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Video Interview
Note: The opinions presented are not necessarily those of the Government of Canada.
 Canada's role in multilateral organizations | 4 minutes | QuickTime |
(Video players are available here: QuickTime | Windows Media)
Transcript:
Canada's role in multilateral organizations
My name is Kristian Gustafson and I was born in Edmonton. On my 17th birthday I joined the Canadian Army and I spent 10 years as a regular army officer. Just before the September 11 attacks I left the regular army and decided to go back to academics. I did my master’s at the University of Alberta and in 2002 started my PhD at Cambridge on American security policy, focusing on intelligence, especially in South America in the 1960s and 1970s. It is a history PhD.
In 1997 as a lieutenant in Lord Strathcona’s Horse, a regular army tank regiment, I was a reconnaissance troop leader in Bosnia based in the town of Kljuc, in the northwest of Bosnia. I was one of four reconnaissance troop leaders. Our job was to drive around the countryside; observe training of local forces; prevent movement of weapons; prevent any destabilizing acts by locals; oversee visits of displaced persons returning to hometowns that were no longer their hometowns; and engage in operations as needed to ensure the security of the implementation of the Dayton Accords and the security of the new country of Bosnia. I was there for seven months, post-combat phase, so we weren’t fighting. Our operations were still essential because the country had not settled down to normal business and normal life.
I understand that many Canadians have an impression of what peacekeeping is. They are very proud of peacekeeping, but they don’t really understand the reality of that in many cases in the modern era. In a place like Bosnia, while it wasn’t an open war there were people who sought open war and who sought by mean, underhanded, cynical manners to overthrow the peace. When you are faced with that, rational arguments—or what a Canadian would consider rational arguments—are often entirely irrelevant. What is necessary is resolve and action to ensure that the decisions of multilateral organizations such as the UN are followed through.
If we talk about being multilateral and about making organizations like the UN or the OECD viable, then we need to support them, not just with words but with resolve. That resolve often includes the use of soldiers. Speaking as a soldier, a regular army officer, and my fellow officers, the men that I worked with and my superiors, we were volunteers to the army. We joined because we understand that the state requires that from time to time young men and women go and do military acts in defence of the decisions of the body politic. If we are not willing to do that, then the decisions of the body politic lose force and we are not supporting those organizations that we speak of upholding. |
