Shidane arone biography definition

On the night of March 16, , year-old Somali Shidane Abukar Arone was caught trespassing by Canadian soldiers deployed in his country. Shortly after midnight, he was dead.

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At the time, Somalia was in the midst of a brutal civil war that had sent more than 1. Thousands were dying every week from starvation and lack of medicine. Desperately needed humanitarian aid was being stolen by militia leaders and sold on the black market. In December , Canada sent a 1,strong force as part of a UN peace-enforcing mission to ensure the food got to Somalis in need.

Four months later, Arone snuck into the perimeter of the Canadian base in the town of Belet Huen, kilometres north of the Somali capital of Mogadishu, and was found hiding in a portable toilet by a Canadian Airborne Regiment CAR patrol. The patrolmen suspected he was a thief. Arone was taken to an underground bunker in the Canadian encampment, tied up and blindfolded.

Over several hours, Arone was savagely tortured by Airborne soldiers. Subsequent court-martial testimony revealed he was waterboarded, punched in the jaw, hit by a metal bar, repeatedly kicked, and the soles of his feet burned by a cigarillo.

The Somalia affair was a Canadian military scandal, prompted by the beating to death of Shidane Arone, a Somali teenager, at the hands of two Canadian.

According to several accounts, he was sodomized by a stick that was also used to beat him. Others stopped by to comment their fellow soldiers had a nice trophy. There is a clear throughline between his demise and the fate of people such as Abdoul Abdi, a Somali former child refugee now facing deportation from Canada back to a country he fears only offers him certain death.

Arone and Abdi are just some of the many names that have fallen through the cracks.