UN mission full of risks
COMPLEXITY, DANGER AWAIT CANADIAN TROOPS
The Liberal government has been silent about where in Africa Canada’s soldiers and a cadre of diplomats, aid workers and police officers will be deployed. None of the potential United Nations missions is safe. All are complex. None comes with an exit strategy.
The strongly preferred choice of the Canadian Forces is Mali, which is about the same size as Manitoba and Saskatchewan combined and has about six times as many people. Canadian Joint Operations believe the other possibilities — South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo — present even greater perils and offer less chance of a positive outcome.
Having been with Canadian peacekeepers in Somalia, Eritrea and Rwanda, I can categorically state African missions are in a league of their own for complexity and danger.
Much has been made recently about the risks that will soon face Canadian troops in Africa, and whether they have enough training in the subtleties of peacekeeping and peacemaking.
This is all to the good, but equal attention should be paid to the civilians who will be deployed as part of the whole-of-government approach developed by the Harper government in Afghanistan and which will be repeated, perhaps on a larger scale, in Africa.
Like soldiering, combat diplomacy requires people who are brave and highly adaptive. Our diplomats and aid specialists in Afghanistan quickly discovered that not only were they totally reliant on the troops for their safety, but the soldiers often had more useful skills — military engineers, military civil affairs specialists and military doctors, nurses and medics were better equipped to oversee building schools and delivering medical outreach projects in hostile territory than were civilians.
This made for a complicated relationship at times, not helped by the fact that what is now called Global Affairs tended to send Brahmins with Ivy League educations. Still, there is a small corps of diplomats still in harness — such as Ben Rowswell, Canada’s ambassador to Venezuela, and James Christoff, until very recently our No. 2 in Kenya — who excelled in Kandahar and whose experience working co-operatively with the army would benefit Canada greatly in Africa.
The most informed guesses provided by the military suggest that it will take until at least March or April to get Canadian troops and gear into the field. If the mission is to Mali, they could be based at or near Timbuktu, where French troops clashed with fighters from al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb in the spring of 2013. The average daytime temperature in April and May will be above 40 C, and it never drops below 30 C the rest of the year. It is only slightly cooler elsewhere in the country.
Mali is ranked 179th in the UN Human Development Index, eight places behind Afghanistan. The average lifespan in Mali is nearly 30 years less than it is in Canada. Half the population gets by on less than $1 a day.
Meningitis is the biggest killer, followed by its frequent partner, malaria, say the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Cholera, hepatitis, rabies, tuberculosis, typhoid, yellow fever and the Zika virus are all present. Polio has again become a serious concern.
So even before the fluid security situation is considered, pestilence and hot weather may make Africa more of a challenge for the Canadians than Afghanistan, with its fairly predictable summer fighting seasons.
Before Canada’s mission to Kandahar in 2006, then-defence minister Bill Graham and Gen. Rick
PESTILENCE AND HOT WEATHER MAY MAKE AFRICA MORE OF A CHALLENGE.
Hillier embarked on a crosscountry tour to inform Canadians about how dangerous it would be. That process is underway again, with initial warnings from Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and Marc-André Blanchard, Canada’s new ambassador to the UN, that what Canada is about to undertake in Africa will be peacemaking, not Lester Pearson-style peacekeeping. The prospect of combat and casualties is very real.
If the mission is to Mali, the 600 Canadians would join 15,000 peacekeepers in a country where there has been little peace to keep. More than 100 blue helmets have died in terrorist attacks there during the past 40 months.
Among the insurgents is a relatively new group, the Macina Liberation Front, which targets UN and French troops. The MLF claims loyalty to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb, but resembles Boko Haram, which is affiliated with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant and has carried out terrorist attacks and hundreds of kidnappings in an arc that cuts across northern Nigeria into Chad and Niger.
Whether it is Mali or somewhere nearby, Canada’s soldiers and civilians must pull together in an environment that will be more unpleasant and potentially far more forbidding than Afghanistan.