Canadian navy to escort food ships into Somalia: MacKay
Published Wednesday August 6th, 2008
HALIFAX - Canada has sent a Halifax-based frigate to waters off the horn of Africa to prevent pirates from attacking food shipments bound for Somalia.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Wednesday that HMCS Ville de Quebec and its crew of 253 was diverted from a NATO mission in the Mediterranean.
The warship will provide escort for United Nations world food program vessels travelling into designated Somali ports, in what he described as a crucial mission.
"The population of Somalia is facing serious food shortages and the world food program has indicated that current food stocks in Somalia will be depleted by mid-August," MacKay said in a prepared statement. "It has also been stated that if these supplies are not renewed, Somalia would suffer a severe famine."
MacKay said the Canadian warship was en route and would remain part of the mission until the end of September.
"This re-assignment will not put them at any more risk than they would have been in under their original assignment. Having said that, pirates by their very nature are very unpredictable," he told a news conference at Canadian Forces Base Halifax.
MacKay said a request to send the warship came about a week ago.
"I had a discussion with the secretary general of NATO, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, about the potential for Canada to participate. Suffice as to say we are part of a relatively small number of countries capable of providing this type of escort, and the decision was taken then to participate."
Since last November, France, Denmark and the Netherlands have escorted a total of 27 ships with enough food to feed a million people for six months.
However, the escort system was interrupted in late June, when a Dutch warship left the area.
Last year, pirates attacked three ships chartered by the UN agency to carry food into Somalia.
In a telephone interview, the commanding officer of Ville de Quebec said the ship would arrive in just over a week and will escort a vessel from Mombasa, Kenya, to Mogadishu, Somalia.
Cmdr. Chris Dickinson said although there had been a rash of pirate attacks over the last two years, the Canadian ship wasn't expecting any problems.
He said previous experience has taught NATO that the simple presence of a heavily armed warship with its helicopter is often a deterrent.
"We don't expect to use the boarding party. These guys (pirates) use very small boats. ... It's not the Pirates of the Caribbean, they're not there with a big ship coming alongside one of these vessels," said Dickinson.
"It's a great mission and we're really filling a hole."
Somalia has been wracked by almost constant civil war since the early 1990s.
In recent years Somali government troops along with U.S.-backed soldiers from Ethiopia have been fighting Islamic militias. The fighting has claimed thousands of lives and driven hundreds of thousand from their homes.
The surge in piracy in Somali waters during this time is no accident, said Lee Windsor, deputy director of the Gregg Centre for the Study of War and Society at the University of New Brunswick.
"The fact Somalia is struggling through civil war and never really regenerated out of the '90s means it doesn't have a navy ... it doesn't have a seaborne police force of any consequence that it can use to stop this piracy," said Windsor.
He said the pirates, likely in some cases working for regional warlords, are interested in the food shipments because they are part of a familiar equation in sub-Saharan Africa.
"In a place like Somalia, where food is so scarce, food becomes a source of power. He who maintains power over the food supply maintains power, period."
Windsor said what NATO is doing is, in many respects, an application of the United Nations' responsibility to protect doctrine, where coalitions of member nations have an obligation to intervene to restore law and order.
He said the new mission for Ville de Quebec would not be "that far outside the mandate" that currently exists for the NATO fleet in the Mediterranean.
The vessel which has been at sea since July 17, will carry out its new mission until Sept. 27, at which time it will return to the Mediterranean.
It's expected to return to Halifax by December.
The World Food Program's country director said he hopes other governments would step forward once Canada's mission is over in a few weeks.
"This is a critical moment when more food is needed for a growing number of hungry," Peter Goossens said in a statement.
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