Keeping the peace: stories of Australian peacekeepers - Somalia

Somalia
Persian Gulf

Somalia

In the early 1990s, Somalia was a country in which central authority collapsed. Heavily armed gangs dominated the streets and the countryside. War and drought together led to famine. Early in 1993, Australia contributed a battalion group - over 1,000 personnel - to a US-led operation seeking to restore order and allow humanitarian organisations to deliver aid.

The Australian contingent, based around the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment, took over an area of 17,000 square kilometres, centred on the town of Baidoa. The battalion maintained security in the town and patrolled in the surrounding countryside; it also escorted over 400 aid convoys to 137 villages.

The operation allowed crops to be sown, and business to start up again. Efforts were made to seize some of the multitude of weapons available to the warring clans, and to re-establish local policing and justice. However, eventually the United Nations operation in Somalia ended in failure, and Somalia was left to solve its own problems.

Private Graeme Brown

Private Graeme "Brownie" Brown was an Aboriginal soldier who went to Somalia in 1993 with the 1st Battalion, Royal Australian Regiment. One day in February, Brown was with a group tracking blood trails from a fire-fight with Somali bandits the night before.

At that moment they saw a speeding water truck hit a six-year-old girl playing in a puddle beside the road. Brown, who was a trained medic, applied first aid, but the girl had suffered massive head injuries and soon died. The Australians stopped the truck and vigorously chastised the Somali driver but, to their disgust, were not authorised to arrest him.