Peacekeepers Day celebrates 75 years of United Nations peacekeeping

Peacekeepers Day was celebrated at Peacekeepers Park in Garrison Green Sunday morning, with more than 100 people taking part in the ceremony.

It’s the 21st annual event honouring Canadians killed who served on international peacekeeping support operations.

The names of the fallen were read aloud, and their names  engraved on the Walls of Honour at Peacekeepers Park.

Family members of fallen soldiers killed in Afghanistan were also present, as they too were remembered.

“This was supposed to be a 50-year Wall of Honour, it lasted six,” said Rick Wright, Calgary Chapter President, Canadian Association of Veterans in United Nations Peacekeeping (CAVUNP).

“That's because of Afghanistan. We ended up putting the people from Afghanistan on the wall because it was our understanding that they were reacting to the United Nations Security Council directives. We found out last year that was not true. But we're not taking them off the wall.”

169 PEACEKEEPING MISSIONS

Wright has hosted the event for years with representatives from the RCMP, Calgary Police, Calgary Fire and Alberta Health Services.

“There's a wall here from the peacekeeping in Korea, and then this wall is all of the 169 U.N. peacekeeping missions that Canadians have been on,” said Wright.

“A lot of people who did serve, but they're suffering from PTSD and our organizations we sort of gather around and help people with PTSD to work their way through. (With) some people it's very easy, (but with) some people, they've got really bad PTSD.”

Organizers say that peace support operations may include peace-restoring, peace-enforcement, peace-making, peacekeeping, observer missions, humanitarian operations, reconstruction, and occasionally the supervision of elections.

REMINDER OF SACRIFICE

Robert Cairns served on several UN tours including in Yugoslavia. 

He says Peacekeepers Day is an important reminder to never forget the sacrifice made by so many Canadians.

“We lost people in every field of the UN and every place we went,” said Cairns.

Spr Stephan Stock was 25 when he lost his life in Kandahar province, Afghanistan, in August 2008, along with two other comrades.

“They were going to a dam that they were going to put in a turbine and they were just on the way back and they just hit an IED and three of them were killed,” said Stock’s mother Leona.

Leona Stock attends Peacekeepers Day to remember her son, who was a combat engineer.

She attends Peacekeepers Day to remember her son, who was a combat engineer.

“It's nice that he’s remembered, but it also reminds us how much we've lost,” she said.

Wright says more than 130,000 Canadians have served on peacekeeping missions since 1948.

Peacekeepers Park in Calgary has the names of more than 300 fallen men and women written on its walls.

The Sunday closest to Aug. 9 is selected as Peacekeepers Day because on Aug. 9, 1974, Canada experienced its largest single day loss, when nine Canadian peacekeepers were killed when their Buffalo aircraft was shot down over the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon.