Soldiers Made Me Look Good

by Lewis MacKenzie

  The KLA decided to jump on the independence bandwagon and commenced its terrorist campaign against the Serbian minority in Kosovo. Serbian police, the KLA’s favourite targets, were regularly ambushed, captured or killed. The CIA added the KLA to its list of terrorist organizations. As is the habit when an authoritarian government is challenged, particularly under communist rule, the reaction by those in power was heavy-handed. Under the leadership of President Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian security forces in Kosovo were reinforced, and a campaign to track down and eliminate the KLA was launched. Following the Bosnian government’s example, the KLA hired a respected U.S.-based public relations firm to represent its cause, and the propaganda war was on. International sympathy started to swing in the KLA’s favour; international calls for Milosevic to moderate his campaign to eliminate the KLA started to dominate the news.

  In 1999, NATO marked its fiftieth birthday as the most successful military alliance in history. It had never been forced to fire a shot in anger, and at the end of the Cold War it was still intact as a powerful military force. But it faced a dilemma: there was no consensus regarding what NATO’s new role should be. Every option, from disbanding to becoming the world’s policeman, was on the table.

  Early in 1999, the eyes of the international community were focused on Kosovo. On January 15, the media had repeated ad nauseam film clips of more than forty cadavers in a ditch near the town of Račak in Kosovo. The site was visited by William Walker, the U.S. representative of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Serbia. For all to hear, including the television audience, Walker said that this was a massacre of civilians carried out by the Serbs. Subsequent forensic investigations concluded that there was no massacre and that this was a staged event: KLA cadavers, the result of earlier fighting, had been deposited in the ditch, and some of them had had their uniforms replaced with civilian clothes before being shot again for effect. It was a brilliant propaganda victory for the KLA and became known as Kosovo’s “Gulf of Tonkin incident.”

  NATO, sensing a role for itself and therefore its survival, went into overdrive. When the emergency conference dealing with the crisis in Kosovo, held in Rambouillet, France, in February, with a follow-up meeting in March, issued an ultimatum to Milosevic that U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright acknowledged he could never accept, NATO finalized its plans to forcefully intervene in the internal matters of a sovereign state. For all intents and purposes, NATO would serve as the KLA’s air force. NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbian installations and security forces in both Serbia and Kosovo began on March 24.

  On March 31, U.S. Army Staff Sergeants Andrew Ramirez and Christopher Stone and Specialist Steven Gonzales were captured by Serbian forces in the area of the Macedonian-Kosovo border. The three men were part of a NATO force that had recently been deployed to the area to secure the border. The Serbs claimed they had crossed the border into Serbian territory, whereas NATO claimed they were in Macedonia when captured. The debate mattered little; the three Americans were prisoners of war.

  At the time, I was being kept busy responding to media requests for interviews about the bombing campaign. I did not support NATO’s actions and its justification because I had my suspicions about the “massacre” at Račak long before any forensic investigation confirmed my misgivings. I had seen the media manipulated too many times in Bosnia to accept the initial reports of any incident as gospel. The KLA was playing the West, particularly Madeleine Albright, like a Stradivarius.

  The three captured U.S. soldiers were causing a PR nightmare for the Serbian authorities in Belgrade. I received a call from the embassy of Yugoslavia in Ottawa suggesting that I might be able to assist in releasing the soldiers. Coincidentally I had been approached by CTV to join another “Lewis and Clark” expedition with my friend Tom Clark and travel to Belgrade to cover the war. The two opportunities matched perfectly. I also agreed to write an article a day for the Ottawa Citizen for as long as the bombing campaign endured. This detail would ultimately prove to be my undoing with President Milosevic.

  We flew to Budapest on April 12 and then drove to Hungary’s border with Serbia to meet up with the car that had been arranged to drive us to Belgrade. Serbian customs officials took us to a small room beside the office of the senior customs officer and asked us to wait. Tom and I feared that we would be detained for hours, and perhaps days, as was the case for two CBS reporters we had encountered a few minutes earlier sitting on the sidewalk in no man’s land. Within minutes the officer in charge arrived with the majority of his staff brandishing two bottles of slivovica. “Welcome back to Serbia, General MacKenzie!” the boss exclaimed for all to hear. It seemed the fact that I didn’t blame the Serbs for everything that went wrong in the Balkans—even suggesting that the Muslims in Sarajevo had staged some of the atrocities blamed on the Serbs, combined with my articles accusing the KLA of staging the Račak massacre—had convinced many Serbs that I hadn’t bought into the slick PR campaign being conducted against them.

  On arrival in Belgrade we checked into the Hyatt Regency, the hotel where most of the foreign press corps were billeted. Our first stop, thanks to the intervention of the Yugoslavian ambassador to Canada, was the foreign ministry, much to the envy of the other foreign journalists. We were told by Foreign Affairs Minister Zivadin Jovanovic that we would have a car and driver permanently assigned to our CTV team and that one of his personal staff would be our contact with his office. We could go where we wanted and speak to whomever we wished. I asked about interviewing President Milosevic, hoping this would raise the issue of the three American POWs. The minister didn’t bite, and we returned to the hotel.

  During the next few days we visited and reported on the destruction of the refinery and petrochemical production capabilities in Pančevo, close to Belgrade, and Novi Sad in the north. The bombing at these two sites was unbelievably precise. At Novi Sad, the plant manager explained that he had been trained in Houston, Texas, and was in charge of the plant’s subsequent construction. There was only one stack out of more than a hundred that was absolutely critical to the plant’s operation, and a single NATO cruise missile had gone straight down the stack, destroying the control room. There was no other obvious damage, but the entire massive facility was shut down and there was no chance of starting up until after the war was over and the critical parts had been replaced. We also saw evidence of precise bombing the following day when we visited the headquarters of the special security service in Belgrade. The missile had gone straight through the front door before detonating and destroying the building and its few occupants; most of them, anticipating an attack, had left well before the missile struck. Unfortunately, the myth of NATO’s “precision” bombing was shattered the following day.

  In the evening, while watching CNN after our visit to the destroyed security service building, we heard that a town in the south of the country close to the border of Kosovo had just been bombed. We decided to drive there early the next morning. As we got close to the town, we could see smoke rising from its centre. Arriving at the impact area, we saw a number of low-rise apartment buildings, minus their exterior walls, facing us. They looked like doll houses—you could see the interiors of all the rooms.

  An angry crowd began to form around us. Our handler was not having much luck in calming them down by explaining that we were there with the permission of their government. Then he mentioned my name: “This is General MacKenzie, from Canada.” To our complete amazement, the mood of the crowd changed, and in the midst of this chaos they suddenly became friendly. It was then that I realized just how persecuted the entire nation felt. Although I had repeatedly apportioned the Serbs somewhere around sixty per cent of the blame for what went on in Bosnia, the fact that I had also exposed what the other sides were doing had earned me a reputation for being objective—at least, with the Serbs.

  Then, coming from the right, through the rubble, an elderly lady was carrying something in her arms. When she r
eached me she held out the body of a three- or four-year-old child. The child had no head. It was her granddaughter. The woman screamed at me, asking why the Americans had done this to her family. I was at a loss for words. In the midst of this very emotional scene, her son ran back into the rubble, emerged with a dusty bottle of slivovica and insisted that I have a drink with him. I must say, not many innocent victims of an ill-founded bombing campaign would have been so understanding.

  We left the devastated town centre and drove around looking for something, anything, that might have been the Serbian military target that NATO had missed. We found nothing. There was an abandoned army camp about fifteen kilometres outside of town, close to the main highway, but its state suggested that it hadn’t been occupied for years. We returned to Belgrade.

  The meeting with Slobodan Milosevic and discussions regarding the U.S. POWs was getting close, according to hints from the foreign minister. Unfortunately, my arrangement with the Ottawa Citizen to write an article a day was my downfall.

  There had been increasing speculation in the press about the possibility of Kosovo gaining its independence. For all intents and purposes, the Rambouillet Accords immediately removed Serbia’s sovereignty over Kosovo and stated that “Three years after the entry into force of this Agreement, an international meeting shall be convened to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo, on the basis of the will of the people” (my emphasis).2 Two weeks after arriving in Belgrade, I penned an article for the Citizen predicting that Milosevic might well “encourage” the hundreds of thousands of Serb refugees from Croatia to relocate in Kosovo in order to help the “No” side in any future referendum on sovereignty. The refugees had been ethnically cleansed from the Kyrenia region by the U.S.-inspired Croatian army’s “Operation Storm” four years earlier. One paragraph of my article read: “If this is indeed the new Milosevic strategy, to see it unfold would be nothing less than another affront to humanity and a perverse exploitation of another group of innocent victims for political gain.”3

  I was writing the articles by hand and the hotel’s front desk was faxing them to the Citizen in mid-afternoon. I assumed that each and every copy was being sent to the foreign ministry or Milosevic’s office before it ever made contact with the hotel’s fax machine, and I was right: within hours, our relationship with the foreign ministry cooled and the meeting with Milosevic was put on hold, never to be discussed again. Since any chance of influencing the fate of the U.S. POWs had evaporated, plans were made for my return to Canada. I was hesitant to leave because of my frustration with the propaganda being perpetrated by my old colleagues in NATO. The alliance’s spokesman, Jamie Shea, stressed ad nauseam that the Serbs were not aware of what was really happening in Kosovo because they only had access to their state-controlled television. In fact, exactly the opposite was true: in Belgrade, I had access to more news channels than I did back in Toronto. BBC1, BBC2, SKY, Channel 4, CNN (both domestic and international), CBC plus a number of others were all available, and there were satellite dishes on just about every building in the city and the surrounding areas. The propaganda on the state-run channel was so bad—“Five hundred Marines pre-positioned in Macedonia deserted today, refusing the order to invade Yugoslavia”—that the locals watched it only for entertainment.

  Tom Clark stayed in Belgrade for a few more weeks. He was there when a NATO air strike destroyed the Belgrade TV studio building used by the international media. A number of the friends we had made during our reporting back to Canada were killed. The hands of the make-up girl who patted a bit of powder on our faces before we went on camera were found across the street from the bombed-out building. Nevertheless, every channel broadcasting from the building was up and running from other locations within hours. The NATO attack achieved nothing but needless carnage, much like the rest of the ill-founded campaign.

  Fast forward to February 17, 2008—and contrary to UN Resolution 1244 of June 10, 1999, which recognized the continued existence of Kosovo as part of Serbia—the province’s leadership declared Kosovo an “independent, sovereign and democratic state.” In the celebrations that followed, ominously the most popular flag waved on the streets of the capital of Pristina was not that of Kosovo but rather of neighbouring Albania. The ultimate objective of a “Greater Albania” was on parade for all to see.

  The Western media immediately announced the inevitability of comprehensive international recognition of an independent Kosovo. They failed, however, to point out that the leaders of the vast majority of the world’s population did no such thing. China, Russia, India, Spain, Indonesia (the world’s most populous Muslim nation), Greece, Argentina and Canada (at the time of writing) were among the majority of the UN’s 192 nations that did not grant recognition. For Canadians who had served in the Balkans in the 1990s, the situation was particularly upsetting, considering the emerging leadership of the new “statelet.”

  The newly minted prime minister of Kosovo, Hashim Thaci, and his immediate predecessor, Agim Cheku, have less than heroic backgrounds—contrary to what has been argued by their Albanian supporters. Cheku was a commander in the Croatian army and was in charge when Croat units raped and murdered their way through the Medak Pocket, burning Serbian families alive in the basements of their homes before they were stopped by Canadian peacekeepers. He also had a leadership role in Operation Storm in 1995, when lightly armed Canadian peacekeeping positions were cowardly and intentionally shelled with heavy artillery and tank fire before being overrun by Croatian army units. Shortly thereafter, Cheku ventured to Kosovo and assumed a leadership role with the KLA along with its leader, Hashim Thachi.

  At that time the KLA was recognized as a terrorist organization by the CIA. Under the leadership of Thaci and Cheku, the KLA decided to kill members of the Serbian security forces in Kosovo with the strategic objective of inviting a heavy-handed reaction from Serbia and thus resulting in Western intervention on the side of the KLA. NATO fell for the ruse, and once again the West was outsmarted by the complexities of Balkan politics. In this instance, it could be argued that we bombed the wrong side.

  If a nation is to be judged by its democratically elected leadership, Kosovo’s reputation is hanging by a very thin thread.

  18: ICROSS Canada: Our Drop

  in the Bucket

  “We will endeavour to ease the suffering, and feed the victims of poverty on this battered and bleeding planet.” 4

  ICROSS CANADA PLEDGE

  IT WAS 1998, and standing over the Kenyan graves of Canadian soldiers killed during the UN mission in the Congo during the 1960s, Billy Willbond felt compelled to find someone “qualified” to pray for their departed souls. He tracked down a Jesuit brother, Michael Meegan, and the rest of Billy’s life took a sharp turn—much to the benefit of thousands of Africa’s children.

  Billy Willbond and I served with the 1st Battalion of the Queen’s Own Rifles of Canada on UN duty in Cyprus during the summer of 1965. He was a corporal in a company headquarters and I a lieutenant commanding the battalion’s reconnaissance platoon. We met but didn’t really get to know each other. Billy went on to serve with the newly created Canadian Airborne Regiment in the mid-1960s and retired as operations sergeant of the Special Service Force in 1978. He then took up a position with the Central Saanich Police Department on Vancouver Island.

  Twenty-eight years ago, Michael Meegan dropped out of his final phase of seminary training in Ireland and went to Africa. With the exception of trips around the world to lecture on AIDS and related subjects and to meet with supporters like Bill Clinton, Elton John and Elizabeth Taylor, he hasn’t left. He founded the International Community for the Relief of Starvation and Suffering (ICROSS) and is an acknowledged leading expert on the AIDS pandemic devastating Africa. He has been criticized for allegedly misrepresenting his academic credentials, but his good works in Africa speak for themselves and reflect a unique and selfless dedication to the helpless victims of AIDS on the continent.

  In a nutshell
, ICROSS seeks not a cure for AIDS but rather dedicates itself to reducing the pain and suffering of those in the terminal stages of the disease. Michael lives in the field and organizes and trains Africans to look after Africans. He has little to spend on infrastructure and equipment—during a recent visit, we had get out and push to help our truck make it over a steep hill as brand-new SUVs from large NGOs roared past. All donations to ICROSS and all Michael’s speaking fees go to easing the pain of the terminally ill.

  Billy Willbond was so impressed with Michael’s dedication that following his visit he returned to Victoria committed to assisting him with his humanitarian mission. Initially, Billy used the slow hours during his night shift at the Saanich police station and his modest military pension to solicit medications and equipment and ship them to Michael. The increasing use and popularity of e-mail by retired military personnel enabled Billy to put together a team of volunteers, primarily but not exclusively retired peacekeepers, and on October 1, 1998, he created ICROSS Canada. Since those early days, Billy and his national team of volunteers have begged, borrowed and “coerced” more than $3 million worth of medical equipment, medicines and medical supplies for those who need them in both east and central south Africa.

  Seven years ago, Billy called me and said I was to be the national patron for ICROSS Canada. This was not a request, but an order from one old soldier to another, so I signed on. The first challenge was convincing the bureaucracy that we were a legitimate and useful charity, operating in the best interests of Canada. Following an extended and frustrating wait, we were successful in obtaining charitable status in 2002.