Canadian war crimes

I've been annoyed for years because all I learned about in history class was war crimes committed by other countries, whether or allies or enemies. Like give me the dirt on my own country, dudes. I know Canadians are supposed to be nice but no one is ever that nice. (Hence today's post.) 

Oh look, a lemur! This is literally the only nice thing you'll see in this post.

*trigger warning for murder, torture, & sexual assault*

(Also, I tried to stick to stuff that was like authorised by the Canadian government, but as it turns out there's not a lot of war crimes committed by Canada so a lot of this is soldiers acting on their own. (Also, I'm looking at modern history, more excluding the Canadian crimes against the First Nations because that could take up an entire novel series all by its lonesome. If you're interested in that extended and rather gruesome history, you can read about that here.))

Korean war

Shin Hyun-Chan was a survivor of an unprovoked attack by a Canadian soldier during the Korean War. Despite being shot, Shin and his ten-year-old sister survived but their father wasn't so lucky. His father's body was delivered to their house, wrapped in nothing but a blanket. 

The soldier who shot and killed Shin's father, John Murray Steeves, was tried for murder. Accounts vary, but apparently Shin's father stole John's watch, or that John was looking for "women and liquor", or a group of soldiers were looking for an unoccupied house for a place to party. That all sounds like pretty bad excuses for shooting someone, if you ask me. He was found guilty of murder (he wasn't charged for injuring Shin and his sister) and sentenced to fifteen years in prison, but was released early and didn't even serve six months. According to the courts, there wasn't enough evidence to convict him. The family wasn't notified. 

This wasn't an isolated case, either. Six months before Shin's attack, a group of Canadian soldiers entered a farm house. They beat and sexually assaulted the two women and beat the men before shooting grenades and their weapons into the house. Gross. 

Of the more than sixty cases of crimes committed by Canadian soldiers (who were tried and convicted in Seoul), most were released upon their return to Canada. Niiiiiiiice. 

Somalia affair

I kind of don't even want to talk about this one too much because it's honestly disgusting, so I'm going to gloss over the details because I don't want something like this on my blog. (If you want all the gruesome details, you can read that here.) To make a long story short, in 1993 the Canadian soldiers stationed in Somalia caught two dudes who had been stealing from them and claimed they were sabotaging their operation. They shot one (while he was on the ground, posing no threat) and tortured and killed the other. Apparently, between 15 and 80 soldiers heard the beating but didn't do anything. 

In response, the entire elite Canadian Airborne Regiment was disbanded and the soldiers involved charged (a more comprehensive list of the charges and results can be found in the source linked above) but no one served more than a year in prison. 

This was supposed to be a peacekeeping mission, and it turned into a national disgrace.

*distracts you with pretty flowers*

Japanese Canadian Internment 

Again, this is a rather long and horrible story so I can't cover all the details, so here's the summarised version. Between 1942 and 1949, after the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and Malaya, Pearl Harbor, and Canada declaring war on Japan, more than 22,000 Japanese Canadians were "interned" (I like to say taken prisoner). Japanese Canadians lost their jobs, farms, and even Canadian citizenship. How did the Canadian government fund these internment camps, you ask? By selling the Japanese Canadians' belongings (including boats, cars, houses, etc). 

This was completely ridiculous because many Japanese Canadians actually volunteered to serve in the war, but when they were discharged (remember that they weren't treated the same as other white soldiers, of course) they were unable to return home and faced deportation to Japan. 

In the internment camps, people were often forced to work on farms or on logging plants, and if they refused they were sent to prisoner-of-war camps on the other side of the country. Whole families were torn apart, often unable to find each other after the war, leaving women and children to fend for themselves. 

The government finally apologised and offered compensation in 1988, more than 40 years after the internment camps.

Shortlist 

I unfortunately can't cover everything, but here's a shortlist of suckyness. 

- Canadian Special Forces, but we know like nothing about them which is kind of scary. 
- Apparently Alberta, my home province, had a Board of Eugenics? (Like wow, thank you for your contributions to society my dudes, you suck.)
- The MS St. Louis was an ocean liner carrying Jewish refugees the government turned around during WWII. (To be fair, they weren't aware of the death camps yet.) About a quarter of those refugees were recaptured and died in a death camp.

Do me a favour? Go watch some cat videos or something to cheer yourself up, because that was kind of grim. 

Sources (imsorryforusingwikipediabutimshortontimeokay):

The Korean War (The Diplomat)
The Korean War (APJJF)Canadian Special Forces (Counterpunch)
Alberta Eugenics Board (Wikipedia)
The Somolia Affair (Wikipedia)
Japanese Canadian Internment (Wikipedia) 
MS St Louis (Wikipedia)