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http://www.embassymag.ca/html/index.php?display=story&full_path=/2007/july/ 11/lunch/ Embassy, July 11th, 2007 LUNCH WITH BRIAN The General Who Testified Before Milosevic By Brian Adeba As Lt.-Gen. Michel Maisonneuve answered former Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic's questions during a four-hour cross-examination in 2002 at The Hague, he couldn't help but notice the difference three years had made. In 1993, the general had served for one year in the UN protection force in the former Yugoslavia as chief operations officer, and in 1998 in Kosovo, where he witnessed the atrocities committed against ethnic Albanians. Because of this work in Kosovo, he was called up as a witness in The Hague during Mr. Milosevic's war crimes and crimes against humanity trial in 2002. The Canadian general's testimony revolved around the massacre of 45 ethnic Albanians in a place called Racak in 1999. Throughout the cross-examination, Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve remembers, the former Serbian leader launched into political speeches and had to be reminded by the judge to stick to the facts during the trial. "My reaction was that he's an old man now," he says of the encounter with the man who presided over the break-up of Marshall Josip Broz Tito's Yugoslavia. At that point though, in 2002, the emotion had gone out of him, compared to 1999 when Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve thought Mr. Milosevic was the "new Hitler and I really wanted to get to him." When we met for coffee in Ottawa last week, Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve told me what he is up to nowadays, two months after he swapped his military fatigues for civilian clothes after nearly 35 years in the Canadian Forces. Over the cause of his career, he has held a number of important posts. In the late 1990s, during the Yugoslav crisis, the general served as head of a unit in the Kosovo Verification Mission, set up by the Organization of Security and Co-operation in Europe. The outfit was tasked with supporting a 2,000-member force consisting of unarmed observers whose duty was to ensure that the warring parties–Serb and Albania–didn't get at each other's throats during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia. Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve was later moved to the OSCE-KVM protection force in Albania, where he served as head of the refugee task force looking after the welfare of refugees fleeing the fighting in Kosovo. Reminiscing about how he ended up in Kosovo, Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve says it all started when he received a phone call from his superiors asking him to report to Europe for his new duties, which included participating in establishing what would eventually form the monitoring force. He asked if he could be given a few weeks to prepare, but was told his presence was needed in a few days. The assignment was supposed to last six weeks, but he was asked to stay another six months. When he arrived in Kosovo in 1998, his first task was to oversee the transfer of the bodies of 35 ethnic Albanians from Serb authorities. The ethnic Albanians were killed while trying to cross the border into Albania. "They had been in the morgue for four to five days," he says. "That was my first shock on arrival and it became a daily occurrence." While the KVM received criticism on its effectiveness, in 1999, Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve says it and the overall NATO effort saved hundreds of lives and made life better for the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo. "When we arrived, Kosovo was like a police state. The Albanian people who made up 90 per cent of the population were not able to even look a policeman in the eye." I ask what he thinks of independence for Kosovo. Selecting his words carefully, he says the proposal put forward by Finnish diplomat Matti Ahtisari for a supervised independence for Kosovo is probably the best of a number of bad solutions. The important point is whether different ethnic groups can live together in Kosovo. "The Serbians have as much right to be in Kosovo as anybody else," he says. "If we start talking about partition all the time, then that means that we just can't have a tolerant society that accepts everybody and what does that mean for the rest of the world, including Canada?" Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve's last post before retirement was as chief of staff of NATO Allied Command Transformation, which aims to transform NATO's capabilities to meet the challenges of a post-Cold War era. I ask Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve about the mission in Afghanistan. He thinks NATO's role there is more demanding than the organization's air campaign in Kosovo. A ground war and fighting an insurgency, Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve says, is much more complicated. However, he's of the opinion that Canada is doing the right thing by participating in Afghanistan, and that NATO countries must ensure that they succeed in their objectives. Afghanistan, he stresses, is a test of NATO's relevancy, its new raison d'être in the post-Cold War era. "Unless Afghanistan is a success for NATO and can be demonstrated to be a success, then people are going to continue questioning the usefulness of NATO." You can sense it in him, the aura of a relaxed man, content he's done his duty and looking forward to taking it easy. Just the other day, his wife asked him to lose the tight-cropped military haircut he sports, another sign that he's finally left the military. But when you ask Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve about retirement, two months after he announced it, you get a sense the man is not going to cool his heels in his new residence in Dundas, a suburb outside Hamilton. Letting go, it seems, is going to be a little hard. "I haven't considered it really a retirement," he says. "I have considered it a removal of the uniform, but strictly a transition to something else." As he prepares for a new life outside the military, Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve says he would like to continue serving Canada in the areas of education, security and management. Currently, he's pursuing teaching opportunities at McMaster and Guelph universities. Retirement, in the real sense of the word, might yet be elusive for Lt.-Gen. Maisonneuve. [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent using cyberus.ca WebMail - http://www.cyberus.ca/ Serbian News Network - SNN [email protected] http://www.antic.org/
