Canadian military likely headed to Sudan: Ex-diplomat

KINGSTON, Ont. – A former Canadian diplomat to Africa said Canada’s next military deployment will likely be in war-torn Sudan.
John Schram — who was Canada's ambassador to Ethiopia, Eritrea and the Sudan from 1998 to 2002 — said now that Sudan has completed a referendum, big issues are being raised, and the fractured country will need international support to bring some measure of calm.
Those issues include negotiations on frontiers and oil rights and revenues between country's north and south, a second referendum in the oil-rich Abyei region and the ongoing peacekeeping/peacemaking effort to support the emerging state.
The Canadian military's presence in Afghanistan has prepared it for such a mission, he said.
“We’re going to come under pressure from the Americans who have been in the lead all along,” said Schram, who is a senior fellow in international relations at Queen’s University and who spent almost four decades on the Africa file for the federal department of external affairs.
“However, we also have a skeptical public and a non-interventionist government and there’s a sense of weariness and reluctance to do what the Americans want us to do,” he said. “After Afghanistan, do Canadians have the stomach for another nation-building program?”
Schram thinks Canada's soldiers do. He believes that among the rank and file, although their equipment has been chewed up in the harsh Afghan climate and they are tired and overstretched, there is a belief that Task Force Afghanistan is not a single mission, but the establishment of a permanent expeditionary force always on a mission overseas.
There is already a contingent of nearly 40 military officers in the Sudan monitoring the situation and reporting back to the Canadian government. Such contingents nearly always precede a military intervention to provide intelligence and logistics support.Read More