If anyone has an interest in world affairs and the way that politics and organizations set up to reflect a world vision of conflict-prevention with a view to aiding the inevitable flow of refugees that result from such seemingly unavoidable conflicts providing humanitarian aid around the world, there is nothing quite as instructive as reading the opinions of those who were actually on the scene in some of those dramatically obscene conflict situations.

I've only now got around to reading General Rick Hillier's (former Canadian Chief of Defence Staff' 2005--2008) memoirs, A Soldier First -- Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, published in 2009. His story is an interesting one, from his boyhood to his maturity as a responsible, intelligent, humanely capable manager of the Canadian Defence Forces.

His impressions, above all, of the United Nations and its sadly dysfunctional role in overseeing the order of a fractious, bellicose, combative world simply serves to validate an overall public perception of that ambitiously-failed world body as an inept, corrupt, crony-ridden, Third-World vehicle by which political-religious-social blocs have been able to capture and manipulate the administration of its various arms to their very particular vision of their place in the international community and their complaints over past injustices while they are themselves complicit in current injustices.

Some of General Hillier's observations strike the message of a compliant-to-pressure, hopelessly befuddled and incapable United Nations and they're worth noting:

"The Srebrenica Massacre had left us with enormous numbers of refugees to deal with, tens of thousands of the homeless during a viciously hot summer. I went to Tuzla and landed by helicopter at the airstrip just outside the UN sector headquarters on a hot afternoon, with temperatures hitting 40 degrees Celsius. There must have been 35,000 refugees on the runway, most of them old men and women and some very young children, but almost nobody in between. They were on that runway in the hot sun with precious little water, almost no food and no shelter. Almost all were in deplorable condition because of the traumatic and severe hardships they had faced during the attack and afterwards, when they were forced to make their way into Muslim-controlled territory, over hills and through forests, on foot. That tarmac had now become their home."
"The United Nations, representing the will of the international community, had failed. The UN just couldn't handle that many refugees and was incapable of looking after them, let alone helping them recover and get on with their lives. By then we were starting to learn the details of what had occurred during the preceding days in Srebrenica. The reason there were so few young adults in the flood of refugees was because the Bosnian Serbs had murdered them, and those who had escaped were on the run, hiding or fleeing for their lives."
"I went to one refugee camp that the United Nations was helping run for people seventy-five years of age and older. It was as pathetic as it was appalling and tragic. All these elderly people were living twenty-five to a room in a tiny, decrepit schoolhouse that had only a partial roof. Each of them was sleeping on a thin blue rubber mattress and had a little bag containing food or clothing from the UN High Commission for Refugees, which was now everything they owned. They had been driven out of their villages, their families killed or dispersed to God knows where, and this was what they had to look forward to for the rest of their lives...."
"Within days, we assumed responsibility for organizing the evacuation of the Krajina Serbs, who had been bypassed by Croatian military forces and were now refugees, living in a  hostile area and fearing retribution from angry Croats. Many had fled ahead of Operation Storm, but a lot of them were still trapped behind the Croatian front lines. In what became a showcase of human tragedy and the viciousness of human nature, this motley collection of tens of thousands of impoverished men, women and children left Krajina by motorcade, on tractors, bikes, carts, horses or whatever vehicles they could find, with as many of their household possessions as they could carry, and travelled through parts of Croatia to other, Serb-held areas. All of this was carried live on TV around the world Despite the supposed protection of Croatian police and UN forces, those convoys of old women and children, riding in the backs of hundreds of tractors and carts, were pelted with rocks, eggs and anything else people could get their hands on all along the route out of Serb Krajina. It was a travesty and, again, the UN was powerless to prevent it."

And he has placed on subjective perspective born of real-time and on-site experience an issue that is repeatedly raised by Canada's federal opposition parties, forever critical of all decisions made by the current government relating to Canada's involvement in meeting the international challenge of fighting against the massed forces of malevolently-directed terrorists in their pursuit of gaining conscripts and territory while violently disrupting national stability; torturing, raping, enslaving, murdering their way into odious notoriety as international threats.

"The United Nations had no concept of how to build multinational forces into one effective team for a mission and, worse than that, it usually had no concept of what kind of mission it would be asking that team to do. We were doing things in the former Yugoslavia that no one had been prepared for, and even though it was dawning on some of our military and civilian leaders that UN peacekeeping operations were a thing of the past, there was no way that we could get past that mantra of 'peacekeeper, peacekeeper, peacekeeper'.
"...Yet our soldiers were sent into the Balkans under Chapter 6 of the UN charter, a peacekeeping mission where they could use their weapons only to protect themselves. As a result, we put soldiers and sailors and airmen and airwomen, who served on the ground, in positions where they saw brutal acts that they were powerless to stop. That was a scar that a lot of our people brought back from the Balkans, and a scar that the entire Canadian Forces, particularly the army, brought back as an institution."

Yet it is the outdated and useless concept of Canadians as peacekeepers in a volatile and violent world that the federal opposition partners keep referring to; that it is only as peacekeepers that our troops should be dispatched to meet the challenge of medievally-brutal terrorists meting out mass bloodbaths to religious and ethnic minorities as they sweep through Africa and the Middle East now, in their religiously-inspired campaign to dedicate the world and its community of people to Islamofascism.