[If you move north you'll just switch to a different theater of military operations, with the great Canada-Denmark War looming ...]
August 29, 2004
Canada Reinforces Its Disputed Claims in the Arctic
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
PANGNIRTUNG, Nunavut, Aug. 24 - Hundreds of Canadian troops were all around. Helicopters swooped over the tin roofs of this isolated hamlet. A navy frigate and coast guard icebreaker were moored and readied in a nearby fjord. Across the bay, Master Cpl. Carl Gale was doing his part, too, as he introduced himself to an Eskimo family out picking wild blueberries.
"I suppose you know we are up here for training," he told Aluki Metuq, 31, and her four children, and then asked if they had seen any of the mock satellite debris his unit was hunting for. They had not. But the troops and their Eskimo Ranger guides gathered in a field of flowering moss anyway to join them for a snack of berries and a friendly chat before the patrol resumed.
The show of force, coupled with efforts to win over local people, showed how far the Canadian military was willing to go to familiarize itself with an increasingly valued region where it seldom operated while strengthening Canada's claim to it.
The $4 million exercise is the most prominent sign to date of Canada's intensifying effort to reinforce disputed claims over tens of thousands of miles of Arctic channels and tundra. Once nearly permanently frozen, forbidding and forgotten, the region is today seen by officials from Canada and competing nations as a potential source of both wealth and trouble.
Not all of Canada's vast claims to the Arctic are recognized internationally. The United States, the European Union and Denmark either contend that the region's waterways are open to all or have placed their own claims on parts where climate change is expected to increase access to the region's bountiful resources in coming years....
"We used to forget that the Arctic was our border," Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew said in an interview. "There has been a change of perception of our reality, of where we belong."
But while Canada claims the region, it does not regularly patrol it. That is what Operation Narwhal was intended to remedy by making the military more comfortable operating in what can be an extreme environment and by allowing a sometimes mistrustful native population to get used to seeing Canadian troops and navy ships in Arctic waters....
One ... [recent] operation was the "sovereignty patrol" undertaken by 20 regular Canadian troops and Eskimo Rangers in April. The patrol traveled between Resolute Bay, site of a research center on Cornwallis Island, and Alert, an outpost located at the northern end of Ellesmere Island on the Lincoln Sea. It was the longest and northernmost such operation in Canada's history.
Like these exercises, it also demonstrated both Canada's determination and its inadequate defense resources. Only 5 of the 16 mostly rented snowmobiles survived the treacherous 900-mile, two-week journey through the shifting ice and howling winds in working order. The five troopers who managed to complete the patrol hammered metal plaques into the tundra declaring Canada's sovereignty over the remote Arctic archipelago off the coast of northwest Greenland.
The patrol was Canada's response to an unlikely challenge from Denmark, which in two previous summers had landed marines from ice-cutting frigates on Hans Island, a desolate piece of rock in the Kennedy Channel, between Greenland and Ellesmere Island.
The Danes believed that the island and its surrounding waters had enough fishing and gas potential for them to pound Danish flags and plaques into its rocky surface and stir up a diplomatic incident that is still not settled....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/29/international/americas/29canada.html>
Carl