Transcript
I think my view on the role that we played was that the stabilization of the country did occur initially and then there was basically a withdrawal, a drawdown from, you know, the bigger national contingencies. And what I saw in my time over there was that, yes the food aid and, you know, the things that was initially to try and, you know, help the people of Somalia not only stabilise and get out of a civil war sort of situation but also to make sure that the people of Somalia were being fed and the food was getting out to where it needed to, because what was happening was the warlords would all, you know, be controlling all of that and it was only going to where they wanted it to go. So definitely saw some improvement in that space.
However, I saw a very gradual, and towards the end it was a rapid decline of the security situation and the country was starting to basically return back to a fairly lawless … Infrastructure was very poor. We were over there during the infamous Black Hawk Down, you know, I think everybody's probably seen the movie, but we were there when that was happening.
And that was just a sign of how the locals, particularly the Aidid clan, had started to get on the front foot with the UN and all the other nation contingents and start being offensive towards, you know, taking an offensive posture towards the UN forces. And, you know, obviously everybody knows that there was, you know, quite a lot of people killed over that two or three days.
Probably overnight, really. Helicopters were shot down, you know, tanks were out in the streets and who knows what the number of Somalis that were killed. The official figure and what actually occurred is probably nowhere near what's been reported. But it was quite a significant deterioration and that was certainly a trigger point in the whole of the deployments and certainly had a major impact on the subsequent deployments of how the Australian contingents were prepared.
And, you know, we were definitely lucky that we didn't have any significant casualties. We had people that were suffering from, you know, I think they call it, you know, battle fatigue as a result of some of the incidents that were occurring. But definitely, you know, to answer your question, the situation deteriorated pretty much and I saw a declining the whole time that I was in Somalia.
