We are grateful this holiday to friends and subscribers as Blacklock’s embarks on a 14th great year of independent, all-original Canadian journalism. On behalf of contributors, please accept our thanks. We’re back tomorrow — The Editor.
My recent hang up on utility has supplanted any interest I’ve had in the good. It’s been so long since the opposition hounded you, “What’s a million? What’s a million?” Clarence. The amateur partisans with their seasonal pragmatism actually believe your big picture, cost-benefit Karma. What are the poems only I read (and reread) but war wails? I want to offer you a poem with the facts checked.
I fear it’s too late, Clarence. Anyone I’ve met has had to make some sense of me. I know my dreams are filled with familiars, but G.D., C.D. Howe, tell me from your cosmic station how’ve I done in my former lovers’ dreams?
In Tamara’s do I dig her for answers? In Ang’s do I stand astride the exit? In Mary Woolworth’s am I man or still thirteen? In Nat’s have we kissed?
Ah, how I impress myself, my fantasies’ announced, but believe me this is better. Since I’ve told my wife, she’s told me twice about her dreams about me. In the second some former roommate harangued her, “You’re not good enough for him! He deserves better!” but Clarence, between the audience and us, we know a dreamt word’s as worthless as a dreamt dollar.
By Jeff Blackman
In spring 1999 a paramilitary group called the Scorpions descended on Podujevo, Kosovo, a mid-sized city the size of Medicine Hat. Albanians were rounded up. It was a cold morning, and one small boy named Shpetim, age 9, jammed his hands in his pockets to keep warm. The gesture seemed to irritate the gunmen.
They ordered Shpetim to empty his pockets, and out tumbled the boy’s collection of marbles – plunk, plunk, plunk. The boy’s mother, unsure of what to do, bent down and tried to gather them up as they scattered, writes Eliott Behar. Later they shot Shpetim in the head.
Behar is a former Ontario Crown prosecutor who recounts his two years’ work as a war crimes attorney at The Hague. Behar was raised in Toronto, the son of an architect. His family numbered Holocaust survivors. He is a skillful writer with a police reporter’s eye for detail.
“Spend time listening to the men who directed these atrocities, and listen to the collective narratives and beliefs of the citizens who either carried out these acts or endorsed them from the sidelines, and you begin to see that they were themselves, even before the bloodshed began, driven to act by their own sense of injustice and victimhood,” Behar writes. He spent so much time listening to chain-smoking witnesses, Behar notes his Court robes always faintly smelled of Kosovar tobacco.
All participants in genocide are “in thrall to narratives of injustice and victimhood that made them feel entitled to act as they did, and that seemingly silenced the demands of their individual consciences,” writes Behar. “It is a mentality with the power to infect not just the leadership but also the facilitators and willing executioners amongst the general population.”
Canada was oblivious to the viciousness of civil war when it committed forces to the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbian cities. Few Canadians could spot Belgrade on a map. F ewer still had any nuanced understanding of the ancient and justifiable hatreds in the region. “I have no politics,” a Serbian friend once told me. In the Balkans, politics are fatal.
The facts: The Serbian cabinet in 1999 devised a secret plan to roust 800,000 civilians, mainly Muslim, from their Kosovar villages, and later attempted to cover it up. The expulsions were “forced, well-coordinated and part of a systemic campaign,” notes Tell It To The World. The chief architect, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic, died of a heart attack at trial seven years later. “It was, to be sure, a striking and disappointing anti-climax,” Behar writes. “No factual findings were ever made and no verdict was ever delivered.”
Milosevic’s interior minister shot himself before he could be brought to trial. A deputy prime minister was sentenced to 22 years. Yes, there were atrocities on both sides, and Serbians as a people were not collectively complicit in atrocities. It was a Serbian newspaperman who first uncovered the conspiracy, and Serbian parliamentarians who provided much of the evidence against Serbian murderers.
“Crimes had taken place on all sides of the conflict and many Serbs had also been victims themselves – victims of violence by Croats, by Bosniaks and by Kosovo Albanians,” Behar writes. “But it was also true that the mass murders and deportations I had described had happened, and that they had been directed and overseen by Serbian authorities. The evidence was clear.”
In a town called Suva Reka, a police constable Velibor Veljkovic remembered the day orders came to round up Albanians. Police went down the street, shooting terrified townspeople. Veljkovic had been on traffic detail and IT records storage, but this day his assignment was to collect the corpses of the police department’s victims – more than a hundred, he recalled. The mayor supervised the work.
Back at the station, Veljkovic returned to his desk when the phone rang. A distraught Albanian woman was on the line: “I told her they had to leave. She asked me where to, and I told her to Albania. She asked me, ‘What are we going to do in Albania?’ I didn’t want to continue this conversation. I simply said, ‘Go to Albania; you have to leave otherwise you will suffer the fate of the other ones’”; “I hung up and within half an hour there was an en masse departure of members of the Albanian community by vehicles.”
“There was no more killing. People simply left. We resumed our work,” Veljkovic explained. For a town constable in Suva Reka, public duties now included traffic tickets, IT management, murder.
Tell It To The World is a haunting and poignant and remarkable book. To read it is to gain some greater understanding of humanity.
By Holly Doan
Tell It To The World, by Eliott Behar; Dundurn Press; 264 pages; ISBN 9781-4597-23801; $24.99
Canadians must be ambitious if cabinet is to meet its climate targets, Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin said yesterday. Her remarks followed testimony by the Commissioner of the Environment that Canada has the worst climate record of any G7 country: ‘We are a poor performer.’
There was “no money to be made” in collecting tuition from tens of thousands of foreign students, the president of Conestoga College of Kitchener, Ont., yesterday told the Commons immigration committee. MPs scoffed at John Tibbits’ testimony, noting Conestoga was the nation’s heaviest user of the foreign study permit system: “Do you deserve your $640,000 salary?”
Public Works Minister Joel Lightbound in his first meeting with Canada Post’s largest union since the launch of a national strike said service cuts “would stand.” The Canadian Union of Postal Workers distributed minutes of the hour-long meeting in a newsletter to members: “The Minister and his staff appeared to be interested in what we had to say.”
Canada’s chief bank inspector yesterday warned lenders to brace for “unexpected economic outcomes” amid the unresolved tariff war. Superintendent of Financial Institutions Peter Routledge said his office will increase monitoring of bank loans: “The lack of clarity on tariffs is generating unease.”
Liquor, beer and wine would see mandatory health warnings under a private bill yesterday taken up by the Senate social affairs committee. Senator Patrick Brazeau (Que.), a recovering alcoholic and sponsor of the bill, told legislators to prepare for intense lobbying by industry: “Personally, it led me down a very, very, very dark path.”
Cabinet is far short of its target to build electric auto charging stations despite more than a billion in subsidies, says a federal audit. The report warned even if successful there was “no evidence” that financing a national network at taxpayers’ expense would lower emissions: ‘Government involvement is necessary to address market failure.’
Canadians must be “very, very careful” that ruthless governments do not steal their rights, Attorney General Sean Fraser yesterday told reporters. Fraser complained provinces’ lawful use of the Charter Of Rights’ notwithstanding clause could spell “our future downfall as a nation.”
Cabinet yesterday introduced a bill granting itself new powers to suspend or cancel temporary permits for foreigners let into Canada. It follows figures from Immigration Minister Lena Diab’s department that 3,049,277 foreigners are here on valid or expired permits: “We have rules in this country and we expect people to follow those rules.”
Federal regulators should let the real estate market “clear out people who can’t afford what they bought,” a Liberal Senate appointee said yesterday. Senator Daryl Fridhandler (Alta.), a corporate lawyer, questioned government intervention: “Allow basic economics to take their course.”
Wayne Easter, retired nine-term Liberal MP (Malpeque, P.E.I.), yesterday requested a judicial inquiry into alleged corruption in his home province. Easter said Prince Edward Islanders were alarmed by suspicious dealings pointing to Chinese subterfuge: “You need a federal public inquiry that can subpoena witnesses, trace bank accounts.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s candidate to oversee defence contracting is now cabinet’s highest paid appointee, figures show. The $679,100-a year salary award for Toronto banker Douglas Guzman, a former associate of Carney’s, is twice the finance minister’s pay: “I am proud to have the opportunity to serve Canada.”
Liberal MP Stephanie McLean (Esquimalt-Saanich, B.C.), secretary of state for seniors, yesterday would not say how many cabinet meetings she’s attended since her appointment last May 13. Secretary McLean under questioning from Senator Denise Batters (Sask.) also declined comment on her salary, office budget, core duties or whether she was assigned a car and chauffeur: “I am pleased to have received an invite.”
