Michael J. Whelan – Kosovo 2001
CAMP CLARKE – Irish Transport Coy Headquarters, Lipjan, Kosovo – K.FOR
The Chicken Farm
Long before the war Ajim Salihu was a school teacher – before his job was taken from him. When the war came in 1999 and his home on the outskirts of Lipjan was burned he took his wife and children and fled Kosovo. Like many thousands of others Ajim found relative safety for his family in a refugee camp just inside the border of neighbouring Macedonia. Serbian troops had positioned themselves on the premises of a disused chicken processing factory very near to his home and used it as a base for a reign of terror on the local population. This was the very site, which would months later become the home of the Irish Transport Company deployed as part of the K.FOR multinational peace enforcement mission. When Irish soldiers serving as peacekeepers replaced the Serbians in the factory it once again began a semi production of sorts and with it came the inevitable side effects of smells, rodents and pests. From then on the Irish base, although officially named Camp Clarke, after the Irish patriot Thomas Clarke executed in 1916, was unofficially referred to as the ‘Chicken Farm’ to all in the mission area and at home in Ireland becoming a permanent fixture by the time I arrived there.
Because of its location the camp had many problems to overcome and I was to have first-hand experience of them as would many others who lived there over the years. The chicken farm smelled awful, especially during the warm weather and dry spells, the chickens and their droppings attracted flies as big as your fist at times, ok maybe that’s a little bit of an exaggeration but they were huge and everywhere all the time. I remember that when we ate in the dining hall (a large cookhouse tent capable of catering for up to a hundred soldiers) or anywhere for that matter within the boundaries of the camp the flies would be all over you. At times you literally had to lean over the plate with your arms to stop them from landing on your food, it was a constant battle. I remember one occasion when the chap sitting facing me during dinner had covered his food with his arms and upper body, covered the fork full of food as he raised it as best he could and just as he placed it in his mouth a massive dirty big bluebottle landed on it as it went in. We watched in amazement as he began to chew with a victorious smile on his face, nobody piped up or said a word, we all liked the guy very much. We said nothing until he had swallowed the prize and then we fell around the place laughing. I couldn’t finish my meal; you just couldn’t tell were the flies had been, it was a constant battle. I remember in Lebanon the flies were a constant irritation but the chicken farm was almost biblical.
Then there were the mice, millions of them. If there’s one thing that I cannot stand it’s mice, and rats for that matter. But mice, at times the camp was overrun with them, they ate everything. They ate the back off the fridges in the kitchen so the cooks found it difficult to keep food fresh. While waiting for new appliances to arrive, which took some weeks, the cooks did their best to disguise the dull taste of the food (this was our theory anyway). I remember thinking that they must have been lacing the food with garlic, which was fine but after a while I began to smell garlic coming through my skin and hair and my stomach would be upset, other people were feeling the same way too.
It could be very comical at times too only it was very real and serious. There was a family of feral cats living in the camp and they managed for a while to keep the numbers down but all of a sudden the problem with the mice became more severe and we realised the cats had disappeared. For some weeks there was no sign of the cats until one morning after a heavy snowfall I was climbing onto the roof of the operations building to reposition the microwave dish to try get a better signal, a tricky business at the best of times without slippery surfaces when I came face to face with a couple of the cats. It was a little bit alarming to say the least, they had frozen to death in the heavy snows and low temperatures of the winter and the body of one large cat, a white one, was sitting up looking straight at my face as I reached over the gutter to gain a grip on the roof. Its mouth was wide open showing its teeth and the front paws were raised as it was about to scratch my arm.
In the mornings, while queuing for breakfast along the inside of the large cookhouse tent you could see groups of mice running up and down between the double layers of the tent wall. Some of the guys would kick or slap the tents inner lining with their mugs and the mice would fall. The mice were also getting into the accommodation tents and into our equipment. One of the drivers was adamant one morning, while getting himself prepared for a detail, that someone had been playing tricks with him and switched one of his combat boots with someone else’s as he couldn’t fit his foot into it. Eventually he reached in and pulled out a large dead mouse, which he had just crushed with his toes. On another cold day the engineers were digging a cesspit trench in the hard ground just outside the camp’s wire fence. As soon as the digger began to break the surface the ground seemed to raise itself up like it was moving of its own accord. The guys in the camp began jumping up onto vehicles; anything to get off the ground, others ran to shut the doors on the accommodation tents. It was hilarious to see, some guys were terrified, he he, I know I was. After being disturbed by the mechanical digger thousands upon thousands of mice had begun to run towards the camp and through the wire. It reminded me of a documentary I watched many years earlier about swarms of locusts destroying crops in America, that’s what the mice looked like running and hopping in such a great number, swarms of locusts. Anyway I still get the jitters when I think about it. I don’t think I would have survived mentally intact if the mice had found their way into the tent where I lived in any great numbers, as it was the nine of us that called that place home kept them at bay though there were moments when I thought we were up against it.
The other thing that I found difficult sometimes as did everyone else was the severe cold temperatures. The weather-haven tents were ideal in the very hot summer temperatures, which we had for a couple of weeks at each end of the six months we were in Kosovo, as they had air conditioning fitted but the winter was a different story. The air conditioning in our tent was faulty and we could never get it working efficiently. When the cold weather came the tent was absolutely freezing. With all nine of us in the room there was some heat but the temperatures plummeted during the night and in the morning you could see an actual cloud formed in the room. I slept in my bunk wearing a tracksuit, I lay my uniform under the sheet so my body lay upon it to keep it warm. In the mornings when all of us hopped out of our bunks resembling a bunch of crazy people frantically trying to dress in a hurried frenzy of movement I had something relatively warm to get into, it was very funny to watch nine grown men crying with the cold. The room would be warm enough at night because most of us would be in there, chatting, writing or reading letters, listening to music or doing some personal administration on our gear but during the night the condensation would constantly drip off the metal formers that shaped the domed tent and saturated the bed clothes and even dripped onto the faces of the guys. One chap in particular would curse all night at the constant dripping of water onto his head, he would move his bed but it still got him and no-one wanted to switch places with him. Another chap in my room had a shaven head and I remember at night the beads of sweat on his head would freeze and in the morning he would have to peel the pillowcase from his skin. With all the craziness of the pests, when morale was low in the short winter days and the troubles that went with the mission we were carrying out I remember the creature comforts too and the fact that when you become a soldier you learn to make do and improvise.
But it is important to remember too that from this same site Serbian troops had organised a reign of terror on the outlying villages and parts of Lipjan itself using houses and other features on the flat central landscape for target practice. Ajim’s house was among those regularly mortared and eventually destroyed. When I met him in September 2000 he was working as an interpreter for the Irish in Camp Clarke and was earning enough money to start his life over, he was forty years old, I had just turned thirty in June. I had left my wife and three year old son safely at home in Ireland, Ajim was in the midst of trying to protect his family and begin again. He and ten other local Albanian men had assisted the thirty six Irish military engineers, who had been urgently despatched from Ireland, in the construction of the camp. This was a task fraught with obstacles and dangers, a very short time schedule of less than two weeks and mine clearance issues among them. The camp, on handover to the 1st Irish Transport Coy, consisted of thirteen weather-haven tents, shower and toilet facilities, laundry, cookhouse, recreation room etc built around an existing brick building used for the HQ, operations-communications centre, detail office and canteen and all to accommodate and protect approximately 110 personnel (number accurate when I was in the camp), their weapons and equipment and thirty six vehicles of all shapes and sizes. Some of the original outer buildings of the factory were used by the fitters as a transport workshops and repair area.
When the camp was eventually taken over by the Irish the British forces, including Ghurkha’s and Royal Irish Guards, who been stationed locally since the invasion, were replaced by a Finnish Battalion and relocated within the MNB area of responsibility. There was always great co-operation and friendliness between Irish and British, Finnish and American troops and personnel from all the other countries that we came into contact with during the operations in Kosovo. The local population who had feared the camp and what had emanated from it into their lives previously, where now relatively free and happy to return to their homes now that Irish soldiers were in possession of the factory but as the mission evolved the stories and evidence of the atrocities that occurred in the area prior to the arrival of K.FOR and the Irish emerged and we heard them and many times saw the results.
The people of Kosovo, whether they liked it or not, were to live in an administrative vacuum for a very long period after the war ended. Kosovo was described by some in the international media as ‘The Phantom State’ – there was no functional government except for the interim administration, the UN mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) and a peace maintained by thousands of NATO and Non-NATO troops in the K.FOR multinational brigades. The ethnic cleansing had ceased after the NATO airstrikes and when K.FOR came into Kosovo the reprisals by ethnic groups against each other was also largely put to an end. Though the peacekeeping troops were on the ground they couldn’t be everywhere at once and these incidents still occurred regularly. Even though atrocities occurred months prior to our arrival they still seemed very recent and resonated in the communities, where there were always emotive signs; and stories that we learned.
MASSACRE AT SLOVINJE AND THE DELL OF DEME
In the wider Irish Coy area there where many hamlets, towns and villages, even cities as we were a mission asset of the force commander, which in reality meant the whole country. Not very far from Camp Clarke was the village of Slovinje , where on the 15th of April 1999 a massacre had taken place, the largest atrocity to happen in the Lipjan municipal area. On that day approximately 150 Serbian police, militia and paramilitary forces entered the village, which prior to the war had seen a mixed Kosovo-Serb and Kosovo-Albanian population with good relations between both. The Serb forces began painting symbols and slogans on buildings throughout the village later breaking into homes and demanding the residents leave. This forced evacuation quickly turned into violence with many random beatings of people, with rifle-butts, in the streets. Many of those beaten were elderly and infirm and this occurred in view of women and children. Some of the elderly Albanian refused to leave their homes and were systematically shot. In one particular case a grandfather, his two sons and two grandchildren were executed. Eighteen people were murdered on that day and their bodies hidden in a mass grave by their killers.
Later about 800 people from the same village and other outlying Albanian villages congregated at a place called The Dell of Deme – an area consisting of two attached fields of different sizes surrounded by woodland. They spent the night outdoors and at approximately 2pm the next day April 16th Serb forces converged on The Dell of Deme from all sides and began herding the people back towards Slovinje , during which they separated women and children from fathers, brothers and husbands. One of the men didn’t want to leave his sick wife and was shot dead. Incidents of stripping people naked and beatings were common. The people were then told to run towards the woods, while the Serbs opened fire with automatic weapons killing seventeen of them.
The bodies of the people killed on the first day were later exhumed and placed in an ancient local schoolhouse for families to identify. Those killed on the second day were also placed in a mass grave by their killers. When the Albanians eventually returned to recover the bodies they found the grave empty, the Serbs were suspected of moving them and as far as I can ascertain from researching for this article their bodies have never been found. To this day there is still animosity, anger, revenge and violence on the ground in Kosovo though the country itself is trying to change this and Irish peacekeepers helped here in many ways.
GYPSIES
Lipjan, though quite a modern town in Kosovo terms back then, was situated not too far from the mountains and about a 25 minute drive from the Irish camp. In those mountains lived many Roma gypsies and in one town in particular, Gorjne Gadimlje was a community of Askali gypsies living in absolute poverty and disowned by everybody. The Irish and K.FOR in general tried to help all factions, religions, and ethnic groups no matter what the background or charges that might have been issued against their communities during or after the recent war. Children, as far as I was and still am concerned, shouldn’t be held accountable for the sins and actions of their parents, grandparents or community. The conditions and plight of children in Kosovo was always one of the main things that affected me while I was there. The qypsies, as far as I could see, were not wanted and often accused by the Kosovar-Albanians of working with the Serbs and of mutilating the bodies of Albanians killed during the war. It was for one of these, a Roma Gypsy family living in a hovel of a house without a roof in the depths of winter, which the Irish company bought and built a new wooden home with money from their own pockets and through organising fund raising activities within the unit itself.
SOVEREIGNTY
Ireland, the modern Ireland that I live in, was also born through violence and violence at times has tried to break the Irish people but democracy prevailed and though they struggle with modernity they are still free and I am very happy about that. But as a historian I can see we are very lucky to be that way and no matter what people might complain about Ireland is a democracy, maybe not a perfect one but a democracy just the same. As a person interested in stories and people I have a weird ability to see patterns and links between events, dates and peoples etc that others have no interest in when I talk about them (I could bore a plank of wood sometimes). And so over the fifteen years since my time in Kosovo I have often wondered about that small simple portrait of Thomas Clarke, which hung in the reception area in the headquarters of the Irish Transport Coy in the middle of the British Multinational Brigade area of operations. That simple symbol of Irish destinies mounted in a country that I had never heard of until recently before being deployed there, and certainly Tom Clarke hardly knew of either, was relatively unnoticed by most of the Irish soldiers and most visitors to the camp. Whether British, American, German or any other nationality they would have received a basic introduction to who he was and why the camp was named in his honour, if they got one at all.
Irish troops and peacekeepers in a very real way are proof of ‘Ireland taking its place among the nations of the Earth.’ This was a key Irish republican sentiment echoing from the early Irish struggles for independence. Certainly Theobolde Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen of the 1798 Rebellion would appreciate the testament proved my Irish involvement in peacekeeping around the world if they were present today to see it, and also Robert Emmett of the failed insurrection of 1803, when he is said to have so eloquently spoke these words from the dock prior to his execution in Dublin. These words were not lost either on Padraig Pearse and the volunteers of 1916 who subtly tied them into the Proclamation read aloud from the steps of the General Post Office and though I myself abhor violence I have to recognise where my country has come from and her passage.
Camp Clarke, the Irish HQ in Kosovo, was a symbol of making things better if even for the creature comforts of those who lived there for a while and for helping to alleviate the sufferings of people in a war ravaged landscape. Irish soldiers and those serving as peacekeepers all around the world for the last sixty years are a symbol of Irish sovereignty too and though I struggled many times to see that back then, when morale was low and things were tough, I see it now.
Michael J. Whelan
February 2015
Michael J. Whelan - Writer 