Twenty-five years after Rwanda, where is Canada on peacekeeping?
by Lee Berthiaume, The Canadian Press
Posted Dec 13, 2020 7:00 am EDT
Last Updated Dec 13, 2020 at 7:12 am EDT
OTTAWA — When now-retired major-general Guy Tousignant handed over command of the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Rwanda 1995, Canada had been involved in virtually every UN mission over the previous four-plus decades.
But after the scandal of Somalia, in which Canadian soldiers tortured and killed a teenage boy, the frustrations and failures of the UN’s efforts in Bosnia and Croatia, and the horrors of Rwanda, Canada started to withdraw from peacekeeping.
Today, Canada has around 40 peacekeepers in the field. That’s a fraction of the 1,200 Canadian blue helmets and blue berets deployed when Tousignant left Rwanda.