KINGSTON—Unlike most other Canadian soldiers, Lt.-Col. Dalton Cote doesn’t carry a gun. He is a peacekeeper, one of 27 left in a military that used to be defined by that role.

For the past six months, while his comrades in arms were patrolling through Kandahar and sidestepping IEDs, Cote left his guns at home, donned a blue beret, climbed into a UN truck and negotiated his way through checkpoints in an effort to observe troop movements, monitor weapon stashes and investigate violent attacks on both sides of the makeshift border that could next month become the official partition between north and south Sudan.

As the leader of 20 Canadian peacekeepers sprinkled across the Sudanese countryside, Cote, a 45-year-old father of two, was, until five weeks ago, leading the largest Canadian peacekeeping contingent currently deployed.

Officially, Canada’s objective in Sudan is to help “create the conditions for long-term peace, stability and prosperity” in the country. Unofficially, the strategy of the 20 Canadian military observers on the ground there is to be as visible as 20 people can be in a region the size of France. It’s a pretty simple strategy meant to dissuade violence between hostile tribes as the region prepares for a referendum next month that is expected to split the country in two.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called the referendum “a ticking time bomb.” Cote is a little more optimistic.

“I believe the referendum will be peaceful,” the newly returned officer says from behind his desk at the Royal Military College in Kingston. “It is in nobody’s interest for the referendum to lead to bloodshed. So I’m optimistic.”

He says the 20 Canadian military observers and the more than 10,500 UN peacekeepers from 59 other countries now stationed in Sudan are out and about, patrolling the streets of Juba — south Sudan’s largest city, where Cote was stationed — and dropping into the countless small villages that dot the south Sudanese countryside.

“They are out there right now, patrolling, being seen and trying to create those conditions for success,” he says.

While the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan are relatively self-sufficient, the 20 unarmed Canadian troops stationed in Sudan rely on the Russian air force for aerial transport and on a small fleet of aging UN Nissan trucks that Cote says are prone to breaking down on some of the roughest roads in Africa.

There are seven trucks for 20 Canadians. At any given time, half of the trucks are inoperable.

For protection, Canada’s unarmed military observers look primarily to battalions of armed Bangladeshi, Indian, Pakistani, Zambian, Kenyan and Egyptian troops who are charged with guaranteeing their safe passage through what was, five years ago, one of the bloodiest war zones in the world.

The Canadian mission in Sudan began in 2005, at the close of a 22-year civil war that saw a rebel movement in the south of the country fight with the established government in the north over “resources, power, the role of religion in the state and self-determination,” according to the UN.

Two million people died during that conflict. A further four million were displaced within the country. Some 600,000 fled as refugees.

Keeping the peace following such a deadly conflict isn’t something the Canadian Forces, once renowned as the world’s leading peacekeeping force, have really done of late.

“It’s true, I am one of only a few Canadian Forces members directly involved in UN peacekeeping,” says Cote.

“Peacekeeping can be a frustrating task,” he says. “The UN is at times bureaucratic and not all peacekeepers (from other countries) are of the same quality. But Canadian peacekeepers are still well respected in the field. And I think the value of it is seen as very strong within the military.”

Cote’s view contradicts what many Canadians — who continue to indicate in opinion polls that they want the military to return to peacekeeping — have been told by pundits such as Jack Granatstein, military historian and former serviceman. Granatstein argues the military “hates peacekeeping because it hurts training, it’s not a fit job for a soldier in the eyes of many soldiers, and because it’s so unrealistic in the public’s expectations.”

The number of UN peacekeeping missions is at an all-time high. There are currently 100,000 military and police personnel serving on missions around the world. Canada contributes 157 police officers and 64 military personnel to that total. But only 27 of those military personnel are actually on the ground carrying out patrols and other traditional peacekeeping roles.

Seven of Canada’s peacekeepers are stationed in south Lebanon, the Golan Heights and Egypt. The rest are in Sudan.

During Cote’s tour, 18 Canadian servicemen and two Canadian servicewomen were part of an international contingent of uniformed peacekeepers.

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Some critics, including Steven Staples of the Rideau Institute, say Canada’s paltry peacekeeping contributions are token gestures by the current government. He points out that you could take all of Canada’s current peacekeepers and put them on one school bus.

“It’s a low number, yes,” says Cote. “Would I have loved to have had more Canadians on my team? Yes, of course. But the big numbers come primarily from those Third World countries that provide the large (armed) battalions. Canada’s contribution, if it’s not sending one of those battalions, would be relatively low.

“We’ve got 30 people in Sudan. Ten of them are in key decision-making positions. And 20 are on the ground as military observers.”

The Canadian Forces have not deployed an armed battalion of troops to a UN peacekeeping mission since joining the war in Afghanistan in 2002.

Though he defends the role of peacekeeping, Cote says the military needed to move away from the tradition in order to rebuild itself.

“We spent so much time on peacekeeping missions that we had lost some of our capabilities as a military,” he says.

“We had lost a lot of the experience during the Cold War, while engaged in that classic peacekeeping, to have the ability and the capability to deploy in different conflict scenarios.

“For the military, we want to be both (combatants and peacekeepers). It’s the spectrum of conflict. You want to have the capability to do both. We have the tools to do both now.”

Canada was once the UN’s top contributor of peacekeepers. It now ranks 57th. Haiti, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo have all been proposed as countries where the military might redeploy after its partial withdrawal from Afghanistan next year.

But there are many critics who say traditional peacekeeping is obsolete in an era when intrastate conflicts have made civilians the target of atrocities and have rendered unarmed military observers impotent bystanders to crimes against humanity.

Cote acknowledges there were limitations on his mission, which saw him serve as an unarmed, Pearsonian-style military observer with no authority to engage militants and a limited ability to protect Sudanese civilians. But he says such missions still serve a purpose in certain conflict zones.

“I don’t think it’s obsolete,” he says. “The first thing with a peacekeeping mission like the type we had in Sudan is it assumes that peace is there to (be kept); that the two parties want peace and that you can go in and you can do your role. The UN probably wishes that it had gone into Sudan a lot earlier to help stop the war, but it would have been a lot more difficult.”

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