A new Canadian film being aired on the eve of Remembrance Day — typically a time to recall soldiers’ sacrifices from the First and Second World Wars — is shedding new light on a much more recent and controversial chapter in the country’s military history: the 1992 Sarajevo airlift during the Bosnian War.
In the same Balkan capital where the 1914 assassination of an Austrian prince sparked the First World War, Canadian peacekeeping troops led by Maj.-Gen. Lewis MacKenzie were deployed in July 1992 to carry out what’s described in the film as a “harrowing” mission to secure the city’s airport and deliver supplies of food and medicine in the midst of a bloody civil war touched off by the fall of Communism in the former Yugoslavia.
And the new documentary by Toronto filmmakers Barry Stevens and David York, which premieres Sunday on the History channel, includes fresh accounts from MacKenzie and soldiers under his command about how the Canadians turned their “Chapter 6” UN mission — a pure peacekeeping assignment — into what the now-retired MacKenzie calls a “Chapter 6 and a half,” where tight restrictions on the use of deadly force were relaxed amid the chaos and violence of the Siege of Sarajevo to keep vital aid flowing and to protect the lives of both civilians and Canadian military personnel.
“I rewrote the rules,” the unapologetic MacKenzie says in the film. “I said, ‘If the mission is threatened, if the planes are being interfered with coming in, if anybody is being shot at … you can use deadly force.’ And Canadians were able to do that better than anybody else.”
As other UN personnel did in Rwanda a few years later, the 800 Canadian peacekeepers in Sarajevo confronted what Stevens called a “genocidal civil war” while constrained by a UN mandate intended to ensure intervening foreign troops didn’t fuel the madness.
It was “very difficult for the Canadian soldiers involved,” he said in an interview. “They’re expected to behave under these United Nations peacekeeping rules in a hot war. They were trying to be peacekeepers when there was no peace to keep.”
As the film, titled Sector Sarajevo, makes clear, MacKenzie himself orchestrated his own leadership of the airlift mission when he approached senior UN officials and claimed Canada wouldn’t support the dangerous deployment unless MacKenzie himself was put in charge — a somewhat “unethical” ploy, he admits, that nevertheless worked.
The situation encountered by the Canadian peacekeeping contingent was horrifying, the film recounts, as warring Serbs and Bosnian Muslims clashed in and around Sarajevo at the outset of a murderous, atrocity-filled conflict that would go on for three years.
The Canadians “did behave as well as they possibly could, but also suffered for having their hands tied in some senses and just being hugely understrength,” said Stevens. One of the peacekeepers interviewed in the film said the UN rules governing the mission “were asinine. The rules would get you killed.”
Stevens said the documentary is important because it’s “the most frank people have been about that mission” and highlights the almost impossible challenge that faced MacKenzie and the peacekeepers assigned to his UN Protection Force.
“They went way beyond their rules of engagement,” said Stevens. “They did counter-sniping. They took out mortar positions. And even though they couldn’t bring an end to the conflict, they at least did stop some of the evil acts that were going on. And Lew MacKenzie authorized that.”
MacKenzie’s role in leading the mission has been debated for years. Author and CBC broadcaster Carol Off investigated Canadians’ peacekeeping efforts in the former Yugoslavia and was critical of MacKenzie’s handling of the UN mandate in her 2000 book The Lion, the Fox & the Eagle, which also praised Canadian Lt-Gen. Roméo Dallaire’s actions as a UN commander in Rwanda and Canadian judge Louise Arbour’s pioneering role as an international war-crimes prosecutor in both the Rwandan and Bosnian conflicts.
As in his own writings, in the film MacKenzie defends his decision to place the welfare of his peacekeepers above strict adherence to UN rules about how the Sarajevo mission was to have been carried out.
Next year’s 100th anniversary of the June 1914 assassination of Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand will put Sarajevo in a global spotlight and kickstart four years of centennial commemorations of the First World War.
But Stevens said reexamining the story of Canada’s pivotal role during another milestone moment in Sarajevo’s history illustrates the need for Remembrance Day commemorations to encompass a wider range of narratives from the country’s military past.
“On Remembrance Day we should be honouring peacekeeping and peacekeepers as well as war fighters,” said Stevens, who also produces the “War Story” series of documentaries that airs on History and focuses on the two world wars and the Korean War.
Canadians who served in the “ambiguous” moral circumstances that have characterized many post-Cold War conflicts, he added, “should also be recognized as contributing to Canada and serving honourably and with valour.”
