Just say "No" to Congo

Exactly the right decision I'd say (I love the "spurns" and "plea" in the Toronto Star's headline; talk about loaded):

Canada spurns UN plea on Congo
...
Canada turned down a United Nations request to take command of the peacekeeping mission in Congo and will instead devote its resources to Afghanistan.

"Finding a lieutenant-general at this time can be a challenge, especially with Afghanistan going on," said Maj. Denys Guay, deputy military attaché at Canada's permanent mission to the UN in New York.

Guay confirmed in an interview that Canada was approached by the UN secretariat's department of peacekeeping operations about six weeks ago to submit a candidate to take charge of the massive UN force in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Canada was asked for a two-star general and limited support staff, not a contingent of troops.

The request was forwarded to the department of foreign affairs and defence department for review, Guay said, but Canada opted to contribute to Afghanistan instead of the mission in Congo.

Canada's former ambassador to the UN, Robert Fowler, said the decision signals Ottawa has all but given up on traditional peacekeeping.

"It is such a pity that we have withdrawn from UN peacekeeping to this extent when this used to be a signature for us, a Canadian brand," said Fowler, who was a special adviser on Africa to both Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin and is now a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa.

Canada is now tied with Malawi as the 53rd largest UN peacekeeping contributor, Fowler noted...

Mr Fowler seems, sadly, to be thinking more along the lines of Prof. Michael Byers than those of reality--some Congo reality here, along with Prof. Byers' views on UN peacekeeping (see the Upperdate for one particularly interesting aspect of those missions). And here's some more UN peacekeeping reality, with a Congo component:

...The UN in particular has been plagued by sex scandals among its peacekeepers in recent years. After a particularly shocking series of rapes by Nepalese blue-helmets in Congo in 2003, Kofi Annan, then UN secretary-general, set up a committee of inquiry. Its damning findings of “repeated patterns” of rape and other sexual abuse by peacekeepers prompted Mr Annan to announce three years ago a policy of “zero tolerance” for such crimes for all the 200,000 or so personnel, civilian and military, who are employed by the UN and its agencies around the world...

Ain't UN peacekeeping a treat? Just our kind of folk to command, eh? And imagine the hit the CF and this government would take if something really nasty took place with a Canadian in charge.

Here's reaction to the story in a topic thread at Milnet.ca.