Thank you.
I'm very happy to be part of this majority-women panel.
Thank you very much for allowing me to share my thoughts on UN peacekeeping or, using the term I prefer, UN peace operations, of which peacekeeping is a part.
Peace operations are of importance to me as an operational academic because they are of great importance to Canada, to the people in the conflict areas, and to the United Nations, our world organization. Despite all their flaws, UN operations remain one of the best ways to prevent, manage, and resolve conflict. I have spent 30 years studying them, 20 years teaching military officers about them, and over 10 years working with the United Nations, including the field missions earlier this year in Mali. I remain convinced that even in the worst mission areas, there is some peace to keep, people to protect, and initiatives to support. Canada needs to help and has much to contribute.
Being a scientist by training, I rely on factual data to describe trends. In the graphs that I've circulated to the committee, you'll find in graph 1 the number of Canadian uniformed personnel deployed on UN operations since 1950, when a Canadian general led the military observer group in Kashmir. You'll see the big jump that happens in 1956 when the United Nations deployed, on the suggestion of Lester B. Pearson, the United Nations emergency force. We went beyond unarmed observers and deployed armed units in a truly international peace and police force. That's when our number of troops rose to over 1,000. Then Canada helped put together the peacekeeping force in Cyprus in 1964 and again contributed after the Yom Kippur War with UNEF II.
At the end of the Cold War we saw a plethora of new missions in Somalia, Bosnia, Cambodia, and then Rwanda. Canada's deployments, police and military combined, climbed to a peak of 3,300 in July 1993. Canada's identity is built partly on the excellent work of the military personnel and the diplomats who made Canada one of the world's top peacekeepers in the second half of the last century.
After 1995, the UN stopped creating new missions for a few years, and then it surged in the new century, but Canada kept its numbers low, at about 300 to 500. The last time Canada deployed armed units in peace operations was in Ethiopia and Eritrea, as Carolyn mentioned, and in Haiti.
At present Canada provides no units and only 47 personnel as individuals, 23 police only in Haiti, and 24 military personnel in Haiti, the Congo, Cyprus, South Sudan, and the Middle East. You'll see the numbers there.
Until 2006 Canada provided logisticians to the Golan Heights in Syria, but these were withdrawn under the pressures of the Afghanistan campaign, halving the numbers to about 150 total in peacekeeping, as shown in graph 2. You'll see the drop at the left side of that graph.
The numbers dropped further with the present government. When Canada hosted the UN peacekeeping defence ministerial conference in Vancouver, the number fell to the lowest level since Pearson proposed the first peacekeeping force in 1956, and it went down further in January. It has picked up slightly since. Currently, the government deploys less than half the number deployed on average by the previous government. If you're interested, I update the numbers monthly on my website—walterdorn.net—on a page titled “Tracking the Promises”.
Graph 3 shows Canada's rank among nations contributing personnel, moving from the number one position, which we held during the Cold War—and in the early 1990s we maintained that position—to the current position as number 74 among personnel contributions to the UN.
For reference, I also added graph 4, showing the total number of forces deployed in UN peacekeeping operations, and you can see that while Canada is near an all-time low, the UN is near an all-time high. At present the UN Secretary-General deploys more forces on operations than any other leader in the world, including the President of the United States.
Having been seconded to the UN over the past year, thanks to funding from Global Affairs Canada, I worked at UN headquarters and conducted technical visits to five peace operations. I can declare with certainty that the UN has many highly competent individuals who go beyond the call of duty and work selflessly, risking life and limb to save vulnerable people.
I can't help but pay tribute to members of my own team. When I deployed back in 1999 in East Timor, I lost a member of my team and there was a massacre in a church complex where I conducted voter education. That experience only deepened my conviction that we had to make the UN work. After 450 years of colonialism and occupation, the Timorese people finally had their chance to gain independence, and that was due to a UN operation.
Fortunately, the UN has improved immensely since that time. We can't judge UN activities by the experiences and tragedies of me in 1999 or of soldiers who served a quarter of a century ago. UN headquarters has improved its field support in many ways since the last large deployment of Canadian Forces, which was in Bosnia in 1994 and 1995.
For example, at the time, the Office of Military Affairs was run by a Canadian general, General Maurice Baril. He had a staff of about half a dozen people. Now the Office of Military Affairs has more than 120 military officers serving, from about 70 different countries. Unfortunately, Canada is not currently one of the countries employed in OMA as UN staff.
The UN's capacity has grown immensely in so many different areas, including the areas in which I work: technology, intelligence, doctrine, training, and protection of civilians.
Unlike the UN's, Canada's capacity for peace operations has declined. With few personnel deployed over the past two decades, the Canadian Armed Forces have less experience than in previous generations and do much less training. With the closure of the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in 2013, we no longer have a place where military, police, and civilians can train and educate together. Although the Peace Support Training Centre, or PSTC, in Kingston, with its new Paul A. Mayer Building, does excellent work, its program is only for the military, it is mostly aimed at the tactical level, and only a small fraction of its program is actually focused on the UN specifically.
In a report, “Unprepared for Peace?”, I documented the decline of peacekeeping training more generally in the Canadian Armed Forces. As the only person who teaches a course on peace operations at the command and staff level, I can tell you that the number of activities in the Canadian Armed Forces has dropped to less than a quarter of what it was in 2005, with fewer exercises and almost no role-playing as UN peacekeepers, though some efforts are now being made to reinvigorate the peace operations curriculum.
Some other hard-hitting facts also sadden me. Canada seeks to increase dramatically the number of women in UN peace operations, yet we are failing to lead by example, with only three military women deployed, even as many individual women are willing to seek deployment and are eager to deploy on missions.
I've had women in my office saying that they've been trying for years to get on UN operations but that the opportunities just haven't been there. Now there will be some exciting opportunities for air force officers and women in the helicopter detachments to deploy in UN peacekeeping with the announcement of Mali, and I hope opportunities will come for men and women in the army and navy as well.
I could talk about Mali, but I'll leave that for the question period, because I'm sure questions will be raised about it. I have done fatality statistical analysis there, and I'd like at some point to address the issue of child soldiers in Mali.
In conclusion, there is so much to do to re-engage in peace operations. We have to be careful not to suffer from paralysis by analysis. We've had a number of years now of dithering and delay that have actually caused the UN problems in its deployments. My suggestion is that we adopt a modus operandi of “push what moves”, meaning that we start working quickly on a whole range of activities so that we get the experience we need to find the initiatives in which we can make breakthroughs.
I have submitted a brief with more than 40 suggestions. You can use it as a kind of smorgasbord to look at which ones you might want to choose to highlight.
Canada can become a really constructive force on the international stage, helping bring peace to war-torn areas of the world. Only then can we help heal the open wounds of the world body that hemorrhage problems to the rest of the globe. Only then can refugee flows be diminished, diseases be eradicated, and terrorism be cut off at its source. Only then can Canada truly say it is back.
Thank you.