It was past 4 a.m. on Sunday April 25th at the Stenkovec 2 camp in Macedonia. Hundreds of Kosovar refugees were gathering at a tent in the dark to be processed for evacuation to Leeds.
The place was a mess after rain. "It was like cream here yesterday", said Col Richard Heaslip of the muck. It was everywhere, trodden through by miserable people whose clothes stank of damp sweat.
Col Heaslip, from Naas, Co Kildare, was there with the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe. He and his staff began processing the refugees at 4.15 a.m. The allocation of seats on the plane was 76, but they managed to raise the quota to 82 by having children sit on adults' knees.
There was a crisis. Some of the selected refugees did not turn up, having already been evacuated elsewhere. This meant that a few more had to be chosen from the clamouring crowd.
"This is the part where we have to play God", said an OSCE staff member with no pleasure. The old, the sick and the handicapped were given priority. The fit and frustrated became angry. A group of men seemed to have trouble on their minds. One was very aggressive, threatening to burn down the tent. He accused the OSCE staff of accepting bribes to get people on planes. He had been in the camp for a month, yet others who had arrived there after him had been evacuated. Other men recounted similar stories.
Col Heaslip was suddenly on his own in the middle of the protesting group. He mentioned the word "police" before explaining the UNHCR criteria for selecting people to be evacuated. The men cooled down. Realising that they were blaming the wrong people, they apologised and went away. The evacuation continued.
Speaking about the Irish way of peacekeeping, Col Heaslip said: "We tend to go in to talk through a problem and not to beat a solution into anybody." This was what he had done that morning in Stenkovec 2. Others might not have shown such patience in the face of anger.
Col Heaslip was one of four Irish Army officers working with the OSCE in Macedonia. Lt Pat Hayes helped the UNHCR with communications. Cmdt Mick Baston worked at UNHCR headquarters in Skopje while Cmdt Eamonn Smith was discreetly collecting harrowing evidence for the International War Crimes Tribunal from traumatised refugees in the camps. Another Irish OSCE officer, Capt Pat Farrelly, was with refugees in Albania.
All five are experienced peacekeepers and between them they had already served with the UN in Cyprus, Lebanon, the Middle East, Cambodia, Central America and Western Sahara before going to Kosovo. In times when our national self-esteem has been battered by widespread stories of abuse and corruption they are people who can make us proud to be Irish.
All five arrived in Pristina with the OSCE verification mission - to oversee the implementation of the Holbrooke-Milosevic accord - on Decem ber 9th last year. By mid-January of this year there were over 1,000 OSCE personnel in Kosovo and tension with Belgrade was rising. Six Yugoslav soldiers were kidnapped and the liaison group headed by Col Heaslip was charged with securing their release. This was accomplished, for which he credits "four very good British officers" on his team.
Then 45 Kosovar Albanians were massacred at Racak. OSCE withdrawal was considered as a "tool of diplomacy" and Col Heaslip was sent on the first of three trips to Macedonia to organise the evacuation. He returned to Pristina after three days. There they negotiated a "blind eye" strategy with the Yugoslav authorities to enable the Kosovar Albanian delegation to be flown from Pristina airport to the Rambouillet talks in Paris. Some of those on the delegation were wanted men.
Further tensions with Belgrade in February prompted more talk of an OSCE withdrawal and Col Heaslip travelled to Macedonia again. By mid-March it was clear that the Rambouillet talks were going to collapse and on St Patrick's Day word came through that the evacuation would have to begin in earnest. At that stage there were fears that OSCE personnel might be taken hostage by the Milosevic regime.
Col Heaslip was despatched to Skopje once more and on March 20th all 1,400 OSCE personnel were evacuated from Kosovo. NATO began its bombing on March 24th.
The OSCE complement was reduced to 300 and they were asked by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Madame Ogata, to help deal with the colossal influx of refugees into Macedonia and Albania. They continued to do so throughout the war.
Of the Irish officers, Lt-Col Pat Hayes was the first to go back into Kosovo after the war, returning almost immediately the conflict ended to help put a communications network in place in Pristina. The other officers were back in Kosovo within days. The province was divided into five military regions, each of which had a person in charge whose task was to oversee the rebuilding of society along lines which were ethnically fair.
Col Heaslip had charge of this task in a region to the south-east. He was based at Gnijlane, a region with a population of 300,000 and seven municipalities. Only one of these had a Serb majority. There were immense difficulties in getting the majority Kosovars to recognise the rights of the minority Serbs and permit their integration into a reconstructed Kosovo.
However, with another Irish echo, both sides were gradually brought face to face and encouraged to begin to deal with one another. Col Heaslip had set it as his target to get ethnically-balanced administrations set up in each municipality by November 30th. His secondment period ended earlier this month.
Col Heaslip and his colleagues have just returned to Ireland, their mission completed. They may be reassigned routine duties here or may be sent abroad again. Whatever the future holds for them, they deserve a warm welcome home for Christmas.
