Global Policy Forum

By Allan Thompson

It is a United Nations assignment that seems to be part penance, part Mission Impossible. Africa has intersected for a third time with the career of retired Canadian general Maurice Baril, who arrived in Congo last Thursday with a U.N. mandate to cajole warring factions into sealing the final chapter in the blood-soaked country's precarious peace process: formation of a unified army.

"I have lived frustrating experiences in my life. I would probably have preferred to be fishing and enjoying my granddaughter at this time. But how can you enjoy those when you see so many people dying?'' Baril said by telephone in his first interview after arriving in the capital, Kinshasa. "It is still a group of enemies who are trying to build a government, and trying to build an army, and they're stuck. But the peace process cannot be derailed because the effect in the region would be devastating and pretty quick,'' he said. "This conflict has to be stopped and sorted out and agreed by the Congolese with all the help the international community is willing to give them,'' he said.

Nearly 10 years ago, as an up-and-coming Canadian infantry officer, Baril served as the U.N.'s top military adviser in New York and in 1994, was on the receiving end of urgent cables from fellow Canadian Roméo Dallaire, containing dire warnings of impending massacres in Rwanda. Baril and other officials failed to read the signals that a genocide was looming and later, could not convince the world to intervene as 800,000 were slaughtered. In 1996, Baril, by then Canada's army commander, headed a stillborn multinational force deployed to Rwanda's neighbour, Zaire (since renamed Congo). The force was meant to deal with the spillover of the carnage and the plight of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees caught up in the beginnings of a rebel insurgency in Congo. But the mission collapsed when many of the refugees simply walked home to Rwanda and international support evaporated.

Baril, who retired in 2000 from his position as Canada's chief of defence staff, has returned to Congo — again at the behest of the U.N. — on a mission to finalize negotiations for reform of Congo's army. But in the past month or so, all efforts at military reform have failed, not least because of clashes between the government and the Rwandan-backed RCD-Goma militia and disputes over how to carve up the pie. At issue is the distribution of such jobs as army commander, head of operations and intelligence chief.

Baril's mission to reform the military is also tightly interwoven with the ongoing war, which erupted in 1998 when Rwanda and Uganda sent in troops to support rebels seeking to oust then-president Laurent Kabila. By some estimates, more than three million people have died since then, most from war-induced famine, disease and displacement. While countrywide warfare has largely stopped, serious fighting continues in eastern Congo, particularly in Kivu and Ituri provinces. A French-led peacekeeping force of 1,400 with support from two Canadian transport aircraft was recently installed in Bunia, capital of the mineral-rich Ituri region, to try and quell fighting between Hema and Lendu ethnic groups that has claimed 50,000 lives. And in North and South Kivu, the powder keg bordering Rwanda that has been the scene of ethnic massacres and regional war, the fighting continues.

A leading analyst on Congo, Franí§ois Grignon, Central Africa project director for the Brussels-based International Crisis Group, said Baril's mission to reform the army can go nowhere until the larger struggle over territory and resources is resolved. The Rwandan government, which withdrew most of its troops last October, is still supplying the RCD-Goma with supplies, weapons, ammunition, tanks and soldiers, Grignon said. And the Kinshasa government is supplying the latest generation of the ex-Interahamwe forces, which remain in the Kivus. "You can't at the same time sit at the table to pretend that you are going to move forward with the peace process, create a new army and stop fighting, and simultaneously send supplies and ammunition to your troops and to your proxies who are fighting,'' Grignon said.

On Thursday, the international committee overseeing the peace process met with President Joseph Kabila to discuss the structure of a new army. On Friday, the three major factions submitted their wish lists for key positions. "It would have been nice if all of the propositions would have been identical, but they were not,'' Baril said.

Today the international committee composed of ambassadors from Security Council countries as well as representatives of the European Union, African Union, Canada, South Africa and Belgium, is expected to present the parties with a proposed army structure. "The indications are that the major players are ready for some concessions. So it is up to the diplomats and the military to work a compromise that will be eventually acceptable. It would be nice if they could accept it on Monday and I would go back home,'' Baril said. Baril is working in tandem with U.N. Special Envoy Mustapha Niasse. "We have been asked to come in if the process is still blocked. We are the strategic reserve of the secretary-general to push this process,'' Baril said. "They have made some moves but they are still quite a bit apart. These are people who have been fighting for quite some time.''

Baril admits there is a common thread that winds through the Rwanda genocide, the abortive 1996 mission to eastern Zaire and his current task. But he insists the conflicts are not simply a continuation. "They're not the same conflict. Rwanda was very localized, very brutal and very short. It was kind of sorted out and the dead were counted. In 1996 we were involved in a narrow mandate to help Rwanda recuperate 1.3 million of their citizens who were nearly rotting at their border. At the same time, what we witnessed was the start of the infighting in Congo," at the end of the life of a very brutal dictator,'' he said, referring to Mobutu Sese Seko.

Baril says he has been affected personally by returning to Africa. "I think what is the most frustrating is ... everybody (in the Western world) finds a reason for not committing their resources,'' he said. He said he feels "very disappointed" by the failure of the world community to respond to Rwanda. "I share the responsibility for the mistakes of the U.N. because I was there. But I feel that we tried everything that we had. I'm coming here with the same opinion again. We're going to give everything that we can. Again, I happen to be involved in a collective effort to make something that has been very wrong for a long time, to make it good."

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