Peacekeeping and Black Hawk Down

by John Thompson

January, 2002

Peacekeeping isn’t for boy scouts with rifles. Many Canadians have a limited idea of what exactly is entailed in modern peacekeeping, or just what kind of snake pits our soldiers are sometimes expected to stick their heads into. There is a movie they ought to see.

While many Canadians condemned our late Airborne Regiment for its apparent misdeeds in Somalia in 1993, they don’t know that our troops were models of decorum and peaceful behavior. They shot three Somalis and beat another one to death while aid workers looked on our Paratroopers as a positive example. The Nigerians, Pakistanis and Malaysians killed dozens. In one 18-hour period on October 3^rd 1993, in the Bakara market area of Mogadishu, US troops killed between 300 and 1,000 Somalis.

The Americans were trying to arrest two of the top aides to Muhammed Farrah Aidid, one of the worst of the warlords who had ushered in the anarchy that had killed hundreds of thousands of Somalis. Aidid had attacked UN troops to assert some control over food shipments (and food was power at the time) and was in cahoots with Osama Bin Laden — a development of which the US was then unaware.

The Bakara market area was the home neighborhood for Aidid’s heavily armed clansmen. They came boiling out of their homes with assault rifles, rocket launchers and machineguns in response to the raid by 75 young Army Rangers and 40 Delta Force commandos. Although the US troops captured the objects of their raid, they were soon hemmed in by hundreds of gunmen, the latter on their home turf and fighting at close range in an urban area — the worst possible circumstances and other handicaps soon developed.

After 18 hours, 18 Americans were dead and 77 were injured. There were additional casualties, including a dead Malaysian soldier from the UN armoured column that eventually shot their way into the area where the Americans were trapped. The events in the incident were carefully reconstructed in Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down, which has been more or less faithfully turned into a movie by the same name. It is a violent movie about violent events, but hopefully might finally increase public consciousness about what has attended "peacekeeping" and "humanitarian" missions in recent years.

Canadians say they are proud about our peacekeeping tradition, but they know very little about its worse moments. The Canadian Airborne Regiment (supposedly "disgraced" by their conduct in Somalia) was caught in the middle of the 1974 fighting on Cyprus — they killed, were killed and wounded, and rescued hundreds of people caught under fire. There was also a period where the Paratroopers were all expecting to die in the coming hours. Who remembers this?

In Bosnia and Croatia, Canadian soldiers were mortared, sniped at, and ran over mines deliberately planted on their patrol routes. Some — like their forefathers in the World Wars — had to fight off infantry assaults. There are empty places in Serbian and Croatian homes because of Canadian troops too; their men were shooting at ours when we killed them.

The Canadian casualty toll from the former Yugoslavia is not generally known, our Government doesn’t like to discuss it. As Scott Taylor and Brian Nolan pointed out in Tested Mettle, there has been a degree of misdirection as to the numbers and causes of injury and death among our troops. Including accidental deaths (which were always included in our lists of war dead from formal conflicts) and suicides, it may be that 135 Canadians have been killed or injured in the last nine years there.

Nobody in Canada really remembers that our peacekeeping troops have been killed and injured by their ones and twos here and there — beaten by mobs in the Congo, shot-down over the Golan, sniped in Cyprus, or traumatized in Rwanda.

Today, a light (i.e. under-strength and under-armed) Canadian battle group is on its way to Afghanistan. Some of them are probably going to see combat, to be shot at and to shoot back. There will be mines on the tracks they drive on, some may get ambushed or sniped at, and some will probably be killed. It is unlikely — though not entirely impossible — that they will experience anything as horrific as the US did in Mogadishu, but on an individual basis, some will.

In the end, combat is a personal experience and death remains death. Peacekeeping has never been peaceful and is a job for properly prepared soldiers, not boy scouts with rifles.

John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca