A Life Half Lived Read online

  As he sped along the road hugging the rear bumper of the truck Mike hoped that he would be right. As the truck and the ICRC cruiser neared the checkpoint Mike’s nerves increased. Instinctively he wound down the windows to minimise the risk of flying glass fragments should they hit him. He would have prayed if he had not lost faith in a god many years before.

  At the checkpoint the soldiers saw the speeding truck from a distance and raised the temporary boom to allow it through. His assumption was correct; once he’d passed the checkpoint the guards just assumed he had gained permission. Why else would he drive so close to one of their trucks? Mike then overtook the truck, the driver of which must have assumed he had permission to be there.

  Only a short distance down the road near the small village of Kuplensko, a few kilometres short of Vojnic, 20,000 or more women, children and men were huddled on an exposed valley road. The chain they formed stretched for more than seven kilometres along the roadside, surrounded almost completely by Croatian tanks.

  Mike did not slow down at the next checkpoint. He drove right into the middle of the crowd allowing the soldiers to assume he should be there. How else, they reasoned, could he have got this far? He did not give them time to think how strange it was that a foreigner had been allowed in, given the orders they had just received. Mike stopped his car and exhaled deeply, appalled by what confronted him. All these people in such a small place! They were drinking water from a small stream and from puddles formed by rain. They defecated where they could as the risk of land mines prevented them seeking privacy behind a tree. Cattle that had been taken had been slaughtered and were being torn apart by desperate and hungry people. And the Army just waited, silent, like a cat watching its prey.

  With no food, sanitation or shelter, a humanitarian disaster was quickly unfolding. People would die of exposure, and disease would very soon spread – if the Army let them live that long. Mike noticed tanks on the move, their turrets swinging in getting ready to shoot. Horrified, he realised what was about to happen, and he was in the middle of it.

  In desperation he took the only course open to him and climbed out of his vehicle, onto the roof and simply shouted at the soldiers. “I have authority to speak to your commander.” Tank turrets froze for a moment as armed soldiers made their way down the road, while Mike quickly put in a radio report to Zagreb, seeking urgent clearance for humanitarian help.

  An enraged Croatian soldier, with a strong US accent, demanded proof of Mike’s authorisation. Mike could only reply that his commanders could be called to confirm it, hoping to hell that the ICRC in Zagreb had got through to the high command. The ICRC was negotiating in Zagreb but authorisation had not been granted. However, now that an ‘international’ was present, any thoughts of mass execution by the soldiers had to be tempered by the certain knowledge that someone would know. The soldiers feared later reprisals from the international community, and were thankfully unaware that the ICRC delegates cannot give evidence in War Crimes Tribunals.

  While the ICRC negotiated, Mike stayed put, knowing that his presence in what became known as ‘Kuplensko camp’ was the only protection these people had while the ICRC negotiated. He stayed put for three days, drinking the cesspool waters, eating torn cattle, dirty grass and anything else he could get his hands on – just as the others did. Along with them, he fell ill with dysentery, went hungry and was cold. Mike was one of the thousands, but he could escape. After three days of negotiating, the ICRC was allowed to bring in emergency shelter, water and food and Mike could leave.

  On the last day the rain came down. Drizzle marked the onset of autumn and temperatures began to drop. Mike left via the same route as he’d arrived, taking with him the cold stares of disappointed soldiers robbed of their prize. He is an unsung hero, a brave man and an example of the Red Cross at its best.

  In the days leading up to the attack his national Red Cross staff fled Kladusa in the last of the ICRC vehicles. Mike told them to choose whichever direction they thought was the least dangerous. They would have to risk choosing which army to run into: the advancing Croatian army, the retreating Serbian army or the advancing Muslim army. When Mike’s people left they honestly had no idea whether they would live or die that day. If they approached a Croatian military unit, they would use their ICRC radios to contact the Delegation in Zagreb and have them contact the Croatian army to give them access. If they approached a Serbian unit they would call Belgrade, and if they approached a Muslim unit they would call Sarajevo. Their lives were literally in the hands of people they had never met, connected only by a common bond of being staff of the ICRC.

  The night in Zagreb was the night Bruce Biber and I decided to bring the entire ex Kladusa ICRC national staff from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia together for dinner, to meet for the first time. In 1996 it was a brave attempt to bring Serbs and Muslims to Zagreb, but we brought everyone together and had a meal. The evening started with the individual groups of Croats, Serbs and Muslims only speaking to each other, clearly nervous about interacting across the ethnic groups.

  Eventually one man, Dusan, told the story of his escape from Kladusa. An ethnic Croat, he had eventually made his way back to Zagreb, but en route he had run into the advancing Muslim army. Dusan told the story of how he radioed Sarajevo and how the operator in that city had saved his life, but he had never met the person. Slowly a hand at the other end of the table went up. “That was me,” a voice said. For the first time, saved and saviour met. Another told her story of approaching the advancing Croatian forces and calling the operator in Zagreb. Another hand rose, “That was me.” Another saved and saviour met. The stories were repeated around the table until everybody met the person they had saved or were saved by. As these brave people got to know each other, Bruce and I sat back and watched them interact for the first time, reflecting that if only people got on like this in the first place, they would never have needed a war.

  Maria – The Real Cost of War Maria was a girl who was barely into her second decade of life. She had fled across the border from Bosnia into Serbia in late 1995 during operations ‘Flash’ and ‘Storm’ in what some commentators said was the largest human movement of refugees recorded to that time. Maria arrived in Sombor, a village in the Vojvodina region of northern Serbia. Each villager had been trained to register and receive refugees by Gordana, an heroic woman who ran the local Red Cross unit and who could fill you with joy and enthusiasm merely by being in her presence. Her energy and passionate focus to do the best she could for some extraordinarily beaten children was amazing.

  Gordana was also a sanctions breaker. The village in which she lived was well-known for its Naive School of Art. Gordana would smuggle art from Serbia into Switzerland, where she would auction it, then smuggle the money from the sales back into Serbia, against all sanctions imposed on former Yugoslavia. The money she raised was used to set up an orphanage for children who arrived unaccompanied, one of whom was Maria.

  Gordana had a vision to build a summer camp in addition to the orphanage for these children and given that this was a Yugoslav Red Cross camp, I was invited to attend as the delegate of the ICRC. In my role I had been able to secure from the ICRC 100,000 deutsche marks to support Gordana’s aim. During several visits to Sombor while the summer camp was being built, I came to know several of the children.

  I returned to Sombor for the opening of the summer camp and had intended to visit briefly, but I was besieged by emotion. I was overwhelmed by the state of the children and to this day that night sits uncomfortably in my memory. The children laughed and cried, fought and played, danced around the campfire and cooked camp bread, just as they would in any similar camp. All of these children were different and they all had something to hide, or be fearful of. Some were refugees; the parents of others had died in Bosnia, although they lived in Serbia. Some were what the humanitarian ‘industry’ calls ‘social cases’ – a euphemism for children thrown out of home as the parents had no money or desire left to look after them,
or were in prison.

  One of the children named Susanna took my hand in hers and led me to Lilian Tobler, a Swiss volunteer and one of 10 from Care Concern at the camp to assist the volunteers. Susanna took Lilian’s hand and formed the link between the three of us. She then looked up at Lily and me and said simply, “Mummy and Daddy”. To this day I still don’t know if this was meant as a statement or a question. What became apparent to me was that for just a few short minutes we gave Susanna what she didn’t have – a family, attention and a little bit of love. .

  Maria, a little girl, sat silently beneath the canopy of a tree isolated from the rest of the children by her refusal to speak and join in. Her demeanour saddened me most. Whatever had happened to Maria in Bosnia, whatever she had seen and suffered, resulted in her being reduced to a shell of a human who did not communicate in speech. She didn’t laugh or cry and she showed no emotion. No one could imagine the tragedy and the horror that she’d witnessed in the conflict or what had made her shut down. Yet she stood up, and came to sit next to me. She placed her arms around my waist with the soft touch of a shy, young girl. Her pale face had a strong, dimpled chin and she had hardened eyes that didn’t look directly at me. Instead, she snuggled her head on my shoulder and gently hugged me as her mind wandered to some lonely part of her history, oblivious to the campfire and the other children around it. In the moonlight I saw a tear making its way down her pretty face. Then she cried a silent flood of tears, then a sniffle and a sob that convulsed through her body.

  I wondered what role I was playing in Maria’s mind. Who in her past was I replacing for that short moment? Where was her imagination taking her and what did she wish for? What caused this child to behave in this way? Why did she choose this moment to let the emotional floodgates open? And why did she choose my shoulder? Each of these children tugged at my heart, but the greatest pull came from Maria, letting escape part of the pain she held inside. As I write, the memory of that day floods back.

  I later found out a lot more about Maria. She was probably the small girl that Michael Fry had heard screaming when the Fifth entered Kladusa. Maria's story is a tragic reminder that war has an impact on people in the worst possible ways.

  When I think of Maria, I know why we must fight to end futile war. It is why Kosovo was so important for the Red Cross, in 1996. We could see a new war coming, and we wanted to stop it.

  Kosovo 1996: A Ticking Time Bomb Many people have heard of Kosovo. Some may recall stories from the media about how Albanians were struggling for independence from Serbia. It seems a simple story of independence. But like all such stories, the truth is far from simple. In 1996 and 1997 Kosovo was central to our conflictprevention work.

  Following the fall of the Roman Empire, the southern Slavs (including those now considered Croats and Serbs) first settled what is now the Balkans. The Serbian nationhood established itself in what is now Kosovo. The southern Slavs were not independent though. For most of their history the Serbians were ruled brutally by the Turks with many marking the Serb defeat by the Turks at the ‘Battle of the Blackbirds’ in Kosovo in 1389 as the foundation of their nation.

  For the Serbs, Kosovo held and still holds a special place in their national psyche. Serbs maintained a majority population in Kosovo right up until World War II. With the assistance of some forced migration of ethnic Islamic Albanians by Hitler’s occupying forces, and by the sheer force of demographics (the average Kosovan family has two more children than the average Serbian family), by 1996 Kosovo was 90 per cent Albanian.

  Additionally, Kosovo contains within its borders, the Field of the Blackbirds, the site of the defeat of the Kingdom of Serbia by the Turks on June 28, 1389, an event still commemorated with a Serbian national holiday. The Battle of the Blackbirds is so important that it is historically ironic that on that same day in 1914 a Bosnian Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, shot Franz Ferdinand at a protest for the independence for Yugoslavia. Some claim Princip to be ethnic Albanian, although the weight of evidence suggests he was Serb. Franz Ferdinand had foolishly but deliberately chosen the day to show his empire’s power.

  Kosovo also contains many churches and monasteries central to the Serbian Orthodox faith. It is considered the heart of Serbian nationality by many, with some historical validity.

  The vast majority of the Kosovo population at that time was neither supportive of the Serb authorities or Serb. Milosevic controlled the territory through fear and brutality, not through acceptance.

  Around the time of my being selected to join the ICRC, the principles of democracy and political tolerance were far from accepted in the institutional framework in Serbia and Montenegro, which were then the last two republics that made up the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY). Milosevic was still dictator. Political unrest between ethnic Albanian and Serbian authorities continued in Kosovo, and grew until the later breakaway of Kosovo in 1999.

  In 1996 the leaders of the Kosovo Albanian population supported boycotts of programs that were run by Serbian authorities, and set up parallel organisations including health and education programs – and even claimed an independent Red Cross Society.

  This was a problem for me on my arrival since a country may have only one Red Cross Society and the ICRC could not recognise multiple societies within one internationally recognised state. There was continual unrest within the Albanian population, and large refugee populations from Bosnia created areas of political instability in parts of Serbia.

  The ICRC presence in Yugoslavia in 1996 was reshaping itself in the transition from a situation of conflict to post-conflict. The Federation’s presence was tainted by difficulties, particularly in Kosovo, where the ethnic Albanian population allegedly linked their activities with those of the Serbian authorities and has supposedly encouraged a boycott of Federation and Yugoslav Red Cross programs.

  The Yugoslav Red Cross (YRC), during the time of the former Yugoslavia, was recognised as one of the best 10 national societies in the world, having run a very strong international program. Assumptions of ‘Balkan pride’ created difficulties in confronting the Yugoslav Red Cross with the reality of their situation, now trailing at least the Croatian Red Cross in restructuring and development. The YRC was ‘confirmed’ as the legitimate Red Cross Society for the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia at the same time as the Croatian and Slovenian Red Cross Societies were recognised, clearly remaining a point of contention in Kosovo.

  The scope of ICRC activities in 1996 was quite wide in its attempt to disseminate humanitarian values as well as humanitarian law; however, diplomatic and political problems prevented their full application.

  Plans for an ICRC/YRC schools’ program, primarily aimed at recruiting youth into the YRC while also encouraging values of tolerance, had been delayed due to problems of access to the Albanian population of Kosovo, although it became obvious that the problem was more one of institutional arrogance of the ICRC.

  Early on, it became clear my role would be just as much an internal diplomat within the different branches of the Red Cross Movement, as it would be as an external diplomat. The biggest challenges, problems and dangers were internal not external. In the post-conflict environment there was a danger of forgetting that the most important thing was the people affected by conflict and hostility.

  Changing Cultures in the Red Cross The Delegation in Belgrade was never a truly operational Delegation as the ICRC would understand it. To put it simply: the war was never in Belgrade (although it supported the Delegations that were in the war). The mainly Swiss delegates of the ICRC who worked with the organisation in those days were used to being in an environment that was considerably poorer than Geneva and considerably less educated than Geneva. They were also used to being in places where people were of a different skin colour and educational background. The plain truth however, is that the ICRC was founded by a European largely due to a European war and was formed to deal with Europeans. Most of its history is tied up in European conflict, and its involvement
in Asia and Africa is relatively recent in its history.

  The wars in former Yugoslavia took the ICRC back to its roots in Europe. However, by this time it was no longer used to dealing with people from a relatively wealthy country (Yugoslavia was the wealthiest of the former communist countries). The ICRC was unused to hiring local staff who were as well educated, and often better educated than the expatriate staff. As a result of prejudice or perhaps thinly-veiled racism local staff were subsequently treated, in general, with far less respect than they deserved. The generality was more pronounced among the Swiss-born delegates.

  Until the 1990s the ICRC was entirely Swiss. The hiring of non-Swiss was, in 1996, still considered an experiment (and indeed hiring a non-Swiss who doesn’t speak French is almost unheard of). Before I was deployed to Belgrade I joined a dissemination course largely made up of non-Swiss citizens. One of the directors of the ICRC found it necessary to tell us that the ICRC hired non-Swiss because of donor pressure and that it was “an experiment that would fail”.

  In those days a non-Swiss person was left in no doubt that they were not considered by the organisation to be of equal standing to the Swiss. However, by opening up to the ‘outside’, the pool of talent that the ICRC could hire from was larger and therefore, with proper recruiting, the level of expertise and skill must rise. A non-Swiss person joins the ICRC for a belief, rather than a career, unlike many of the Swiss.

  The same theme played out in many other countries. Within the humanitarian world the lowest in the hierarchy was a locally employed national staff member, who may have been grossly over-qualified for their role. In the 1990s the treatment of non-Swiss expats was tolerable, but the treatment of the local staff was very close to intolerable, only saved by the notion that no matter how badly they were treated, they were still employed.