobs in Kinshasa, with three more working farther inland at Kisangi.

They are among only 60 Canadians still wearing UN blue berets as peacekeepers among more than 2,500 Canadian troops overseas...

The Democratic Republic of Congo is the third biggest country in Africa, an area roughly the size of western Europe. Its road network long ago collapsed, swallowed by jungle.

To police this 2.4 million square kilometres, the UN has just over 18,000 soldiers. "You're spread very thin," says Aitken..

The major contributing nations now are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and India, but there's a positive Babel of languages within the mission.

"We get many staff officers from Europe - Russia, Romania, England, France, Belgium, Switzerland - and from South America we have Bolivia and Uruguay that provide a lot of staff officers...

The Canadians live on a UN per diem and buys their food locally. They take turns with the cooking. Shopping can bring surprises, though.

"Some things are amazingly priced. A head of lettuce is 12 bucks. A box of mushrooms is eight bucks."

The roads are so bad that farmers simply can't move produce into the cities and much of it is flown in from Europe or South Africa.

But Aitken said the Canadian Forces support system works well, shipping in magazines, newspapers and movies every week or two, making the soldiers the envy of some other contingents...

Although the Canadian mission in Afghanistan gets most of the attention from the Canadian public, politicians and the army itself, Aitken isn't bothered.

"Within the Canadian Forces this is not a high-profile, simply because of the numbers of people we have here," he said. "Within the UN, it is the most high-profile mission, it is the largest mission, it is the most successful mission."

Comparing the Congo and Afghanistan is comparing apples and oranges, he said. "They have a lot taller mountain to climb than we do."

Aitken, who is due to come home in July, admits that it's hard to change things in a fledgling democracy that has yet to shed the trappings of authoritarianism and tribalism [emphasis added--now how about cutting the Afghan government some slack, Canadian opposition politicians and pundits?]. But he says the UN has to keep at it.