Clockwise from top right: A young Mundari woman with tribal markings; Lt.-Col. Michael Goodspeed inspects the kitchen at a local orphanage; Kids at play in Juba, southern Sudan’s capital city; Lt.-Cmdr. Hugh Son seeks information from a local near Rokon.

On a rutted track three hours northwest of Juba, far into southern Sudan’s still lawless territory, Lieutenant-Commander Hugh Son sees the first group of Dinka Bor warriors. Tall and raggedly fierce, these nomadic Dinka tribesmen are well armed and unpredictable. One carries an AK-47 over his shoulder and has a long silver spear by his side, another has an AK-47 on his back and a darkened axe in his hand, the blade’s steel tip sharpened and gleaming.

Son, wearing his Canadian Forces desert fatigues, eases the white United Nations truck forward. The Dinka stop in their tracks and stare. Son’s navigator, Lieutenant-Colonel Edwin Sanchez from El Salvador, smiles at the gunmen. They don’t smile back. Everyone inside the truck goes quiet. As UN military observers, neither Son nor Sanchez has a weapon.

Somewhere, maybe two minutes behind Son’s vehicle, the heavily armed Bangladeshi security force is struggling to catch up.

Son’s big four-by-four crawls past the first group. On the right there are more tribesmen standing somewhat tactically in the tall grass away from the road. No one moves and nothing happens.

Son has made it past the first of the Dinka Bor warriors, but his mission is far from over. He still has to drive two hours further into the rolling, largely unmapped savannah to reach the frontline village of Rokon where he’ll discuss the future with a Sudanese Army colonel named Ali.

This patrol was always going to be risky. The Dinka Bor, long displaced by war, were shepherding an estimated 1.5 million cattle across southern Sudan on a long march home. Just the day before the patrol, the Dinka were involved in a gunfight that killed several locals. In addition, the roads are mined and the terrifying rebel group known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) is rumoured to be operating in the area. Two UN police officers refused to accompany Son’s patrol, arguing the risk of an attack was too high.

Nothing is simple in Sudan. From the dusty Arab north to the lush green south, Africa’s largest country is riven by religious, ethnic and economic tensions. Slightly larger than Quebec, Sudan’s 40 million inhabitants speak 134 distinct languages and comprise dozens of unique tribes, many of which have a long history of animosity. Not only is the country vast but, situated in northeastern Africa, Sudan straddles the divide between Islamic north Africa and the Christian tribal south.

The tension between north and south isn’t all about religion and ethnicity, however. The discovery of extensive oilfields in Sudan, and the revenue generated by oil-hungry nations keen to exploit a new resource at any cost, has only added fuel to the fire. The hardline Islamic government in Khartoum, which supported Iraq in the first Gulf War and sheltered Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, has a long history of marginalizing Sudan’s outlying regions, like the south, and hoarding national resources for the population centered at the capital. The ongoing situation in Darfur, western Sudan, where conflict has killed hundreds of thousands during the past few years, is the latest in a long series of brutal civil wars.

It was just over one year ago that a fragile peace broke out in southern Sudan. After almost 50 years of sporadic war and over two million killed, the fighting between the northern government and the southern rebels has mostly stopped. The peace agreement, signed in January 2005, is why Canadian troops are in Sudan now and why this story, based on a trip to Sudan in November 2005, was written.

In March 2005 the UN agreed to send a 10,000-person mission to monitor the agreement, facilitate the demobilization of soldiers and aid in the return of millions of displaced people, like the Dinka Bor. Once the deployment is complete, there will be 750 UN military observers (UNMOs) with about 4,500 soldiers comprising their protection force. The remainder are support and civilian staff.

The UN will be in Sudan for at least the next six years, probably longer. Right now, soldiers from over 50 countries are quietly deployed across the south. There are Mongolians, Egyptians, Bolivians, Chinese, Russians, Greeks, British and many others. In late 2005, as the first wave of soldiers went in, it was clear to many of them that the situation there remains volatile. There is quite simply a sense, in the south’s capital city Juba at least, that the conflict just isn’t totally finished yet. Everyday both sides still bring out their mortars, man their guns and prepare to defend their ground. “They have this long history of war, it’s what they know,” says Captain Sam Perreault, an UNMO from Ottawa. “They have the weapons and they have the animosity. The only thing missing is a spark.”

Son, Perreault and more than 20 other Canadian UNMOs are on the frontlines of the effort to keep that spark from reigniting southern Sudan. Living in small groups among the Sudanese, the UNMOs are the UN Security Council’s eyes and ears. Through patrolling, talking to local soldiers, and inspecting military sites, the UNMOs verify that the two formerly warring parties are following the terms of the peace agreement and that other armed groups, including the Dinka Bor, don’t cause too many problems.

But the UNMOs have another role that’s perhaps even more important than collecting information. By their very presence, the UNMOs provide a signal to the long-suffering locals that finally the international community is really here, really helping. “We’re dealing with a very complicated situation here,” says Alan Bones, chargé d’affaires at the Canadian embassy in Khartoum. “There was a longstanding and truly horrible civil war that had devastating consequences for the south. I mean, it’s devoid of infrastructure and several generations have lost their livelihoods, their education, their families. And so it’s really important for the international community to be seen to be consolidating the peace now that the parties have agreed to put down their arms.”

Unfortunately, the most hostile group in southern Sudan, the LRA, have not agreed to put down their arms. Known locally as ‘tong-tong,’ the LRA is an unhappy blowback of an earlier European effort to stabilize Sudan. Their leader, a messianic savage named Joseph Kony, believes he is possessed by the spirit of an Italian missionary who once lived in the area. Renowned for their unbelievable barbarity, including machete attacks on babies, cannibalism and forcing children to kill their parents, the LRA is a result no missionary ever intended.

Kony’s supposed aim is to overthrow the neighbouring Ugandan government and impose an aberrant form of Christian fundamentalism on the country. Based in southern Sudan since the early 1990s, he has formed an army that has kidnapped thousands of children and has begun attacking UN targets, most recently killing a Swiss deminer. “The LRA is a particularly brutal and rogue element that, in my opinion, needs to be snuffed out,” says Canadian Brigadier-General Greg Mitchell who spent six months of 2005 as the deputy force commander of the UN mission in Sudan. “But it’s not an easy thing because the territory is vast, the LRA’s capabilities are pretty good and their terrorist capabilities are even better so they’ve got a reputation that people are very fearful of, including elements of the military are fearful of them. But they do need to be dealt with, one way or another, relatively soon.”

The UN mission in Sudan is essentially a race against encroaching chaos. In any post-conflict situation there is a window of time where hope emerges and peace has its chance. If progress is slow or uneven, hope may vanish and no Western nation wants any part of a shooting war in Sudan. This is why the UNMOs role is so crucial. Spread thinly across the entire breadth of southern Sudan, they are the unarmed and unthreatening harbingers of peace, using reason and goodwill to cajole reticent, sometimes suspicious former combatants into giving up the fight. These unarmed UNMOs go where armies fear to tread, literally. “Normally people see the military as carrying guns and killing people, whereas when you’re an UNMO, people don’t sense that, they see us as trying to help,” says Son, who was a naval above-water warfare officer before joining the CF’s directorate of training and education in Ottawa.

“We’re here to help them maintain their peace. We’re not forcing anything on them. We just want to help them re-establish their country, help them if there’s a disagreement between two factions, help them iron things out, otherwise they’ll just go right back to war again.”

This isn’t the first time Canadians have led the way into Sudan. In the 1880s, when Sudan was one frontier of the British Empire, a group of several hundred Canadian voyageurs were hired to lead a column down the Nile River to relieve a besieged English general named Charles Gordon. Sadly, Gordon was speared and beheaded before the Canadians could help save the day. The British got their revenge a few years later when they returned to recapture Khartoum, this time with the help of the new Maxim machine-gun and a young cavalry soldier officer named Winston Churchill.

Clearly then, this current UN mission in Sudan is not the first time outsiders have tried to bring order to this part of Africa. Well-meaning Europeans have been attempting to save Sudan on and off for over a century. Under British rule until 1956, Sudan was officially divided north from south and was always more two separate countries than one. As a result, there has been periodic war between Sudan’s two halves since the British left.

But now the UN has rolled into Khartoum and this time the plan is to get Sudan right. Of course, Africa does funny things to foreigners’ best intentions.

Located at the confluence of the White and Blue Nile Rivers, just below the southern border of the Sahara Desert, Khartoum is a steamingly hot and sand-clogged city of about 4.5 million. Though it’s a long way from the war in Darfur, the tribal unrest in the south or the violence in the east, the tension is still there, it’s still obvious. Outside government buildings there are Toyota pickups with heavy machine-guns bolted on the back. Everywhere there are mysterious people on urgent business. It’s the kind of place where journalists get detained by secret police for taking pictures of trees.

In a particularly dusty area of Khartoum inaptly named Garden City, the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) has put down roots and grown into a sprawling, barbed-wire and high-walled compound. Beneath a tent at the outdoor cafeteria, soldiers and UN workers from across the world gather to drink milky tea and consider their options. The range of camouflage patterns is bewildering. Indian, Bangladeshi, Australian, Pakistani, Rwandan. Some of the more interesting designs seem intended to stand out rather than blend in. The bright blue and purple of the Sudanese paramilitary is a good example. It’s fun to imagine an environment where this would be considered camouflage. In the midst of this multinational circus are the Canadians, wearing their comparatively rational computer-designed uniforms.

An engaging and energetic reservist from the King’s Own Calgary Regiment, Major Joe Howard works at UNMIS HQ in Khartoum on civil-military relations. Everyday he walks 40 minutes through the city’s wild traffic to reach his desk in an air-conditioned shipping container deep inside the UN compound. A couple months into his tour, Howard has developed a bit of routine, stopping for tea with a toothless lady, getting hounded by a pack of wild dogs and heckled frequently by one local guy who yells “Yankee go home.”

“Nothing is a problem in Sudan,” says the affable Howard, who hasn’t yet managed to stop his landlord’s servant from using his bathroom. “Everything is just ‘no problem.’ And you might as well adopt that attitude because you may not have the wherewithal to solve the problem anyway.”

Bangladeshi Major-General Fazle Akbar would probably agree with Howard that there’s hardly anything more difficult than a Sudanese problem. As the UNMIS force commander, Akbar is ultimately responsible for all UN military operations in Sudan, including the deployment of the UNMOs.

In late 2005, the UNMIS deployment was 60 per cent behind schedule and Akbar was beginning to worry that UNMIS was losing credibility on the ground. One of the key problems was that all the equipment for the thousands of UN soldiers waiting to deploy had to be moved in overland from Kenya. But the roads are mined and a real bottleneck has developed because the LRA keeps attacking the deminers. “It’s a sequential effect,” says Akbar. “If the demining gets halted, we can’t get the road clear, so we can’t have the equipment, so we can’t have the troops. Right now we have only one company of soldiers and we have to provide protection to the deminers, and of course to the UNMOs, since we can’t have them moving freely around to get attacked or killed by the LRA. So we are quite handicapped.”

Indeed, there is a whole list of serious issues Akbar is responsible for but has little control over. He needs helicopters, but few are available. He needs money to finance new joint military units, but none is available. He needs to get rid of the LRA, but can’t find a way. Of all these problems, however, it turns out that nothing frustrates Akbar more than the inefficiency of the UN itself. “The UN system has its own logistics, which is under the mission support division, and putting people on the ground is their responsibility. In the army, you know, all elements are under one command and when a commander gives a plan he ensures there is the required support and then he can regulate the plan. But here I don’t have the required support services under my command, so it never meshes and marches in tandem. So this has been my biggest frustration.”

This slow moving UN logistics division has had a direct consequence for several of the Canadian UNMOs, as Akbar ordered a potentially risky change in deployment procedure due to the constant delays. “The concept of operation says protection elements first, medical elements next, UNMOs last. In such a situation I could not wait for infinity for us to be on the ground, to show our presence,” says Akbar. “So I took the risk of putting UNMOs first, medical next, and force protection last. If I had to follow the concept of operation, let me tell you, we would not have a tenth of the understanding of the situation we have now.”

As a result, when Capt. Sam Perreault deployed in October to Maridi, west of Juba, he and his fellow UNMOs stayed in insecure huts without force protection or nearby medical support.

As it turned out, the people in Maridi were extremely friendly to Perreault and the other UNMOs, and he never once felt like they were a threat. Mines, on the other hand did worry him; but even mines weren’t as bad as the prospect of an LRA attack. “That was always in the back of my mind, the situation with the LRA, because they attacked once or twice while I was in Maridi, within 20 to 30 kilometres of there,” says Perreault, who just finished law school and is on his first CF deployment. “During the day when we patrolled, I didn’t think much about it. Even if in the back of my mind I’m like, is this going to be my last day on earth? At night the only time I would think about the LRA situation was when we’d shut off all the lights and go to bed and the only thing between them and us is a bamboo wall.”

Before deploying to Sudan, Canadian UNMOs undergo about one month of intensive preparation at the Peace Support Training Centre in Kingston, Ont. It’s here that Perreault learned the tricks of his trade: how to talk his way through checkpoints, defuse hostile situations, build trust with the locals and dozens of other skills. “I believe that any country that wants to have peace, deserves peace. We are the most fortunate people in Canada, so we need people like me and all my colleagues to come and do it, somebody has to do it. And if this is the way we have to do it, without a weapon, then that’s the way we’re going to do it.”

Though the idea of sending unarmed, uniformed soldiers into a place like Sudan is a little strange, there may be a good reason for it. According to the theory at least, giving UNMOs side arms or rifles would simply ratchet up the risk. In order to truly protect them against a hostile armed force, they would need way more than a personal weapon. “Observers are intentionally unarmed and intentionally military,” explains Brig.-Gen. Mitchell. “Military expertise is required, but being unarmed, you are not a threat to either side. For the individuals themselves, their protection is that they’re not a threat. That’s the theory and it works in many places and in some places it doesn’t.”

For Lt.-Cmdr. Hugh Son’s patrol past the Dinka Bor warriors and on to Rokon, no one was willing to test the theory that being unarmed is a protection. Instead, two truckloads of Bangladeshi soldiers were ordered to accompany the patrol. Disturbingly, they showed up almost 40 minutes late for the start of the patrol. “Having the force protection contingent be late is not a very good thing,” says Son, “because those are the individuals we need to rely on. So the mere fact that they couldn’t keep a timing makes me concerned–can we rely on these guys if push comes to shove?”

After five hours of bumping across dirt tracks, Son finally pulled into Rokon, a small village which is essentially a Sudanese army base. There, after some tense pleasantries, Son went for a short walk with the base commander, the tall and enigmatic Colonel Ali. They talked about troop strength, redeployments and also about what the future held for Ali. “One of the messages I was hoping to convey was that, and I actually said it to him, was that one day perhaps he and I could go on a UN mission together, that one day Sudan would be able to send troops, much like Rwanda sent troops to Sudan,” says Son.

In another potentially fateful example of UN operating procedures gone berserk, after returning from the patrol Son was harangued in the cafeteria tent by a strident Australian woman from the UN’s Juba mine office. She claimed the road to Rokon was uncleared and that mines had been discovered on it just a few days before. Of course, Son had visited the office before the patrol, but the Australian was out and apparently she hadn’t told anyone, including her boss, that she knew the road to Rokon was unsafe. In a peculiar twist, none of the mine staff could pinpoint exactly where and why communications had broken down, or whose job it was to prevent it from happening again. “At least now we know that was a clear road, up to Rokon, on that particular day. Whether we can say that tomorrow I’m not sure, but at least we know that on that day there were no mines,” grumbles Son, who was visibly annoyed by the incident.

It is not easy to imagine Sudan. Words can only weakly describe the scene on the outskirts of a place like Juba. Everything is shattered and failed. There’s garbage and sewage everywhere, the homes are made of mud, many are broken. The children, well into their third generation of brutalizing warfare, stare at you with a mixture of incomprehension and delight. “It’s quite different from Canada,” says Lt.-Col. Michael Goodspeed, an UNMO from Kingston who works as a staff officer at the UN headquarters in Juba. “There’s just an incredible amount of suffering and pain. I see people who are obviously extremely hungry and sick.”

Goodspeed, like many of the soldiers in Juba, is heavily involved in helping out the children at two local orphanages. But even now, after all the help, these kids are still living in squalor. They’re covered in dirt and flies, they have little food and sickness is a real problem. Goodspeed is doing everything he can think of to help, but real funds are scarce. At the smaller orphanage, where the kids make carvings for the non-existent tourist trade, Goodspeed has placed a huge order for official UN gift carvings. “This is certainly one of the most vulnerable populations. These kids, for various reasons, have experienced terrible horrors and now they find themselves totally alone. And we can do something in our spare time, so that’s what we’re doing. We’re going to fix up their orphanage.”

Seeing these tiny kids–babies with distended bellies and little girls in torn, filthy dresses–puts a heavy reality behind Canada’s efforts to help in a place like Sudan. The new and official policy in Ottawa is that Canada has a responsibility to protect innocent people in danger. It is based on the principle that because we can help, we should help. Looking at the orphans, it’s clear the idea is good, but in a case like Darfur, where protecting civilians could mean fighting, the consequences are significant. “On a gut feeling I have a tremendous affinity for the responsibility to protect, but I think war, as Lenin said, is a step into the darkness,” says the thoughtful Goodspeed, who has published a book on modern warfare. “When you go to war–and let’s face it, when your protecting someone, we’re talking about fighting–you realize just how incredibly complex war is, you’ve just multiplied all the variables there, and without any specific mentioning of Sudan, I think you’ve got to be very, very careful how you pick your battles.”

In southern Sudan at least, the battle has already been joined. Despite UN bureaucracy, there is a real chance that, with the help of the UNMOs, the south will eventually pull through and become a place where one day tourists might go on safari. Of course, somebody is first going to have to take care of the LRA.

In addition to the practical challenges, however, there is also, lurking in the background, the history of many previous failures to do good in Sudan, and in Africa. The problems in these places tend to be unrelenting and best intentions aren’t good enough. “This is a country of infinite and subtle complexities,” says Bones, head of Canada’s embassy in Sudan. “If there are any easy answers to the problems here we would have had found them ages ago. The reason that Sudan remains a problem across the board is because there aren’t any easy answers. What we have to do is do the best we can under the circumstances and hope, like doctors, that we first do no harm.”

Sudan provokes big questions. Millions have died there already and still the violence continues. What do Canadians stand for? What are they willing to fight for? Do Canadians have a responsibility to protect little African girls from harm?

For the Canadian soldiers in Sudan, the ones who’ve volunteered to risk their lives, these big questions have stark, straight answers. “In this world,” says Goodspeed, “in the globalized world that we’re in now, you can’t turn around and say ‘Your end of the boat has a hole in it, what are you going to do about it?’ We’re in the same boat.”

To the soldiers, this is a duty not totally unlike saving Europe from the Nazis or Korea from the communists. It is all about protecting the innocent from harm and freeing them from oppression, despite the risks. “To me, this is all apart of the CF mission to provide peace and security to the world,” says Son. “If we don’t step in, no one else will. It’s like if you see someone get attacked and you do nothing about it, because you don’t want to get involved, because you don’t want to get hurt. Look, these people need help and we have to contribute, we can’t just talk about it, we have to actually do something.”