Unsung Canadians toil in Congo
By JOHN WARD
OTTAWA (CP) - 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 job has its challenges, Aitken says. "Time and space and distance are big issues."
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
When he's working on plans and operations, he has to be something of a seer, predicting where trouble may break out and reacting fast.
"Three weeks ago, in north Kivu, there was increased tension in the area so we decided to reinforce," he said. "We reinforced with just a battalion, but it took five days to bring everyone there because you have to fly everything in.
"The biggest challenge is anticipating where you should be."
There are other problems, not the least of which is language. The UN soldiers come from 51 different countries.
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.
"Finding common ground in culture is a challenge, and finding a common language. . . ."
Even though English and French are supposed to be used on the mission, some people don't seem to speak either with much clarity, says Aitken.
"Just because you share a language with a country doesn't mean that you can clearly communicate with them because the accents are so wild. You really have to sit down and think, 'What is this person saying?'
"Although the words are spoken, often you have no idea what they're saying even though they are speaking words you understand, so that creates a problem. It just makes it a little more interesting to try to communicate."
To this confusion, add the hollowness of uncertain cellphone links. "It's almost impossible."
Aitken and his five Kinshasa comrades live in their own compound, but still face difficulties in a city of nine million that has lost most of the normal amenities to 10 years of fighting, where temperatures hover around 30 C and where the average annual rainfall is 142 centimetres.
"There's no infrastructure," Aitken said. "When it rains, the water floods everything. There's no garbage removal, so the garbage is burned.
"There's no such thing as traffic rules, so the daily challenge is getting to and from work without getting your vehicle smacked or getting run off the road."
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.
"Sometimes they go over the top," he chuckled. "We have five artificial Christmas trees here now because every Christmas they send an artificial Christmas tree."
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."
