The Shameful "Somalia Affair" that reduced Canada’s once-proud peacekeeping reputation to ashes - By Richard Foot

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On [March 16], 1993, Somali teenager Shidane Arone was savagely tortured — kicked, punched and burned with cigarillos — by Cpl. Clayton Matchee and other members Canada’s elite Airborne Regiment. Arone had been found by the troops breaking into the camp where Canadians were stationed on a peace-and-humanitarian mission in the dusty, war-ridden chaos of Somalia.

 

Matchee was arrested for his deeds, but two days later he was taken to an army hospital after trying to hang himself in a detention cell with a shoelace.

 

His attempted suicide and Arone’s killing-and-torture would soon be uncovered by the media, as would the execution-style shooting of another Somali a week earlier, caught stealing food from the Canadian camp.

 

So began an extraordinary scandal — the Somalia affair — that would consume the attention of Canadians for the next four years, frustrate two prime ministers, scuttle the careers of several senior military officials, and reduce Canada’s once-proud peacekeeping reputation, and the Airborne regiment, to ashes.

 

Questions and allegations ricocheted around Ottawa in the ensuing years, outlasting the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney and ending up in the lap of Jean Chretien’s Liberals. The Liberals ordered a public inquiry into the affair, which ended up consuming $25-million over two years, before Chretien finally tired of the scandal and shut the inquiry down.

 

Although its work was unfinished, the inquiry commissioners produced a scathing report.1 It said the military — poorly led at the highest levels — should never have sent the Airborne to Somalia, troubled as the regiment was by insufficient training, lousy equipment, ineffectual officers and an unprofessional, “rebel” element in its ranks. Most damning, the report alleged a defence departmentcover-up about what happened in Somalia, including the tampering of official documents, later obtained by the media.

 

Maclean’s magazine called it a “woeful tale of military incompetence, duplicity, cowardice and brutality.”

 

The final toll was two dead Somalis, the ruined military careers of some of the Canadian Forces’ highest ranking officials, and the conviction of Pte. Kyle Brown, sent to military prison — a scapegoat, he insisted — for the torture and manslaughter of Shidane Arone. Clayton Matchee, brain damaged by his attempted suicide, was declared unfit to stand trial.

 

Meanwhile the Airborne Regiment was disbanded, never to return, and the international reputation of Canadian soldiers was in tatters. It would take almost a decade, and a counter-insurgency war in Afghanistan, before the army fully regained the public’s trust, and its pride.

 

Source: thecanadianencyclopedia.com

 

Richard Foot has been an editor with the Canadian Encyclopedia since the spring of 2013. A Halifax-based journalist and author, he was a founding staff member of the National Post and a senior national affairs writer for Postmedia News. He has a special interest in Canada's military history, and has interviewed D-Day veterans on Juno Beach, Canadian peacekeepers in Kigali and soldiers in Kandahar. He's seen 12 of Canada's 13 provinces and territories and lived in five of them. He's been "Screeched in" by the mayor of Gander, Newfoundland, has wrestled a rodeo calf with his bare hands, and once received an $800 speeding ticket for driving too fast on an Ice Road in the Arctic. His favourite Canadian book isMordecai Richler's Solomon Gursky Was Here, for its vivid, epic storytelling.

 

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