A Canadian Armed Forces member turns away from a Chinook helicopter as it lands during a demonstration at the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Gao, Mali, on Dec. 22, 2018.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press
Four years after Canada sent helicopters and hundreds of troops to a United Nations force in Mali, only 13 Canadian personnel still serve as peacekeepers in the rapidly eroding UN mission in the West African country.
A growing number of troop-contributing countries are pulling out of the UN force in Mali in the aftermath of two military coups and the arrival of Russian mercenaries. Canada’s presence has continued to dwindle this year, but it says it will remain in the peacekeeping mission for now.
The UN mission in Mali is already the most dangerous in the world, with nearly 300 peacekeepers killed in the past decade. Now there are fears that it will lose its combat capacity against Islamist insurgents. Troop withdrawals have been announced by Britain, Germany, Sweden, Benin and Ivory Coast, while Egypt suspended its deployment and France shut down its own separate military operation in the country.
The UN mission is weakening at a crucial time in Mali. There are mounting reports of civilian killings and other human-rights abuses, including alleged atrocities by Russian mercenaries from Wagner Group, a Kremlin-backed military contractor. In one incident alone, Wagner soldiers were implicated in the alleged massacre of 300 to 500 people in a village in central Mali.
“In central Mali, the civilian population is living in hell,” the International Federation for Human Rights said in a report on Thursday.
It described a pattern of summary executions, sexual violence and other attacks on civilians by all sides in the conflict, including jihadi groups, the Russian mercenaries and the Malian army. Across the country, the killings this year are the worst since the conflict began in 2012, it said.
The planned withdrawals by several key countries will create “huge operational gaps” in the UN peacekeeping mission, according to Bruno Charbonneau, director of the Centre for Security and Crisis Governance at the Royal Military College Saint-Jean in Quebec.
“There is no doubt that its strength and influence have been undermined, while its effectiveness in accomplishing its mandate has been compromised. The withdrawing troops are some of the best-equipped and trained, and provided essential mobility and support, like medical evacuation.”
Canada, which sent about 250 troops and eight helicopters to support UN peacekeepers in northern Mali from 2018 to 2019, has allowed its contribution to shrink in recent years. It started the year with just 23 military and police personnel in Mali and now has only five soldiers and eight police in the mission, according to RCMP and National Defence officials.
They said there were no plans for a full withdrawal from the peacekeeping mission, known as MINUSMA. Earlier this year, Canada renewed its troop contribution for another year and boosted its financial commitment from $14.8-million to $19.8-million.
“Given our longstanding engagement in Mali and the Sahel region, Canada remains committed to supporting MINUSMA, whose contribution to peace, stabilization and the protection of civilians is essential,” said James Emmanuel Wanki, a spokesperson for Global Affairs Canada, in response to queries from The Globe and Mail.
Over the past two decades, Canada has invested massively in Mali, seeking to bolster its democracy and stability. Since 2000, Canada has provided more than $1.7-billion in development assistance to Mali, including $133-million in the 2020-21 fiscal year.
But the democratic reform efforts seem to have largely failed. After coups in 2020 and 2021, a military junta is well-entrenched in Mali’s capital, Bamako. The junta, backed by about 1,000 Russian troops from Wagner Group, has increasingly imposed restrictions on the UN peacekeepers. This, in turn, has persuaded many countries to withdraw their troops from the mission.
The International Crisis Group, an independent think-tank, has warned that the UN peacekeeping force is “on an increasingly precarious footing” because of the rising civilian deaths, the Russian military partnership and the restrictions imposed by the regime.
“The relationship between the UN and those who hold power in Bamako is becoming so toxic that it may be necessary to at least use the possibility of shuttering MINUSMA to force all sides to hold a more constructive conversation on keeping the mission alive and viable, so that it can work on reversing the alarming decline in security in Mali,” the crisis group said in a recent report.
The British minister for the armed forces, James Heappey, announced last week that his government would withdraw its 300 troops from the UN mission sooner than planned. The regime in Mali, after recruiting the Russian mercenaries, “actively sought to interfere” in the UN peacekeeping force, he told the British House of Commons.
Wagner Group “remains a bunch of murderous human rights-abusing thugs, and there is not a country on the planet that is any better for its presence,” Mr. Heappey said.
“It would be erroneous to think that MINUSMA, a UN mission struggling to match the excellent military endeavour of troop-contributing countries with any meaningful political progress, was really doing anything to stabilize the Sahel.”
Theodore Murphy, director of the Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, said the peacekeeping mission had become “fundamentally flawed” because the Malian government was unreliable. “The pincer forged by Mali’s junta and Russia’s military presence created an increasingly untenable environment for European military forces to remain in Mali,” he told The Globe.