Grant Dawson is author of Here is Hell: Canada’s Engagement in Somalia and an assistant professor at University of Nottingham Ningbo China. Brigadier-General (Ret’d) Serge Labbé was a Canadian Army infantry officer who commanded the Canadian Joint Force Somalia.
Canada has a history in Africa. That’s what Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said last November when introducing Canada’s new United Nations peacekeeping commitment in Mali. Specifically, he said, Canada has “had a troubled history” of peace operations in Africa.
Mr. Trudeau was not referring to Rwanda, where Canada and the world watched a genocide occur in 1994. He was not talking about Libya. Canada joined the intervention in 2011 that led to disorder from which that country still has not recovered. He was talking about Somalia.
The manner in which the Canadian contingent conducted operations in Somalia in 1992-93 should be seen as a shining success. Instead, it is regarded as one of the Canadian Forces’ darkest moments and most shameful failures.
With our Mali mission on the horizon, it’s time for a fresh look, lest we repeat errors of the past.
A Somali youth was tortured and killed by members of the Canadian Airborne Regiment, which was part of the Canadian Joint Forces Somalia, Canada’s contribution to a U.S.-led humanitarian intervention.
And this was not the only disturbing incident involving Canadians in Somalia. When the contingent returned in disgrace in 1993, its principal unit, the Airborne Regiment, was disbanded largely because of the mission. The UN evacuated Somalia in 1995 behind a second U.S. intervention that provided a protective screen for the UN withdrawal.
Somalis were essentially left to the warlords, until a decade later, when an armed group with terrorist links called the Islamic Courts Union seized southern Somalia. They were replaced by a weak UN-supported government that today controls little more than the capital, Mogadishu, propped up by African Union peacekeepers. The militant al-Shabab, an offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union, controls swaths of countryside and launches deadly attacks.
Why, then, look to the Somalia mission for lessons about Mali? Because it teaches us what not to do.
The Canadian mission in Somalia offers multiple lessons for the UN mission in Mali, but one in particular is of overarching importance. Construction of lasting peace and stability requires cultivating and sustaining the co-operation of the local people and, equally important, the long-term commitment by the international community, including international security forces. The Canadian government, along with the United States and other allies, intervened with the assumption that complex emergencies such as Somalia’s could be solved quickly and easily according to a politically driven schedule. With one or two notable exceptions, troop-contributing countries in 1992-93 were lacking any real commitment to the local people or security and humanitarian problems many years in the making.
