UN Africa Mission will be Complex and Dangerous - More So than Afghanistan

By: Matthew Fisher, National Post 

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 are safe. All are complex. None come with an exit strategy.

The strongly preferred choice of the Canadian Forces is Mali, which is about the same size as Manitoba and Saskatchewan together and has about seven times as many people. South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which have also been mooted, are believed by Canadian Joint Operations Command to 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 that 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.

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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 the building of schools and deliver 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 off to war. Still, there is a small corps of diplomats still in harness such as Ben Rowswell, Canada’s ambassador to Venezuela, and James Christoff, who was until very recently our number two in Kenya, who excelled in Kandahar and whose experience working cooperatively with the army would benefit Canada greatly in Africa.

The most informed guesses provided to me by the military suggest that it will take until at least next March or April to get Canadian troops and gear into the field. If the mission is to Mali, one place the Canadians could be based at or near is 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 at the fabled crossroads for Saharan camel caravans will be above 40 C, and 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. That is 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 one dollar a day.

Meningitis is the biggest killer, followed by its frequent partner, malaria, according to 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 Hillier embarked on a cross-country tour to inform Canadians about how dangerous it would be. That process is underway again, with initial warnings from defence minister Harjit Sajjan and Canada’s new ambassador to the UN, Marc-André Blanchard, that what Canada is about to undertake in Africa will be peacemaking, not Pearson-style peacekeeping, and that the prospect of combat and casualties is very real.

If the mission is to Mali, the 600 Canadians would join 15,000 other 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 in Mali is a relatively new group, the Macina Liberation Front, which specifically targets UN and French troops. The MLF claims loyalty to al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb but resembles Boko Haram, which is affiliated with ISIL 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.

Ivison: Liberals’ African peacekeeping plan unlikely to offer easy wins

By: John Ivision, The National Post 

OTTAWA — Harjit Sajjan is heading to West Africa this month on a fact-finding mission impossible.

The defence minister will search for an elusive United Nations peacekeeping mission that will maximize Canada’s chances of winning a seat on the UN Security Council but minimize the potential cost in Canadian lives and resources.

“That’s hard to find in Africa,” warned a senior military source.

Justin Trudeau’s belief in the United Nations as an effective institution runs from the top of his perfectly coiffed head to the tips of his stripey socks, and he is apparently prepared to send Canadian Forces into action to test it.

At a time when people like former UN assistant secretary general Anthony Banbury are lamenting an organization he called a “black hole into which disappear countless tax dollars and human aspirations, never to be seen again,” the Liberals are exploring a role in an African trouble-spot like Mali or the Central African Republic.

Trudeau and his team feel obliged to do something in the world. There was the small deployment to Latvia, as part of NATO’s mini-surge in eastern Europe, but these Liberals have a Chrétien-like aversion to being aligned too closely with U.S. foreign policy and they see the UN as much more sound ideologically than NATO.

A mission in Africa would bring about the happy coincidence of winning acclaim from the developing nations who will decide which country gets the “Western Europe and Others” seat on the UN Security Council in 2020 (Canada is in the running against Ireland and Norway).

Winning this prize would be all the sweeter given the Conservative government’s abject failure to do so in 2010.

“The UN thing looms much larger (for Trudeau’s team) than people credit,” said one senior source.

The military is gung-ho, not least because there are no other major deployments on the horizon — dangerous for morale (there has been a mass exodus of experienced soldiers since Afghanistan) and budgets (the view in National Defence Headquarters is that it would be a good idea to get the army out the door before the completion of the current defence review; “More missions mean more visibility,” said one NDHQ source).

None of this need necessarily be a bad thing. Dr. Walter Dorn, professor of defence studies at the Royal Military College of Canada, has long argued that Canada should beef up the number of military personnel on UN deployment from its current level of less than 30.

Canada, he contends, has special capabilities that could be used in French-speaking West Africa, not least of which are language skills, and there is a “new generation” of peacekeeping missions that differ from those Canada experienced in Rwanda and Somalia because the UN has since adopted a “protection of civilians” mandate.

In the government’s defence, it can be argued that a mission to bolster local African forces would be useful in denying haven to Islamist terror groups. But even if the cause is noble, the Canadian public deserves a thorough explanation on where we might be going and what the mission might entail.

Will we have an end-date or a plan to hand off responsibility to another country? Is there even a peace to keep?

Nobody in Sajjan’s office was prepared to answer these questions, presumably on the basis that the minister hasn’t yet found his facts.

Yet Jon Vance, chief of the defence staff, told a change-of-command ceremony on Parliament Hill last month that the army would be deploying to Africa “very soon.”

If we are going, and it seems we are, let’s hope it’s not to Mali (apparently Sajjan’s trip will not take him to Bamako, though this doesn’t necessarily mean Canadians won’t end up there).

Of 27 UN fatalities so far in 2016, 24 of them were inflicted in Mali as part of the country’s nasty civil war. (In 2015, 12 of 34 deaths were in Mali, and 10 were in the Central African Republic, another potential landing place for Canadian troops).

As Banbury, who quit the UN earlier this year, wrote in The New York Times: “Our most grievous blunder was in Mali.… More than 80 per cent of the force’s resources are spent on self-protection.

“The United Nations in Mali is day to day marching into its first quagmire.”

For a Canadian military with recent experience of fighting in hostile terrain, where hard-won tactical gains were rarely sustained, the prospect of spending all its time and resources on “force protection” can scarcely be an attractive one.

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“I think they will be extremely leery of putting themselves in an area where significant groups target peacekeepers,” said one senior military source.

With the security situation in Sudan deteriorating, perhaps Central African Republic offers the best prospect for Sajjan to fulfil his impossible mission.

For reasons best known to themselves, UN bureaucrats sent soldiers from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Republic of Congo as part of its CAR mission, resulting in serious human rights violations by the soldiers. Banbury noted “a persistent pattern of rape and abuse of the people the UN was sent to protect.”

Protecting civilian populations from rape and abuse; winning the acclaim of emerging nations; avoiding cost in blood and treasure — that would be an ideal trifecta for a government launching its first peacekeeping mission.

It must seem such a no-brainer to the Liberals that they see no need to hold a parliamentary debate, or “consult with Canadians,” normally their favourite pastime.

“It seems anything labelled ‘peacekeeping’ gets a free pass,” said one defence source. “But given the destination, that’s a very bad idea.”

Truck attack in France ups the ante for Canada’s peacekeeping mission in Mali

By: Matthew Fisher, National Post 

Canada’s impending peacemaking mission to Africa took on a more urgent tone Thursday night when a Tunisian man drove a truck through crowds enjoying Bastille Day fireworks on Nice’s palm-lined waterfront.

French President Francois Hollande immediately announced that France’s already overstretched armed forces would mobilize 10,000 troops and every member of the army reserves to guard French streets, border crossings and airports.

France needs Canada’s help — and Canada will answer the call. The army and air force will be heavily involved in Africa and no unit more so than the French-speaking brigade built around the Royal 22nd Regiment, known as the Van Doos.

As Postmedia first reported on July 6, the Trudeau government intends to send troops to French West Africa. Mali is their most likely destination, but the Central African Republic and a couple of other nearby countries are in the mix, too.

Ottawa and Paris have been talking for some time about where Canadian soldiers would fit into one of France’s multiple troop deployments there. No date has been set for the mission. The Dutch and the Germans have already been helping France with the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA). That is because even before the murderous attack in Nice, the Hollande government was having difficulty sustaining the tempo of its African missions as well as operations against the Islamic State in the Middle East and against terrorists on French soil. It is why the RCAF has already spent a lot of time in Africa, using its C-17 Globemasters to provide essential logistical support for French forces.

Canada’s Defence Minister, Harjit Sajjan, had intended to travel to French West Africa next month to help hammer out the details of Canada’s mission there. After France’s latest terror attack, and the call-up of forces to defend France, that trip may have to be moved up.

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This will not be a benign peacekeeping mission with cold beer on beaches in Cyprus crowded with European tourists. French West Africa has become a terrifying place, with Islamic terrorists flooding south across the Sahara from the chaos of Libya to cause mayhem, anarchy and despair in half a dozen impoverished countries.

Then Defence minister Bill Graham and Gen. Rick Hillier, who was then Canada’s top soldier, went across the country during 2005 and early 2006 to prepare Canadians for the likelihood of casualties in an impending combat mission in southern Afghanistan. That mission resulted in the deaths of 158 soldiers and a large number of victims of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Sajjan and Gen. John Vance must in the same way now prepare Canadians for the dangerous slog ahead in Africa. The two men were just together in eastern Europe working out how and when Canadian combat troops would take command of a NATO battalion that will deploy to Latvia.

These warriors know each other well and are well suited to the task. Sajjan served three tours in Afghanistan where he was an army intelligence operative working deep in Taliban heartland. Vance twice commanded Task Force Kandahar, developing an effective anti-insurgency strategy that was much admired by Canada’s allies.

The African mission that is shaping up is not at all the one that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau envisaged when he pledged during last fall’s federal campaign to return the country to traditional peacekeeping. There will be nothing traditional about Canada’s deployment of up to 1,000 troops to the Bulge of Africa.

Canada’s blue berets will not stand there between opposing forces who seek peace. Jihadists control much of the north of the country where, as in Afghanistan, tours will be made worse by hellish temperatures in the high forties and even the fifties.

Only a few weeks ago China gave a hero’s funeral to one of its dead from Mali. In all, 21 blue berets have died there recently.

There will be a jumble of unfamiliar terrorist groups to reckon with, too. Groups in and near Mali that may be added to the Canadian lexicon include the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, which has been at war with fellow Tauregs from Ansar Dine, which imposes strict Sharia law, and Ansar Dine’s offshoot, the Islamic Movement of Azawad. Another part of this sinister tableau is a branch of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which styles itself the Movement of Oneness and Jihad in West Africa.

Casting a pall over everything is the Islamic State. It has established a strong presence just to the north of Mali and is directly connected to or the inspiration for so many of the recent attacks in France, Belgium, Turkey and Lebanon. A further complication is that the UN estimates there are 475,000 internally displaced people.

And that is the good news. The Central African Republic, which lies further inland, and where Muslims are at war with Christians, has it own list of terrorist groups and is generally regarded as even more hazardous for peacekeepers than Mali.

Sending troops in harm’s way will not be the only reckoning for the Trudeau government. Everything that Canada is doing or will be doing militarily in the Middle East, eastern Europe and to help the French in Africa will cost big money.

Whether the prime minister likes it or not, the terrorist attacks in Nice and so many horrors elsewhere are going to demand an increase in defence spending.

Canada Preparing To Commit Troops To UN Peacekeeping Mission: Source

By: Althia Raj, The Huffington Post

OTTAWA — Canada may soon announce it will commit troops to new peacekeeping missions, The Huffington Post Canada has learned.

A spokeswoman for Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion told HuffPost Tuesday the Liberal government wants to “re-energize” Canadian leadership in key areas and in multilateral institutions.

“Canada will increase its support to UN peace operations, extending beyond peacekeeping to include the equally important civilian components of conflict prevention, mediation, and peacebuilding efforts,” said Chantal Gagnon.

Government sources said decisions would be made in the coming months.

Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion speaks at the NATO summit in Warsaw, Poland on July 9, as Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan listens. (Photo: Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

The United Nations is organizing a meeting in London this September, when pledges will be made and future contributions discussed, a UN spokeswoman told HuffPost.

Over the weekend, the Liberals announced Canada would lead a NATO mission in Latvia to curb Russian aggression and deploy 450 troops, a frigate and up to six CF-18 fighter aircrafts. Dion told The Canadian Press, “It is terribly unfortunate that Canada has to deploy its forces in Latvia instead of having peacekeeping in Africa or in an area of the world where it is much more needed.”

The foreign affairs minister is on a rare vacation and was unavailable for an interview. But his office insisted the new NATO deployment will not prevent the Canadian Armed Forces from participating in new peace and security missions.

“Min. Dion has been clear that we will still implement our renewed peacekeeping strategy and that we've had lots of specific requests from other countries to consider, including in Africa (e.g. CAR [Central African Republic], Mali),” his chief of staff, Julian Ovens, wrote in an email.

Dion’s office would not specify what those requests are, but said they’re currently being evaluated in conjunction with the Department of National Defence.
“... we will welcome additional support, particularly in the areas of training, capacity building, engineering, aviation and medical support. ”
— UN spokeswoman Ismini Palla

The UN said it would welcome additional aid from Canada.

"Peacekeeping is increasingly in need of high-technology assets and specialized skills,” said spokeswoman Ismini Palla.

“While Canada is already contributing to UN Peacekeeping, we will welcome additional support, particularly in the areas of training, capacity building, engineering, aviation and medical support.

“Canada's contribution in this field would be highly beneficial,” she said.

Malian police patrol with the German UN mission in Mali in May. (Photo: Souleymane Ag Anara/AFP/Getty Images)

The two missions cited by Dion’s office are particularly risky.

The UN mission in Mali is the deadliest in the world. Since April 2013, 68 peacekeepers have been killed by what the UN calls “malicious acts.”

In May, five Togolese peacekeepers were killed when their vehicle was ambushed. Days later, a Chinese peacekeeper was killed in a mortar attack on a UN camp. Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb claimed responsibility for that attack. Three people working for a UN subcontractor were also killed that same day in a separate attack.

The UN mission in Central African Republic is also plagued with violence. Last week, the UN’s under-secretary-general for peacekeeping operations, Hervé Ladsous, told the Security Council that while free elections had been held this winter, the country continues to face “a security climate that remains fragile and reversible.”

More than two million people — or half the population — lack access to food. One-fifth of the nation remains displaced, and armed groups continue to control vast parts of the country, he said. Last month, more than a dozen people were killed, including a Senegalese UN peacekeeper.

Hellen Akello, 38, a victim of the Lira district attacks by members of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) militia movement, displays her injuries during a visit by an International Criminal Court prosecutor in northern Uganda in 2015. (Photo: Edward Echwalu/Reuters)

Outside the capital in the country’s southeast, the Lord’s Resistance Army continues to murder, abduct, force sex-slavery and recruit child soldiers, said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein in a July news release.

More than 290 people were abducted between January and April, including 60 children, he said.

Zeid also raised concerns that the Ugandan army deployed to help the country is engaged in “credible” allegations of sexual abuse, exploitation, abduction, forced marriages and rape.


’Effective and targeted contributions’


Gagnon said Global Affairs Canada — the foreign affairs department — was exploring different ways to engage in peacebuilding, such as new training initiatives. In addition to talks with National Defence, the department is consulting with the UN, the RCMP, Public Safety, and Canadian experts, she said.

The government is assessing its own abilities in light of the UN’s needs and wants to provide “effective and targeted contributions,” Gagnon added.

The Liberals are also looking to promote the equality of women and men, and would like to increase the number of female peacekeepers and advisors, she said.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the United Nations headquarters in New York in April. (Photo: Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press)

Canada is eager to contribute more to UN peacekeeping efforts, in part because of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s commitment to the organization, and thegovernment’s stated desire to win a Security Council seat in 2021.

Speaking in March at the UN, Trudeau pledged to revitalize Canada's historic role as a key contributor to United Nations peacekeeping. "Canada will increase its engagement with peace operations, not just by making available our military, police, and specialized expertise, but also by supporting the civilian institutions that prevent conflict, bring stability to fragile states, and help societies recover in the aftermath of crisis,” he said.

“Canada would be very welcomed back in peacekeeping.”

The United Nations currently has 16 peacekeeping operations, including nine in Africa.

Of the approximately 1,100 Canadian Armed Forces members deployed in operations around the world, only 31 are working in UN peacekeeping operations, ranging from 12 in South Sudan to one lone member in Cyprus.

An additional 84 civilian Canadians are part of peacekeeping missions around the world, according to Global Affairs Canada.

Bilingual advantage

In February, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and Ladsous met with Canadian officials in Ottawa.

“They conveyed the message that Canada would be very welcomed back in peacekeeping,” Palla told HuffPost.

“Our pitch with Canada was also that they can also offer excellent bilingual personnel, in French and English, which is also very important to our peacekeeping operations because half of them are in francophone places,” she said.