By the end of the year most troops will be out of
Afghanistan and longrunning missions in East Timor and the Solomons will have
been long over, taking Australia back to an era when Australia’s only foreign
adventures were small, worthy and not very risky peacekeeping operations of
which most people had never heard.
That’s how it was in the 1980s and early 1990s, before
Australian dispatched a battalion group to Somalia, the first of a series of
increasingly higher profile missions which took us to East Timor, Afghanistan,
the Solomons and Iraq.
Curiously, some of these ongoing peacekeeping operations
long pre-date the flurry of defence activity over the last two decades and so
the ADF will be returning to a sort of status quo.
Not counting the Solomons, Afghanistan and the Middle East
(around 2,400 personnel), Australian troops are currently serving in Operation
Mazurka in Egypt (25 troops), Operation Riverbank in Iraq (2), Operation
Paladin in the Middle East (12) and Operation Aslan in South Sudan (19). Then
there’s the Australian Federal Police mission in Cyprus (15 officers), which
has been running since 1964.
With experienced and capable defence and police forces and a
commitment to exercising middle power diplomacy, Australia could reasonably
sign onto more such missions. In the meantime, greater attention will be paid
to the mission we’ve got, and some aren’t nearly as benign as they might once
have been.
That particularly applies to the two Middle East operations.
Some troops involved in Paladin work on the Golan Heights, worryingly close to
the Syrian civil war, with the prospect of exposure to chemical weapons. All
are now equipped with CBW protective kit.
Then there’s Australia’s contribution to the Multinational
Force and Observers (MFO), a non-UN peacekeeping mission established in 1981 to
oversee the peace treaty which ended conflict between Israel and Egypt.
The Camp David Accords which produced this agreement
envisaged a multinational force in the Sinai with agreed force limits. This was
never going to be a UN force and so it fell on the US, which in due course
pressed then PM Malcolm Fraser for a contribution. This wasn’t a certainty.
Peter Londey’s excellent history of Aussie peacekeeping Other People’s Wars
notes that the instinct was to help an ally but also not to annoy those Arab
nations which purchased lots of our primary products. Londey said government
dithering allowed the issue to heat up beyond all common sense. Polls showed 72
per cent community opposition. Finally in October 1981, apparently swayed by
the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, Fraser announced approval
in principle. Not until March 1982 did the Australian contribution reach the
Sinai, comprising eight Iroquois helicopters and about 110 personnel.
Australia had long been beaten into this mission by Fiji and
Colombia which remain significant MFO contributors. The Australian contingent,
along with the pair of NZ helicopters who were inevitable termed “Anzac
Airlines” performed useful work.
Despite its initial objections, the new Labor government
decided this mission wasn’t too bad but set a two-year time limit. It ended in
April 1986, but not forever. With the new post-Cold War passion for
peacekeeping, Australian troops returned to the Sinai in 1993 with a contingent
of around two dozen. And that’s how it’s pretty much continued to this day.
So what’s changed? The answer is the Middle East, with
unrest in Egypt spreading into the Sinai with the rise of militant islamist
groups.
“It would be no exaggeration to say the MFO faced
operational challenges this past year that it had not encountered in its
previous 30 years of existence,” said MFO Director General, US diplomat David
Satterfield the MFO 2012 annual report.
In September, dozens of gunman, described as Bedouin
jihadists possibly affiliated with al-Qaeda, broke through the security fence
into MFO’s North Camp in the northern Sinai, one of many violent anti-western
protests across the Middle East prompted by the release of the trailer for the
anti-Islam film Innocence of Muslims.
Eight MFO personnel were wounded, none seriously. Attackers
blew up a guard tower, torched a firetruck and generally caused extensive
damage. Australians were certainly on the base at that time but none were hurt.
Defence said they were not endangered and the incident was appropriately
handled by MFO security forces before the arrival of Egyptian security forces.
The government is certainly conscious that the Sinai is
emerging as a major security risk and in April Defence Minister Stephen Smith
announced Australia would contribute $US1.5 million to MFO over three years for
force protection improvements that would directly benefit ADF members
“These force protection measures will include the
acquisition and maintenance of fully armoured vehicles and may also include
upgrades to MFO bases,” he said.
Once MFO personnel got around in thin-skinned vehicles but
now all offbase travel is conducted aboard armoured vehicles. MFO isn’t
specifically saying there’s an emerging threat from improvised explosive
devices. But IEDs have turned up everywhere else that western forces have faced
Islamist insurgents.
In the annual report, MFO said stone throwing, roadblocks,
protests and overt surveillance of MFO positions and instance of display and
sometimes use of weapons had all increased dramatically since January 2011. It
cited an escalation of serious incidents in their area, including cross-border
terrorist attacks into Israel in June and September and in August, an attack on
Egyptian border guards which killed 16.
On the plus side, both Egypt and Israel realise there’s a
problem, although being Egyptian territory it’s mostly Egypt’s problem. The
Camp David agreements do limit just what forces Egypt can place within 20-40kms
of the border. Israel has been willing to allow Egypt to deploy significant
forces, including attack helicopters but not tanks, into the region to take on
the militants during what’s called Operation Eagle in 2011 and Operation Sinai
in August 2012.
The latter operation was prompted by an insurgent attack
which killed 16 Egyptian soldiers. Insurgents hijacked two armoured vehicles
which they drove into Israel. Both were obliterated and the attackers killed
without Israeli casualties.
