Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  “That’s why I’m calling,” he said. “I only just found out that Captain Rechner worked for you and that he spoke to your wife a few weeks ago. I want you to know that we will be releasing him and his two colleagues tomorrow.”

  I replied, over a bad connection, “That’s good news, Professor, but there is still the issue of the Canadian soldiers you are holding.”

  “We would like to release them too, but there is no way to get them over the mountain here to Pale to join up with Rechner for the trip to Belgrade,” he explained.

  There appeared to be an opening, so I continued: “Come on, Nicola, that’s just not true. I know you bulldozed a dirt road around the mountain just after I left in ’92. You can use that route to move the Van Doos soldiers.” Professor Koljevic, not known for his map reading, immediately came back with: “I’ll check it out, General. If it’s possible, we will do it. I’ll get back to you in a couple of hours.”

  Having been burnt before—when I got involved with the Canadians blockaded in Srebrenica—I knew what to do. I called NDHQ and asked if the leadership wanted me to proceed. I was advised that the French general commanding UNPROFOR was continuously negotiating to have our and others’ soldiers released, but so far to no avail. I then called Foreign Affairs and confirmed that their duty personnel wanted me to proceed. Now a good forty-five minutes behind schedule and a couple of hundred dollars poorer, thanks to cellphone connections with Bosnia, Dora and I jumped in the waiting car and drove to the PPCLI Officers’ Mess in southwest Calgary.

  The reception before the formalities lasted about forty-five minutes before the bugle sounded to announce dinner. As cell-phones were not permitted in the mess, I put mine on vibrate and slipped it into my inside breast pocket. Sometime around the end of the soup course the pleasant sensation over my left breast suggested that Professor Koljevic was calling back. I turned to the commanding officer and, in a serious breach of military protocol, feigned cramps and excused myself from the table. Just outside the front door of the mess, I opened the phone. It was Nicola: “General, you were right. We can bring the soldiers to Pale. They will be released tomorrow.”

  “That’s good news, Professor. I’ll pass the details on to our people. Say hello to Captain Rechner for me.”

  I passed on the news to NDHQ. The next day, CNN showed the bus holding the Canadians off-loading them outside of Belgrade. The professor was the first off the bus. He said to the reporter, “Thanks to General MacKenzie we were able… ” and then the film clip ended. No one called from Foreign Affairs, but at least I wasn’t vilified in the press. Dora wanted me to submit my cellphone bill to Ottawa.

  I never spoke with Professor Koljevic again. Eight months later, he placed a pistol to his head and committed suicide. In 1992, whenever I had taken him to meetings with the Bosniaks, there would be embraces and tears as his former students at the University of Sarajevo, now Bosniak officials caught up in a war, greeted him. I fear the reality of the stupid civil war swirling around him was just too much for this learned professor of Shakespearean literature.

  A final thought about the hostage taking: I have never understood why Captain Patrick Rechner was not decorated for the example he set during his weeks in captivity, under hazardous circumstances and in the glare of the international media. He was the face of a failed and naive UN policy that tried to combine peacekeeping and war fighting. Nevertheless, throughout his ordeal as the most high-profile victim of the UN’s failure, he maintained his composure under great strain and in the view of millions. A lesser individual would have succumbed to understandable fear and agreed to read from scripts provided by his captors for the benefit of the international media. There are all too many examples of the latter, and Captain Rechner’s performance deserved more credit than the less-than-warm welcome he received on his return to Canada.

  16: Political Waters

  “What’s a membership?”

  A ROOKIE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE PARTY CANDIDATE

  THE NIGHT OF October 30, 1995, turned out to be the worst night of my life. I’ll never forgive the CBC for superimposing that bar graph at the bottom of its television transmission that moved back and forth as the “Yes” and “No” votes were received from the referendum on Quebec’s sovereignty. They might as well have shown “My country’s gone” and “My country’s saved” at each end of the graph, rather than Yes and No. The No side’s victory was so slim that I didn’t really feel like celebrating. The Yes side was not going to go away, and the next referendum or a universal declaration of independence was probably somewhere around the corner. It made me think back to a decision I’d made two years earlier.

  Back in 1993, two days before my release from the Canadian Forces, I had been approached by both the Progressive Conservative and the Liberal parties to run for them in the upcoming October federal election. A soon-to-be friend, Hugh Segal, made the pitch for the Tories over breakfast on Bank Street in Ottawa, and the leader of the opposition, Jean Chrétien, had invited me to Stornoway for a similar conversation. It was not a hard decision to make, since I’d never thought I was cut out to be a politician. I had more or less followed the government’s line while in uniform for thirty-six years, so it didn’t seem like a good idea to immediately subordinate my personal opinions and priorities to those of any political party.

  By 1997, however, with the near-death experience of the Quebec referendum still weighing heavily on my mind, the upcoming election looked like an opportunity to make a contribution to the debate. The exposure would give me an opportunity to address the issue of national unity. However, I had to decide which party to join. I had been approached yet again by both the Conservatives and the Liberals, as well as the Reform Party, and Paul Hellyer too had visited me at my home, trying to convince me to run for his new Action Party.

  Most military personnel are small-c conservatives. There are a lot of exceptions, but the combination of conservative values and Pierre Trudeau’s badly hidden contempt for the military in general has been and is a real handicap when the Liberals come courting the soldier’s support at the polls. What really irked me as I tried to make up my mind was recalling the chronic habit of just about every party, once elected, to abandon its platform and promises at the Ottawa city limits on its way to Parliament. The NDP was an occasional exception, but the fact that they would probably never be elected to lead the country in my lifetime provided them with the luxury of being the conscience of Parliament without assuming the usual political risk of leadership.

  If I couldn’t decide on a party on the basis of ideology, I would have to decide on leadership—and that made the decision easy. During the run-up to the referendum, the leader of the Progressive Conservative Party, Jean Charest, had taken a leading role in speaking out in support of the No campaign while his fellow Quebecer and leader of the Liberal Party, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien, had chosen a much more passive, almost invisible role. Charest’s stand was not popular with a significant portion of Quebec’s population and posed a considerable risk for his political future. But he stood his ground, and then some, in support of a united Canada: Charest was the leader I would support.

  Charest opined that I should run in the Toronto area. The party would put together an impressive team to take me by the hand through the nomination process and, if successful, the election campaign. But I had spent most of my life moving every one or two years, and now, having settled in Bracebridge, close to my wife Dora’s hometown of Baysville in the Muskoka region of Ontario, I wasn’t about to move again. Charest didn’t have what you would call a large team to go on the road during the upcoming campaign. Elsie Wayne, the dynamic former mayor of Saint John, New Brunswick, who I knew from my days of commanding CFB Gagetown, was the only other Conservative member of Parliament at that time. We agreed that I would run where I lived, in the riding of Parry Sound–Muskoka, and that I would go on the road to support other Conservative candidates and speak out on the issue of national unity. The fact that the Reform
Party was well represented and organized in the riding meant that we would probably split the conservative vote and let the Liberal incumbent, Andy Mitchell, motor up the middle. That didn’t bother me; I would have a platform during the campaign to address the most important issue, the future of a united Canada.

  The team put together to take me through the process of running as a candidate was certainly not impressed—indeed, they were depressed—at our first meeting at my home on February 2, 1997. Early on in the meeting someone said, “We really have to get busy selling memberships if we are going to get Lew the party’s nomination!” I unwisely asked, “What’s a membership?” There was a very pregnant pause as everyone, including me, realized that their candidate had a very steep learning curve ahead of him. To complete a less-than-perfect day, I was “reminded” by Dora after the meeting broke up at 11 PM that this day marked our thirtieth wedding anniversary.

  In the end, during a really miserable winter in one of the largest ridings in Canada, in which my friend and campaign manager, Don Smith, led the way with a dedicated team of volunteers, we travelled enough miles and sold enough party memberships to win the nomination. It was evident at the nomination meeting that I would probably have my desired platform to address national unity during the campaign. All three national television networks and the CPAC cable network were there to cover what would normally be a low-key event in the political process.

  The campaign was rough on my team. The Progressive Conservative Party kept asking me to speak at numerous events coast to coast, and I didn’t resist: each venue provided me with an opportunity to deliver my thoughts on national unity to a wider audience. Don Smith was frustrated because his role was to get me elected, and here I was, spending too much time out of the riding. My opponents wisely zeroed in on that fact and suggested that if elected I would focus on national and international issues at the expense of the local interests of the people of Parry Sound–Muskoka. The fact that national unity was critical to every riding in Canada was a moot point during the cut and thrust of a political campaign.

  During my presentations on national unity I shamelessly recalled a particularly nasty event that had occurred in Sarajevo in July 1992, at the height of the Bosnian civil war. The UN had brokered a deal with the Bosnian Serbs to use the Sarajevo airport for the delivery of humanitarian aid to all sides in the conflict. We couldn’t wait the month or so for the UN to find the additional troops to defend the airport, so the Canadian government generously agreed that we could “borrow” the Canadian battle group serving in Croatia for thirty days to take on the task. They reported to me as the commander in Sarajevo on July 2, just missing Canada Day. The battle group was based on the 1st Battalion of the Royal 22nd Regiment, the Van Doos. Attached to the battle group for its six-month tour of duty in the former Yugoslavia was a large company from the Royal Canadian Regiment. By sheer happenstance, the battle group’s composition was the reverse of Canada’s national representation group (NRG): two-thirds francophone—the Van Doos, and one-third anglophone—the Royal Canadian Regiment (RCR).

  Shortly after their arrival I tasked the commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Michel Jones, to get some food and medicine to an isolated Bosnian Serb neighbourhood on the south side of the city. Most of the up to three hundred tonnes of humanitarian aid arriving daily was delivered to the primarily Muslim citizens of Sarajevo; however, in keeping with the peacekeeping principle of impartiality, it was important to get aid to those Bosnian Serbs who were also suffering. It was also a fact that with tens of thousands of Bosnian Serb soldiers, tanks and artillery surrounding six hundred Canadians, the humanitarian aid would only flow if the Serbs permitted it. The Bosniak population in Sarajevo and their leadership were not in the mood to accept the principle of UN impartiality and were furious with me for even thinking of sending any aid to isolated Serb locations.

  Anglophone soldiers from the RCR loaded up a number of our armoured personnel carriers with food and medicine and headed through the city before turning south towards the Serb enclaves. Just after crossing the Miljacka River, and still in Bosniak-controlled territory, they were blocked at gunpoint and surrounded by a large number of Muslim soldiers. The soldiers searched the vehicles and claimed the Canadians were smuggling ammunition to the Serbs. They threatened to kill every Canadian in the convoy. The area was completely dominated by high-rise apartments occupied and fortified by the Bosniak soldiers. There was absolutely no way out, and any rescue attempt would be borderline suicidal.

  I called the UN peacekeeping department in New York to try and get the UN to have the Bosnian ambassador call the Bosnian president and have him release my soldiers. The official I dealt with had no idea who I was and didn’t even know that UNPROFOR was in the former Yugoslavia. I hung up in disgust and proceeded down Sniper Alley to see the president himself. He and his defence minister were too scared to accompany me to the scene of the standoff, so I decided that a rescue mission by the Canadian battle group, no matter how risky, was my only alternative.

  As we weaved our way back to my headquarters, I realized this would be the most difficult order I would ever give. I would have to be honest with the soldiers who’d been tasked to conduct the operation. They would have to be told that their chance of success was slim and that many of them would not survive. They would be subjected to deadly fire from 360 degrees, and from above, due to the fortified highrises. The alternative was to let the RCR soldiers be slaughtered, and there was no way I would even contemplate permitting such a result without a fight. I thought that after we arrived at headquarters and I gave instructions it would take at least an hour for the rescue group to get themselves organized, prepare their equipment and vehicles, give their own orders and move out.

  A mad dash by my French marine commando driver brought our vehicle to my headquarters in less than five minutes. As we turned into the parking area behind the headquarters building, I was dumbfounded by what I saw. The entire expanse was occupied by armoured personnel carriers packed with soldiers and pointing in the direction of the confrontation that was less than three minutes away. I was advised that orders had been given, ammunition had been issued, a route had been determined and an assault plan briefed to the lowest level. All that was needed to launch the Van Doos rescue mission was one word from me: “Go!” A largely francophone rifle company was prepared to lay it on the line for a largely anglophone rifle company.

  That, I told audiences in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Saint John, Halifax, Wolfville, Sydney and other stops along the campaign trail, was my Canada. Not a country defined by a Constitution, a Charter of Rights or any other document, but rather by the synergy of two of the founding nations, French and English working together to create a country, not perfect, but better than any other in the history of the world when it comes to tolerance, accommodation and support for those less fortunate than ourselves. The fact that francophones would die to rescue their anglophone fellow soldiers said it all.

  Sure, I knew there were bragging rights involved, as the Van Doos would never let the RCR forget that on July 20, 1992, they saved their butts, but that’s soldiers’ black humour. The more important message for me was that my country was more than the sum of its parts: it was a unique success story of two quite different cultures imposing themselves through conflict on a third culture and ultimately, with all the warts, actually getting along and making it work while the rest of the world looked on with envy. Were we prepared to stand idly by and let Quebec vote that unity out of existence? No way. That was my message.

  The entire effort of running in a federal election campaign was worth it when I saw tears well up in the eyes of Canadians who, when they heard what our soldiers were prepared to sacrifice for each other, realized—perhaps for the first time—what a gift we Canadians had been given.

  The night of the election, we Progressive Conservatives gathered at the Riverside Inn in Bracebridge. At one point I was slightly ahead, and Dora
, who had so far moved twenty-four times in our thirty-year marriage, turned to me and said, “I hope you like Ottawa—by yourself!” Fortunately I didn’t have to endure that arrangement. The excellent Reform Party candidate, Peter Spedinski, received 10,909 votes; yours truly, 11,435 and the incumbent Liberal, Andy Mitchell, 17,752. I wasn’t disappointed: I had convinced at least a few Canadians that this country was worth fighting for.

  Unfortunately, my running in the 1997 campaign gave the false impression that I wanted to serve as a member of Parliament. The many subsequent requests that I run for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative Party, and subsequently the Conservative Party, were good for my ego, but I was smart enough to take on a subordinate and much safer role, the one made famous by Robert Stanfield (also from Truro, Nova Scotia): the best prime minister we never had.

  I knew in my heart that if I was ever successful in obtaining any political office, the reaction twenty-four hours later would be, “Oh my God, what have we done?”

  17: Back to the Balkans

  “Five hundred U.S. Marines pre-positioned in Macedonia deserted today, refusing the order to invade Yugoslavia.”

  SERBIAN STATE TELEVISION, BROADCASTING FROM BELGRADE

  DURING THE BALKAN wars that commenced with the declarations of independence by Slovenia and Croatia in 1991 and Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, conditions in the Serbian province of Kosovo continued to deteriorate. The ninety per cent Albanian majority were treated as less than equals by the Serbian minority. Appointments in the civil service, universities, police and military all favoured the Serbs. However, although the Albanians in many areas were treated as second-class citizens, there was little if any violence between the two communities. There were also growing cries for independence from the Kosovo Albanians, and an armed resistance group calling itself the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) looked north to Bosnia and saw the United Nations manoeuvred into assisting that country in maintaining its recent independence from Serbia.