BAMAKO, Mali — A small contingent of Canadian soldiers is playing a role in the world's deadliest struggle, and it's not in Afghanistan.

It's the battle for Africa.

No place on Earth has been devastated like this continent has in the last decade with millions killed in a disheartening succession of power struggles, genocides and civil wars.

About three dozen Canadian soldiers have some involvement in peacekeeping efforts in Africa, but none more so than Maj.-Gen. Luc-Andre Racine.

He is the first full-time Canadian teacher at an African peacekeeping school. His mission is preparing armies on this continent to step in and stop the bloodshed in their own backyard.

"The more we train people the more competent they will be," said Racine, a Chicoutimi, Que., native in an interview this week.

"The guys we're preparing today will be military leaders tomorrow."

The African Union aims to have a standing multinational peacekeeping force of 1,500 soldiers ready to deploy by 2008, with another 2,500 by 2010.

The belief is that a multilateral force would have more credibility with local populations than national armies who might favour one side, or have a stake in the outcome of a conflict.

African countries have already played a role under an ad-hoc AU force in some of the continent's recent peacekeeping success stories, in places like Liberia, Sierra Leone and Burundi.

Racine moved his family two months ago to Mali, where he runs a training program at one of Africa's three main peacekeeping schools.

A walled compound still being constructed in the heart of Mali's capital is the new home of three-week training programs that have little to do with grenades and guns.

Racine's main tools are things like slide projectors and videotape.

He walks his 60 students through scenarios that are staples of peace-building: negotiating with warring parties, dealing with aid organizations, and even public relations.

The Bamako teaching method includes holding mock news conferences where soldiers learn how they might better use the mass media to reduce tensions.

They are also briefed on the non-governmental organizations they can deal with in a conflict situation to help protect civilian populations.

Most of these soldiers have never been trained in anything but warfare and are often wary and insecure about involving non-military players, he says.

"It might seem utopian, but this is something we've learned since the early '90s," Racine said.

"If you don't know how to behave with people you can find yourself arguing instead of negotiating."

He speaks from experience. His crash-course in peacekeeping didn't happen inside a walled compound equipped with sleeping quarters and an auditorium like the one in Mali.

It happened in Rwanda.

Racine was one of the few Canadians who bore witness to the 1994 massacre, and he wishes such training programs had existed before that disaster.

He recalls naively strutting up to a Rwandan army colonel and barking at him as he demanded access to a restricted area. A pair of Senegalese soldiers pulled him aside and suggested his approach wouldn't work with the colonel.

"They told me, `You see that guy? He's killed I don't know how many thousands of people in the last few days. One more dead white guy won't make a difference."'

After the Rwanda debacle, Canada opened peacekeeping schools in Kingston, Ont., and in Nova Scotia, the latter being named after former prime minister Lester B. Pearson.

It was Pearson who helped pioneer the peacekeeping concept when he was foreign affairs minister during the 1956 Suez crisis. The initiative earned him Canada's only-ever Nobel Peace Prize.

The federal government has invested $1 million in the Mali school and has helped train 3,000 soldiers from the continent.

Canada also has 25 military observers in Sudan and eight in the Congo, as well as part-time instructors elsewhere in Africa.

One Malian soldier says Africans are well aware of the link between peace and prosperity.

"This is a continent that wants to develop. Without peace there's nothing," said Maj. Suleymane Sangare, who was trained in Kingston two years ago.

Although violence rages in Darfur, Sangare credits military observers in Sudan with keeping the conflict from spreading to neighbouring countries.

The first peacekeeping school in Africa was run by the French in Cote d'Ivoire but the violence triggered by a 1999 military coup there prompted its move to Bamako.

That school specializes in training battalion leaders, while others in Kenya and Ghana focus respectively on high-level strategy and ground-level tactical operations.

Canada now provides one-third of the training in Mali and helps the French and Malians run it under a training program led by Racine.

He, like many Canadians, is bilingual, a definite asset in communicating with Africans from different countries where English or French is most common.

One leading Canadian peacekeeping expert who teaches frequently at the school says Canada remains a player in the peacekeeping business.

It's just that Canada's role has diminished in proportion to the overall worldwide growth in peacekeeping, says Jocelyn Coulon, head of the Francophone Network on Peacekeeping Research.

In the 1970s, the world saw an average of five or six peacekeeping operations in which Canada contributed 1,000 soldiers, he said.

"Now you have 34 missions worldwide and players like NATO, the African Union and Australia, and there are 2,500 Canadians involved," Coulon said.

The very nature of peacekeeping has also changed. In missions like Cyprus in the 1970s, Racine says, peacekeepers stood between "two groups throwing rocks at each other" and never addressed the root causes of conflict.

Now in Afghanistan and in many other countries, there are no armies to stand between when a patchwork of rival factions wrestle for control without uniforms to distinguish them.

At the same time, foreign countries are struggling to support a fragile democracy, open schools, and build public infrastructure to bolster the long-term prospects for peace.

Coulon cites the end of the Cold War as an event that changed the face of military conflict. When the Soviets and Americans withdrew their presence in places like Yugoslavia, Somalia and Ethiopia, internal conflicts erupted.

"In traditional peacekeeping you had a buffer zone, in places like Cyprus," he says.

"Now there are less standing armies. You're dealing now with child armies, militias, warlords, village chiefs -- and chaos."

Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean visited the Bamako school last week and told a group of African soldiers they were part of a historic generation on their continent, one that can help Africa develop economically by securing the peace.

After a round-table discussion with the soldiers, Jean dismissed the suggestion from some quarters that peacekeeping is an outdated concept.

"It cannot be a dead concept. Peacekeeping is about life," she said.

"You cannot think of building or developing a country without stability. I think the African countries understand that."