David Snider on the St. Lawrence Seaway near Rivière-du-Loup, Que., in 2014, during a vacation.A. Snider/Courtesy of the Family
David Snider toured the world’s trouble spots, seeking to make each a little safer.
His expertise in security planning made him a valuable asset for United Nations agencies on three continents.
Mr. Snider, who died suddenly last month at 51, was among those Canadians who work overseas in quiet anonymity to protect those who protect refugees and deliver aid.
In a 17-year career with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), Mr. Snider had assignments in some of the most treacherous places in the world. He was a field safety adviser in Monrovia during the uncertain peace following the Second Liberian Civil War. By 2008, he was a regional field safety adviser based in Nairobi, Kenya, with responsibility for eight Horn of Africa countries, as well as Chad. Five years later, he took a similar post in Amman, Jordan, with responsibility for Middle Eastern and North African countries during the ongoing Syrian Civil War.
More recently, he spent four years as an instructor based in Budapest, where he developed training strategies and a set of security management courses based on what he had learned and studied.
A recent decision to return to the field led to a security position in Somalia with UNICEF, which provides vaccines, clean water and other humanitarian aid to children and youth. He died within days of arriving to take the new job.
Mr. Snider was known within the United Nations family for an acerbic wit and a meticulous attention to detail. His sudden death brought an outpouring of testimonials from around the globe.
David Snider, centre, with his UNHCR colleague Arve Skog, left, in Northern Liberia in 2004.Courtesy of the Family
“David’s career is testament to his character,” said Anthony Keating, chief of investigations with the United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, based in Goma. “One challenge after another, not resting on laurels and not content with the idea of anything being exempt from change, no status quo, open to examination.”
The security field jobs demanded a talent for solving complex problems while also entailing the ability to engender trust in some of the most dangerous places on Earth.
To appreciate his skill you had to “combine his intelligence with the ability to connect with people,” said Paul Farrell, the New York-based principal security co-ordinator for UNICEF’s Office of Emergency Programmes. “He could really connect. In security that’s important, because people need to be reassured. He brought that warmth to the job.”
From day to day, he could be dealing with a diplomat in a swanky embassy or strumming a makeshift guitar in a dusty refugee camp.
Wanderlust might have been his birthright. The family lived in five countries, including Canada, before Mr. Snider finished high school.
David Andrew Snider was born in Milton, Ont., on March 15, 1969, the first of three sons for the former Susan Robertson and Dennis Snider, a foreign service officer who late in his career served as a Canadian ambassador to Serbia and Croatia. The boy grew up in four foreign capitals, all coincidentally beginning with the letter B: Belgrade, Yugoslavia; Bridgetown, Barbados; Budapest, Hungary; and Brussels, Belgium.
After graduating from the International School of Brussels, a private, not-for-profit English-language school with students from dozens of countries, young Mr. Snider moved to Ottawa to live with his best friend’s family, necessitating another year of school at Hillcrest High for Grade 13 and a second graduation.
He played second row in rugby union for his school in Brussels and had earlier been a stage performer in grades 7 and 8 at Hawthorne Public School in Ottawa, where he played leads in two Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas, as Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore and the Pirate King in Pirates of Penzance.
In 2000, he earned a master of science degree in risk, crisis and disaster management from the University of Leicester in England. His dissertation was titled, “Communicating from the Field: An Analysis of the Risk Communication Methods Used by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia.”
His overseas career began in 1994 in Zagreb, Croatia, where he served as a security operations and plans officer for the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR), responsible for peacekeeping in the Balkans.
Mr. Snider spent six years as a security officer based in Arusha, Tanzania, and The Hague, the Netherlands, during testimony by victims of the genocide in Rwanda and the war in the former Yugoslavia.
He returned to Canada in 2003 for a year managing pre-flight screening operations at Toronto’s Pearson Airport.
Owing to the covert nature of security work, Mr. Snider’s personal expressions on social media were limited. A hint of his philosophy can be found in a Facebook post he made in 2014 shortly after a man killed a soldier on duty as a ceremonial guard at the National War Memorial in Ottawa before attacking the nearby Parliament.
“The ‘Canadian Way’ is the only way extremism will be extirpated,” Mr. Snider wrote at the time on Facebook. “The Rule of Law, entrenched rights and freedoms, respect for diversity … those are the things that prevent extremism from taking root.”
After a long journey from his new home in Limerick, Ireland, via Amsterdam and Nairobi, he arrived at the United Nations compound in Mogadishu on Sept. 10. He soon after fell ill, rebounded and began work four days later, but relapsed and was about to be evacuated to a hospital in Kenya when he died of a heart attack on Sept. 16.
Mr. Snider leaves the former Audrey Callaghan, his wife of 20 years, an Irish national whom he had met in The Hague while both worked for the UN International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. He also leaves their daughter, Jessica, 15, and son, Daniel, 13; brothers Michael, of Ajax, Ont., and Christopher, of Pickering, Ont.; and, parents, Susan and Dennis, of Port Hope, Ont.
United Nations officials conducted a formal ramp ceremony in Mogadishu for the return of Mr. Snider’s body. His career was recounted by James Swan, the United Nations secretary-general’s special representative for Somalia, while Johann Siffointe of the UNHCR noted Mr. Snider’s passion and analytical mind, as well as his joyfulness, “always with a big smile.”
An honour guard was provided by members of the Ugandan People’s Defence Force in blue berets, who accompanied the casket, which was draped in the United Nations' familiar blue-and-white flag, a symbol of peace in a war-torn land.