Change of Command for Operation CROCODILE

DND Press Release

A change of command ceremony was held today in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) for Operation CROCODILE as Colonel Cayle Oberwarth assumed command of Task Force DRC from Colonel Pierre Huet.

Outgoing Commander, Col. Pierre Huet (left), and incoming Commander Col. Cayle Oberwarth (right), signed the transfer of authority documents on July 7, 2017, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for the command of Op CROCODILE.

Operation CROCODILE is Canada’s military contribution to the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUSCO).

The Canada Armed Forces (CAF) personnel deployed on this mission represent a positive and impartial presence in the DRC and provide credible and professional support to the UN monitoring presence which promotes security and stability in Africa.

Colonel Cayle Oberwarth, Incoming Commander, is honored by the opportunity to command Canada's military contribution to the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. He and his highly trained and motivated colleagues are ready to face the challenges and opportunities of this mission. In the footsteps of their predecessors, they look forward to maintaining their commitment to the United Nations and to working with their allies to maintain a safe and secure environment in this region of Africa.

Colonel Pierre Huet, Outgoing Commander, Task Force Democratic Republic of the Congo, was extremely proud to have led this team of professional and dedicated Canadian Armed Forces members over the past year. He leaves this mission with a great sense of accomplishment and salutes the achievements of the deployed personnel on Op CROCODILE in support of peace and security in the region

As commander of Task Force Democratic Republic of the Congo, Colonel Oberwarth commands nine CAF personnel with expertise in operations, liaison, and planning. They are employed at MONUSCO Headquarters in Kinshasa and the forward headquarters in Goma.

Canada continues to support UN peacekeeping efforts and has been actively involved in ensuring security and stability in the Congo region since 2000.

MONUSCO’s mandate is to protect civilians from threats of physical violence, while working with the local government and international actors to strengthen the Congolese government’s capacity to deliver justice and security for its people.

MONUSCO is a peacekeeping mission under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter authorized to use armed force, if necessary, to protect civilians threatened with physical violence. It is also charged with contributing to the improvement of security conditions.

As of May 31, 2017, MONUSCO mission strength stood at 16,436 soldiers in formed units, 481 UN Military Observers, 2,329 police officers, 791 UN civilian employees, 2,525 locally engaged staff, and 389 UN volunteers.

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.

Related
Canadian regular forces to train troops in Niger as Liberals seek to take part in more UN peace operations
Chris Selley: Are we really any good at peacekeeping?
John Ivison: Prudence demands that we see our way out of African peacekeeping mission before venturing in
Matthew Fisher: Truck attack in France ups the ante for Canada ’s peacekeeping mission in Mali

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.

Canada's military plan for Africa will be for a 'long duration,' says Sajjan

Terry Pedwell, The Canadian Press

OTTAWA -- The federal government will soon announce a plan to bolster United Nations peace efforts in Africa, including trans-border operations, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said Monday, as he wrapped up a five-country, fact-finding mission to the continent.

"I do have a number that we will be announcing shortly that we can sustain for a long duration," Sajjan said during a teleconference from the Democratic Republic of Congo.

And while no final decisions have been made yet on numbers, timing or location, Canada's contribution to a UN mission on the continent will involve more than the military and go beyond what would be considered a traditional peacekeeping role, Sajjan said.

RELATED STORIES
Canada not required to provide minimum number of jets to NATO: report
Canadian army heading for Africa 'very soon': top general
Sajjan to tour Africa, collect information for potential peackeeping mission
Spread of terrorism in Africa on Canada's peacekeeping radar: Sajjan

Whatever form the mission takes, it will also operate beyond the borders of individual countries, said the minister.

"We need to look at the area by regions," Sajjan explained.

"It's all interconnected. If we ended up looking at problems only within the confines of borders, then we are not going to have a true impact."

Establishing trans-border peace operations in Africa may prove difficult for the United Nations, which is already having difficulties manoeuvring through the politics of individual nations.

On Friday, the UN Security Council authorized an extra 4,000 troops to curb the latest violence plaguing South Sudan, a move that was almost immediately rejected by government officials there. That opposition was later softened by President Salva Kiir, who said he would consider the plan under certain conditions.

There has been fierce fighting in South Sudan in recent days, raising concerns that the country, which gained its independence in 2011, may slide back into civil war.

Canadian defence and foreign affairs officials have been assessing the possibility of Canada joining UN peacekeeping operations in Mali or the Central African Republic.

A mission in Mali would be fraught with risk. There are roughly 13,000 blue helmets in the country and more than 100 have been killed in ambushes and attacks since the mission was established in April to support a ceasefire between the government in the south and armed groups in the north.

As part of an effort to finalize Canada's commitment to boost the UN's numbers in Africa, Sajjan visited Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda before making his final stop in the Congo. He was accompanied by former Supreme Court of Canada justice Louise Arbour, who is also a former UN high commissioner for human rights, and retired lieutenant-general Romeo Dallaire, who once commanded a UN peacekeeping force in Rwanda.

Defence analysts have questioned whether Canada is stretching itself too thin by contemplating multi-country commitments of military resources to Africa. Canadian Forces personnel are already involved in or preparing for training and other missions in Latvia, Iraq and Ukraine.

But Ottawa won't task the military with anything that commanders believe they can't handle, Sajjan said.

Minister Sajjan to Visit Congo on Fact Finding Mission

Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press

OTTAWA — Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan will visit the Democratic Republic of Congo next week as part of a trip to Africa to collect information for a potential future Canadian peacekeeping mission on the continent.

Officials have warned against jumping to any conclusions that Canada is preparing to send hundreds of troops to the DRC, where the United Nations has a major peacekeeping operation.

"This is an opportunity for him to go into a country that does have an ongoing peacekeeping mission and see what that looks like," said Sajjan's spokeswoman, Jordan Owens. "It's to see what an ongoing mission looks like."

But Walter Dorn, a peacekeeping expert at the Canadian Forces College, says despite its challenges, the DRC would be a "great mission" for Canada.

"There is the possibility of a major role there," he said. "And we could be looking at a force-commander position."

Former UN high commissioner for human rights Louise Arbour and retired general Romeo Dallaire, who commanded a peacekeeping mission during the Rwandan genocide in 1994, will accompany Sajjan as he visits the DRC as well as Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda during the week-long, fact-finding mission.

The Liberals promised during last year's election campaign to return Canada to peacekeeping and Sajjan and defence chief Gen. Jonathan Vance both said last month that could involve a mission to Africa.

Owens said the defence minister undertook a similar fact-finding trip to Iraq before the Liberal government revamped Canada's military mission against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant in February.

"It's a good way for him to see exactly when the African Union says it has this support, what does that actually look like?" Owens said. "When the UN says 'We're doing this,' what does that mean? So we're gathering information."

There had been speculation that the Liberal government was eyeing a role in the west African country of Mali, where a UN peacekeeping mission has been in place since April 2013. Hundreds of German and Dutch troops are among the roughly 13,000 blue helmets in the country.

But that mission, which is intended to assist a ceasefire between the government in the south and armed groups in the north, has been fraught with risk. Eighty-six peacekeepers have been killed as insurgents, some linked to terrorist groups, have launched ambushes and attacks.

While Owens insisted no decision on a new Canadian peacekeeping mission has been made, the fact Sajjan is heading to East and Central Africa suggests the government is considering a deployment to that part of the continent and not Mali.

Canada has contributed a handful of peacekeepers to the UN mission in the DRC for several years. However, the Conservative government rejected a request in 2010 for Canada to have then-lieutenant-general Andrew Leslie command the force. Leslie is now a Liberal MP and chief government whip.

Dorn says for that reason, there would be some important symbolism if the Liberal government agreed to dramatically increase its involvement in the DRC mission. Canada also has a national interest in the country, he said, with large investments in mining.

The UN mission in the DRC has been sharply criticized for not doing enough to protect civilians from the country's various armed groups. The political situation is also uncertain due to upcoming elections. But Dorn said Canada could make a significant contribution to peace and stability in that part of the world.

Another possibility is the UN mission in South Sudan.

Owens said one of Sajjan's objectives is to determine where a Canadian contribution would be most effective. "He's focused on the meaningful impact part," she said. "If we were to deploy a peacekeeping mission to Africa, is it one that's meaningful?"

Arthur Boutellis, director of the New York-based Center for Peace Operations, said that describes the mission in South Sudan, where peacekeepers have been tasked with protecting civilians from opposing forces loyal to the president and vice-president.

"Really there's a need there," he said. "And if you want to make a difference and prevent mass atrocities, they definitely need qualified troops."