Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  In late 1987, following the illness of a general officer serving at NDHQ, the ripple effect sent me to Canadian Forces Base (CFB) Gagetown to command the largest military base (by area) in the Commonwealth, and the Combat Training Centre, where the junior leaders, both commissioned and non-commissioned, for the Artillery, Armour and Infantry Corps are trained. The following two years were about as pleasant as could be, since I was surrounded by soldiers learning their profession.

  In late 1989, UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar expressed frustration that most of the money spent on peacekeeping was directed to the Middle East or Africa. There was a major conflict going on in Central America as the U.S.-supported Contras fought with Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista government forces back and forth over the Honduras-Nicaraguan border. An agreement was reached whereby troops from Central American countries would not conduct cross-border operations, and foreign militaries (that is, those of the United States) would depart. The Contras would be demobilized by a UN peacekeeping force.

  In the summer of 1990, I was posted to Central America as the deputy commander of the UN mission, and a few months later took over as the commander. During the summer of 1991 I returned to Toronto as deputy commander of Land Forces Central Area, affectionately known as the “Army of Ontario,” which comprised all regular and reserve soldiers in the province.

  Things were now heating up in Yugoslavia, as Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. Cyrus Vance, representing the UN secretary-general, brokered a ceasefire in November 1991, and the UN, moving at its usual glacial pace, did not start to put the force together until four months later, in March 1992. The force’s five general officers had never served with the UN, so they needed an experienced officer as chief of staff. I had volunteered and was selected; I reported to UNHQ in early March. A few months into my tour in Sarajevo, in June 1992, I was able to talk my way out of the chief of staff’s job and became the first commander of Sector Sarajevo. By September of that year I had been promoted to the rank of major-general but was declared persona non grata by the Bosnian government because I blamed it for breaking the majority of the many ceasefires we arranged. My outspoken comments to the media, accusing both the Bosnian Muslims and the Serbs of orchestrating events to make the other side look bad, along with the Bosnian government’s complaint that I was not favouring its side, was making the UN in New York “uncomfortable.” When my soldiers, including my Russian deputy, were detained by Bosnian Muslim soldiers and threatened with death because “you work for that fucking MacKenzie,” I resigned—probably less than twenty-four hours before the UN was set to fire me. I returned to Canada as the commander of the Army of Ontario that year.

  The war in Bosnia was the world’s top news story, so not surprisingly I was constantly being interviewed by the media, and the government was regularly sending me to Europe, NATO, Her Majesty, the U.S. Congress and other venues to discuss the war. I was ignoring my day job. I submitted my resignation, requesting an early retirement in March 1993. Marcel Masse, the minister of national defence and soon to be a member of Quebec’s provincial separatist party, the Parti Québécois, accepted it.

  PART TWO

  ROADS FROM SARAJEVO

  12: Naked on Civvy Street

  “General MacKenzie, why don’t you come to Belgrade and we’ll talk about it?”

  RADOVANKARADZIC, LEADER OF THE REBEL BOSNIAN SERBS

  IT WASN’T UNTIL the corporal behind the counter at the personnel section took my identification card and cut it in half that the life-sustaining umbilical cord that connected me with the Canadian Forces was truly severed. A minute earlier, I had been responsible for 15,000 soldiers; now, one snip of the scissors later, I was in charge of nothing but myself. I would always be a loyal and outspoken supporter of the men and women who had made me look good for over thirty-five years, but the way in which I demonstrated that support would change.

  The biggest immediate shock came when I made my first telephone call. For years when I called someone and said, “Hello, this is General MacKenzie,” there was usually both recognition and a certain degree of respect evident at the other end, deserved or otherwise. Post-retirement, when I said, “Hello, this is Lew MacKenzie,” the response was along the lines of “Yeah, and what do you want?”

  A few days after my release I received a call from Douglas Bassett, head of Baton Broadcast System (BBS), who suggested I drop over to his office at the company’s CFTO affiliate in Toronto for a chat. At the meeting, Douglas suggested I come on board as a commentator on defence and foreign policy issues for CTV. I thought that was a grand idea, particularly if BBS sponsored what had now become my motor racing habit. We shook hands, and my flirtation with the media began.

  Within weeks it was decided that Tom Clark, one of CTV’s best-known and most respected personalities, and I would visit Somalia in April. We were to report on the activities of the Canadian Airborne Regiment (CAR), which was operating in the area of Belet Huen as part of the UN-mandated and U.S.-led peacemaking mission. The CTV staff were already referring to our pending visit as “the Lewis and Clark expedition.”

  In February, before retiring, I had asked that I be permitted to visit the CAR in Somalia. The unit, stationed in Petawawa, was part of my new command when I returned from Sarajevo to take command of the Army of Ontario. During their preparation for a UN peacekeeping mission in the months preceding Christmas 1992, it became obvious that “keeping the peace” was not going to be possible. Somalia was deteriorating. I gave instructions that the unit should drop a number of “nice to have” positions, such as cooks, from their nominal role and replace them with “bayonets”—soldiers trained and ready to fight. I wanted to see how the unit was doing, but my request was denied because my retirement was only a month away and my bosses thought my visit might well become a media circus. My decision to increase the number of fighters was vindicated just before the unit deployed in December, when the United States was given a mandate by the UN Security Council to lead a “Chapter Seven” peacemaking intervention mission, one that would be authorized to use deadly force to “establish law and order thereby permitting the safe delivery of humanitarian aid.” Canada agreed to be part of that force, and the CAR’s blue berets (UN peacekeepers) were withdrawn and replaced by helmets. Their vehicles, painted peacekeeping white, with black UN markings, were already en route to Somalia, and unfortunately they would have to stay that colour after they arrived on the Horn of Africa. As a result, both the Canadian public and the media erroneously referred to the CAR’s task as a peacekeeping mission during its entire six-month tour.

  Our CTV crew arrived in Belet Huen on April 19, 1993. Both the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Carol Mathieu, and his regimental sergeant major were away on a week’s leave. We went on patrol with both the CAR’s soldiers and the armoured unit attached to the CAR. They were well received by the local population, including the thousands of internally displaced persons who were huddled around the town as a result of the fighting and drought. At the conclusion of our visit we filmed the only parachute drop the regiment did during its six-month tour. I envied the jumpers as I watched the hot updrafts gently deposit even the heaviest of them like a feather on the desert floor. We beamed out good-news stories with the help of the CNN satellite in Mogadishu and started for home with Nairobi, Kenya, as our first stop.

  We were in our Nairobi hotel for only a couple of hours when Tom received a call from CTV in Toronto. He hung up and said, “The CAR’s doctor in Belet Huen has sent a letter to his wife in Petawawa indicating that a Somali boy by the name of Shidane Arone was beaten to death by soldiers of the CAR. The letter has been made public, and they want us to go back in and get the story. I told them it was 45 degrees back there and they said it was 40 degrees in Toronto and I said, Celsius? and that was the end of the conversation.”

  It wasn’t easy finding a flight back to Mogadishu, but begging works and two days later we were in Belet Huen. The unit was locked up tig
hter than a drum, and no one was allowed to speak with us. The Military Police Investigation folks arrived at the same time, so people were even more gun-shy.

  We decided to attack the problem from the other end, and so we tracked down the dead Somali boy’s father. With a crowd of at least one hundred locals tightly packed around us, Tom asked the father through an interpreter: “What is it you want from the Canadian government?” Mr. Arone hesitated and then uttered a short sentence. The entire crowd murmured, and a few even groaned. The interpreter whispered something to the father, and he replied with a longer statement. The interpreter turned to Tom and said, “Mr. Arone asks for fifty camels, which is normal for such an act.” Everyone in the crowd nodded in agreement. When we got back to Toronto and checked the tape with our own interpreter, we were told that Mr. Arone’s first request was for five camels but that during the crowd’s commentary he was urged to up the ante. In the end the Canadian government paid the family $5,000, much closer to the price of fifty camels than five.

  Back in Nairobi, we turned to CNN to see what had happened in the world during the past week. The lead international story involved the approximately one hundred Canadian soldiers deployed in the UN “safe haven” of Srebrenica in Bosnia. They had been sent there by the UN commander in Bosnia following the decision of the UN Security Council to declare six safe havens throughout Bosnia for trapped Bosnian Muslims, now more commonly known as Bosniaks.*

  The safe havens would have been a good idea if the UN had provided the manpower to protect the sanctuaries, but they didn’t even come close. Appearing in front of a U.S. Congressional committee, I opined that over 135,000 additional UN troops would be required. The UN commander in Bosnia at the time, General Francis Briquemont, from Belgium, said he agreed but was prepared to try with 65,000. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali requested the Security Council to approve 27,500. The Security Council approved 12,000, and six months later fewer than 2,000 had shown up in Bosnia. The remainder never arrived. As a result, the Bosnian government infiltrated fighters into Srebrenica to do the job the UN was mandated to do. These fighters subsequently became brazen and started attacking Serbian villages around Srebrenica, killing the occupants and burning the villages to the ground. The Serbs retaliated, and the Canadians found themselves smack-dab in the middle of another UN-generated mess.

  As part of the retaliation, the Serbs had blockaded Srebrenica and refused to let resupply units and reinforcements through to the isolated Canadian company in the town. They also denied access to any convoys bringing food to the trapped Bosniaks. Our hotel television showed the leader of the breakaway Bosnian Serbs, Radovan Karadzic, telling a CNN reporter that because the Bosniaks were attacking his people he wouldn’t let the Canadians be resupplied until the Muslims stopped the attacks.

  This was ridiculous. Our guys were less than one hundred strong; there was no way they could deal with more than ten thousand combatants on both sides of this conflict in that location. I picked up the phone and asked the hotel operator to get the number for the Hotel Yugoslavia in Belgrade. I knew from meetings I’d attended the previous year that Karadzic had a room there, and the background in the live interview looked like the hotel. A minute later I was speaking with the front desk and asked for Karadzic’s room. “Not possible,” was the response. I tried: “It’s General MacKenzie” and I was relieved to hear, “I’ll put you right through.”

  Surprisingly, Karadzic answered the phone. I knew how sensitive he was to all the bad international publicity he was incapable of countering. Early in the war the Bosniak government had hired a North American public relations firm to spin its case, but the Bosnian Serbs thought they could do their own PR and had failed miserably. I played the media card. “Mr. Karadzic, what you are doing around Srebrenica is a PR disaster. You’re gaining absolutely nothing from your actions. The Canadians in Srebrenica need to be reinforced so that they can do their job better. For God’s sake, why keep food from the Bosniaks trapped there?” Karadzic caught me off guard by replying, “General MacKenzie, why don’t you come to Belgrade and we’ll talk about it?” The best I could think of was “I’m in Nairobi, but I’ll check out the possibilities and get back to you.”

  Within an hour, Tom had confirmed that CTV would pick up the tab if we could get to Belgrade. They were delighted at the opportunity to get a live face-to-face interview with Karadzic. I called National Defence HQ and explained that there was at least the possibility that I might be able to do something about the current blockade of Srebrenica. They supported the attempt; however, I indicated that I wouldn’t arrange the trip unless Foreign Affairs endorsed the idea. NDHQ called back within the hour indicating that Foreign Affairs was on side and wished us luck.

  Tom had been working with CTV in Toronto on flight timings and determined that we could be in Budapest late the next day, which would allow us to drive to Belgrade for a meeting with Karadzic the following morning. I got back to Karadzic, who agreed to meet us at Bosnia House in Belgrade at 9 AM in two days’ time.

  Our trip to Belgrade was uneventful except for the delay at the border between Hungary and Serbia, where we were held up for a couple of hours—not because there was a problem, but because the customs guards and their bosses insisted on sharing their slivovica (a well-known and dangerous plum brandy) with us. Fortunately we had a hired driver and made it to the Hotel Yugoslavia before midnight.

  The next morning we left our rooms and took the elevator to the lobby on our way to the 9 o’clock meeting. When the elevator doors opened, we were confronted by a swarm of media news-hounds. Most of the major TV networks were there with their lights blazing and their mikes in our faces. Obviously, word of our meeting had been leaked, presumably by Karadzic’s folks. I tap-danced around their questions, saying that we would have a statement following the meeting with Karadzic.

  Arriving at Bosnia House, we agreed that I would meet privately with Karadzic and then engage in a discussion filmed by the CTV team. Finally, Tom would have a one-on-one interview with Karadzic.

  Once Karadzic and I were alone, I continued to play the PR card. “You are really failing miserably with the media,” I started. “But, you know, the situation in Srebrenica offers you a chance to make a positive move which should get you some credit. I recommend you do three things. First, allow the Canadian company to be reinforced and resupplied. Second, let the food convoys through to the Bosniaks in the town. Third, ask the UN to place their observers with your mortar and artillery positions in the hills surrounding Srebrenica so that you can prove that you are not shelling the town—like you say you are not.” I knew I was giving advice to someone who would be indicted as a war criminal in the near future, but if I could help lift the blockade of both the Canadians and the Muslims in the town, I didn’t really care. With only a little discussion, Karadzic agreed. He left the room and told the waiting international media what had been decided.

  Back home, it was two in the morning in central Canada and therefore time to rewrite the day’s editorial. We returned to Canada later the same day. I was amazed to read the criticisms of my discussions with Karadzic: “Who does he think he is?”— “Operating way beyond his ability”—“Interfering in delicate negotiations”—“Karadzic will never live up to his promises, and Canadian lives have been endangered.”

  Within twenty-four hours the blockade around Srebrenica had been lifted, the Canadians were reinforced, food convoys were permitted into the town and the UN dispatched a few observers—though not enough—to the Serbian gun positions. No one from NDHQ or Foreign Affairs indicated that they had supported the negotiation, and the papers that had vilified the undertaking were silent as the blockade was lifted.

  As the world knows, the situation in Srebrenica deteriorated over the next two years. Attacks launched from the UN safe haven and led by a Bosniak, Naser Oric, resulted in the deaths of between 500 and 3,000 Serbs in the surrounding villages. In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces, led by General Ratko Mladic, retaliate
d by capturing the safe haven, evacuating the women and children to the safety of the Bosniak-controlled town of Tuzla and then systematically slaughtering the male population of the town. (There is much debate regarding the number of people killed, with estimates ranging from 3,000 to 8,000.) Oric and the majority of his force had abandoned Tuzla two months before the Serb attack.

  Naser Oric was indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague and served two years in prison for his role as the Muslim commander in Srebrenica. General Ratko Mladic has also been indicted by the ICTY, but he has yet to be captured and turned over to the tribunal.

  * During the time I served in Sarajevo in 1992, we referred to the three sides in the conflict as Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Serbs and Bosnian Croats. All three sides agreed to these terms. “Bosnian Muslims” was, however, somewhat misleading, because it included a number of non-Muslims who nevertheless had remained loyal to Alija Izetbegovic, the president of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was recognized as an independent country by most nations on April 6, 1992. The term currently used when referring to the community led by the Bosnian Muslims, and the one I use from this point on in this book, is Bosniak.

  13: Rapist

  “Allegations against Major General Lewis MacKenzie are unfounded.”