Good morning, all, and thank you for the invitation.
I'd like to put my presentation in context, briefly.
Between 2013 and 2015 I was detached to the United Nations as a mediation expert. I was following the Algiers negotiations quite closely. I've been involved in the negotiations for four of the six rounds. This is the perspective from which I will be talking, with a special focus on Mali but also with a broader concern for Canada's re-engagement with peacekeeping.
My presentation will cover four points. I want to present a brief overview of my own reading of our history with respect to peacekeeping, not because the members of the committee don't know the facts but because interpretations vary, and I think it is something important. I will describe current deployment environments for UN peacekeeping operations, with a particular focus on the situation in Mali. I'll assess Canada's intended contributions. I will also provide some general thoughts about our return to peacekeeping.
Let me start with our past contributions to peacekeeping. In the interests of time, I'm going to try to be brief. There is more detail in the brief that I have submitted to you.
I want to highlight that we have a very long and rich history with peacekeeping, involving our participation in more than 40 missions by the middle of the last decade. Even then, we ranked still only 55th out of 108 UN troop-contributing countries.
We incurred a number of fatalities—exactly 122. However, these were mostly in the context of deployments in places that were not necessarily the most dangerous environments we have been in, including during the first Suez crisis and in Cyprus, Bosnia, and Haiti.
Since Canada's withdrawal from peacekeeping, the figures released by the Department of National Defence indicate that only 22 Canadians are currently deployed in four missions authorized by the United Nations. The UN's count is slightly different, because the UN counts staff officers, police, and experts on mission. According to the UN figures, we contribute 40 persons to five peacekeeping operations, or PKOs. Those are in Haiti, South Sudan, the DRC, UNTSO in the Golan Heights, and Cyprus.
This is at a time when—and I think the comparison is important—the UN has upwards of 110,000 blue helmets deployed in 14 missions and when a significant number of our western allies, including France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries, all re-engaged with UN peacekeeping two years ago, or almost three years ago today.
None of this is new to you, but allow me to highlight my two takeaways from this history.
First, we have deployed peacekeepers in diverse environments ranging from less to more complex and from less to more dangerous, and our fatalities did not necessarily happen in the most dangerous of contexts.
My second takeaway is that while our engagement in peacekeeping may reflect normative values, it's also about realpolitik. It is an integral part of Canada's strategy to contribute to international peace and security on a par with non-UN deployments, such as those in Afghanistan or, more recently, those in Latvia. It is an integral part of our effort to share the burden of international peace and security with our allies, and I think that needs to be front and centre in our minds as we think about re-engaging.
My second point is about current deployment environments. They have changed since Canada was last part of a UN mission. Violent conflict is on the rise, and there are at least four characteristics of violent conflicts that we need to take into account.
The first is that they're much more regionalized than internationalized, as they used to be. Most of today's wars are not civil wars; they are “internationalized civil wars”, in the jargon of academics. That means that there are foreign states and non-state actors who play a role in instigating, prolonging, or exacerbating struggles.
In Mali, transnational jihadist groups such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State have latched on to the grievances of local actors to connect what was a traditional insurgency to broader transnational ideological struggles. The creation of the G5 Sahel Cross-Border Joint Force in July of 2017 has also contributed to regionalizing the Mali conflict, with recent terrorist attacks targeting not only sites on the Malian territory but increasingly G5 Sahel member states as well, including, most recently, Burkina Faso.
The second thing that we need to look at is the emergence of extremist groups. Instability and violent conflict are a fertile breeding ground for extremist movements. By the way, they are also the natural theatre for UN peace operations. Of the 11 countries most affected by terrorism globally, seven host UN peace operations. However, it's important to highlight that all researchers agree that classifying extremist and terrorist actors remains a policy and operational challenge and that it's an exercise that is often instrumentalized by actors with ulterior motives.
In Mali, for example, it is interesting to note that the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, the name that insurgents give to the north of Mali, has been included on several lists of terrorist groups with which, when you look at the rest, it shares very little by way of ideology or political objectives. One explanation that Mali experts have considered is that the NMLA is the most dangerous political opponent of the Government of Mali because of its secular nature and its autonomist objectives, which are likely to draw broad support among communities in the north.
In terms of current environments, the third point I'd like to raise is the multiplication and fragmentation of conflict actors. It has never been as great as in today's wars. In Syria today, we count approximately 3,000 self-identified groups, ranging from groups with a couple of people to more substantial organized forces. In Mali, the fragmentation of northern anti-government forces and their composition and re-composition into ever-shifting alliances and counter-alliances remains one of the main obstacles to achieving sustainable peace. As Arthur Boutellis of the International Peace Institute and I argued in a report that was published last June, this fragmentation, which has created divisions and armed struggles between erstwhile allied clans, is also the result of a divide-and-rule strategy adopted by the government and some of its northern allies.
The last point that I want to raise about new deployment environments is the increase in violations of international humanitarian and human rights law. This has been highlighted in the report of UN Secretary-General Antònio Guterres on the protection of civilians in armed conflict. I will not read the quote from the report, since you have it. I will only say that Mali is no exception to the trend and that today ongoing insecurity, limited economic opportunities, and the lack of access to basic services in parts of the north, and increasingly in the centre of the country, continue to prevent the voluntary return of high numbers of refugees and internally displaced people.
Therefore, the characteristics of these current conflicts complicate the search for peace. In Mali, when I was participating in the Algiers peace process, we achieved a peace agreement, which was signed in Bamako in June 2015. However, that peace agreement was achieved at the cost of clarity. It was an agreement in broad principles that left a lot to be agreed upon during implementation. It has failed to yield peace and stability. Instead, insecurity has spread to the centre of the country. This is not the place to elaborate on the reasons, and there are no parties that are not guilty in this sad state of affairs. It's important to us what this means for efforts to consolidate peace in the country. I'd like to submit that this makes the success of the UN mission all the more important, because there is a risk of heightened instability as Mali has entered, this summer, an important crucial electoral period.
Second, due to all of the forces present in the country, the UN mission is the only operation with a clear mandate not only to address instability and insecurity but also to support peaceful resolution of the underlying issues.
Also, to date, the security approaches of other actors, including the French Barkhane operation and the G5 Sahel, have actually backfired and thrown more people into the lap of terrorist groups.
Against that, I'd like to assess the intended contribution of Canada to MINUSMA.
Canada wants to deploy helicopters to provide transport and logistical capacity and to provide armed escort protection. Canada also wants to help with medical evacuations and logistical support on the ground.
This contribution reflects the government's pledge to re-engage in peacekeeping in ways that will affect the overall effectiveness of UN peace operations and help address, if not fill, critical gaps. This also reflects, to my knowledge, the most serious gaps and needs of MINUSMA.
MINUSMA has repeatedly highlighted that this is what it needs and what it cannot get from a majority of troop-contributing countries. The mission's field offices in northern Mali have come under attack by various spoilers of the peace process. The high number of fatalities is partly due to logistical difficulties of attending to injuries in situ and providing reliable evacuation of the wounded towards places where they can be taken care of.
A quick search of the data publicly available on the website of the UN Department of Peacekeeping Operations confirms that at least 143 of the 166 MINUSMA fatalities come from troop-contributing countries whose militaries are deployed as part of the ground forces of the mission. These are mostly countries from the south. They're not the western troops of MINUSMA.
As such, I think that not only would the Canadian forces be helping reduce the number of casualties, but based on current trends of who is most in danger, they would not be a primary target.
Here are some quick thoughts about Canada's return to peacekeeping. Peacekeeping has changed since Canada last deployed blue helmets. Settings are more unstable, as I just argued, because of a constellation of factors. Not only are these peacekeeping settings unstable, but if they are not kept in check, the chance that insecurity could spread beyond the borders of states is greater today, because of the regional and international conjuncture, than it ever was since the end of the Cold War.
This suggests to me that re-engaging in peacekeeping is not really a choice for Canada or for any country like Canada whose prosperity and security depend on international peace and security. Re-engaging in peacekeeping, while not danger free, is a necessity to prevent trouble spots in Mali or elsewhere from becoming open sores and the source of regional and international instability.
Thus, it seems to me that it is incumbent on any troop-contributing country to assess how it can best improve the efficiency of peace operations while at the same time reducing the risk to its own troops. It is my assessment that in choosing the kind of deployments it has, the Canadian government has done exactly that in this specific case.
