The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle by Carol Off

Author:Carol Off [Off, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-37077-8
Publisher: Random House of Canada
Published: 2001-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

By July, the death threats were no longer simply addressed to MacKenzie but were directed at anyone thought to be working with him. Peacekeepers in the field reported that they would often hear some variation of the slogan “MacKenzie Must Die” before a round of machine-gun fire would go off close to their heads. When General de Chastelain came to Sarajevo for a visit, MacKenzie took his boss aside and told him he wanted out. De Chastelain agreed, and a plan was hatched to remove both MacKenzie and the Canadians from Sarajevo, replacing them with a mixture of Egyptians, Ukrainians and French UN peacekeepers. The makeup of the new force (Muslim-Orthodox-Catholic) was a telling admission that New York had accepted MacKenzie’s (and the Serbs’) characterization of the war as a civil conflict along religious lines.

The French soldiers who replaced the Canadians were shocked to discover how bad relations were between the peacekeepers and the people they were ostensibly helping. A French colonel, Patrice Sartre, says their first order of business was to find out why everyone hated the Canadians. As far as anyone knew, they had been doing a good job and had been cited for several acts of heroism. As a veteran peacekeeper, Sartre had never seen this kind of animosity.

He concluded that MacKenzie was only partly to blame. Half the problem was the airport agreement itself. “UNPROFOR became part of the siege,” says Colonel Sartre. Whether they were preventing people from crossing the airport road or ignoring the shells that fell on Sarajevo, the peacekeepers were complicit. MacKenzie’s perceived biases didn’t help the situation, according to Sartre, but there was really nothing anyone could have done once the UN had decided that the airport should be kept open at any cost.

Colonel Sartre eventually paid personally for the flaws of the airport agreement. It was Sartre who opened the door of the French APC at the Serb checkpoint to reveal a popular Bosnian politician, Dr. Hakija Turajlic, who was sitting inside. A soldier—presumably a Serb since it was their checkpoint—shot over Sartre’s shoulder into the vehicle, killing Turajlic. David Rieff dedicated his book Slaughterhouse to “the memory of Dr. Hakija Turajlic, vice-president of the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina, who was killed by Bosnian Serb fighters on the airport road in Sarajevo while riding in a French armored personnel carrier and ostensibly under the protection of United Nations soldiers.” And Sartre took another drubbing, from French TV, when he was ambushed by a live interview after the network had just broadcast video of people being captured by peacekeepers while crossing the Sarajevo airport runway. He couldn’t possibly defend the policy and he was privately contemptuous of it. In fact, Sartre’s real problems with the “escapees” began after he relaxed the policy of shooting at people considered a threat to the airport.

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