On a narrow road in the hills of Bosnia,
Daniel Gunther, a Canadian infantry corporal, sat in the turret
hatch at a white armoured vehicle. The midday sun blazed down on
the parked carrier as he surveyed the landscape ahead through a
bulky pair of binoculars that he held just under his light blue
United Nations helmet. Gunther, 24, had only been in Bosnia for
about a month, since soldiers of the Royal 22ieme Regiment
replaced an Anglophone unit in Visoko, about 20 kilometres
northwest of Sarajevo.
Earlier that morning,
June 18, 1993, two armoured personnel carriers, one driven by
Gunther, rattled out of the Canadian compound at Kiseljak, near
the peacekeepers' main position at Visoko. Their mission: to stop
at an observation point on the Kiseljak-Visoko road near the
village of Buci. Once there, they hoped that a visible,
stationary UN presence would stop the warring factions from
attacking civilian traffic. It was the kind of workaday
peacekeeping operation that Canadians hear little about. By 9:30
a.m., the two vehicles, one known on the radio net as Seven-One
and the other as Seven-One-Alpha, had taken up positions about
500 metres apart.
At Seven-One, Captain Yvan
Pichette and Sergeant Mario Robert sat in the carrier while
Gunther scrutinized the landscape through his binoculars. As the
morning wore on, the three soldiers in
Seven-One-Alpha-Master-Corporal Richard Martin, Corporal S.R.
Phaneuf, and Private J.P. ThEberge-tinkered with their broken
radio, eventually giving up. At 12:30, Phaneuf left the
sheltering armour to relieve himself.
"It was
at that point that I heard the first explosion," Phaneuf said. He
sprinted back toward the little open door in the back of the
white carrier. An instant later, he heard another blast-this one
Much closer. Bullets smacked the air around both
vehicles.
Inside Seven-One, Sergeant Robert
was rocked and deafened by that second blast. The interior of the
carrier was suddenly filled with acrid smoke. He slammed the
heavy rear door and, he later remembered, "shouted at Corporal
Gunther to start the vehicle and get out of the area as quickly
as possible,"
But there was only silence from
the turret. An anti-tank rocket aimed at the carrier had exploded
where Gunther sat, missing the main body of the vehicle but
killing him instantly. Investigators later found fragments of his
shattered blue helmet 30 metres away.
Later
that day, in Ottawa, National Defence Headquarters issued a press
release which appeared in paraphrased form in most Canadian
dailies the next morning. It differed from what had happened in
one crucial detail: Gunther, it stated, had been killed when a
mortar round hit the carrier.
"Corporal Gunther was probably halfway out of his
vehicle when the shrapnel of what seemed to be a mortar hit him,"
Major Jean-Pierre Sabourin, a spokesman at the military base a
Valcartier, Quebec, told French-language newspaper Le
Devoir. Several other papers phoned Visoko and talked
to a military spokesman, Captain Bruce Stock, who confirmed the
story. (A dispatch from Southam, however, correctly attributed
the death to an anti-tank round.)
The
distinction between the facts as they occurred and the facts as
they were presented to the media is important. A mortar is fired
in a high sloping arc at its target, which is an area rather than
a specific object. An individual mortar round is not a
particularly accurate weapon. What's more, if a mortar round had
struck the thin roof of the carrier, the explosion would have
devastated the interior, killing all three men. An anti-tank
rocket, by contrast, is fired at a deliberately selected
target-there's nothing random about it.
The
official military account wasn't publicly challenged until
December 1993, when the Ottawa military magazine Esprit
de Corps got two anonymous calls from soldiers with a
different view of events. Because he wanted to publicize the
soldier' version as quickly as possible, Scott Taylor, the
magazine's iconoclastic publisher, called The Toronto
Sun's Peter Worthington, who broke the story in his
column.
In January 1994, Esprit de
Corps ran an angry, bitter article that contrasted the
information given to the public and Gunther's wife and family
with what an internal board of inquiry had found to be the cause
of Daniel Gunther's death. "Beyond all doubt," the three officers
on the board of inquiry had written in a report dated July 10,
1993, "the weapon used was in fact an anti-tank weapon and not a
mortar round." Their report was given a restricted
classification.
Beyond Esprit de
Corps and the Toronto and Ottawa Suns, however, the
story got no wider coverage-a lucky break for the military's
public relations officials, says Taylor: "At that point the trust
in [Department of National Defence] communications could have
been blown wide open."
By June 1993, there had
been other deaths of Canadian peacekeepers, but they were
accidents of a war zone, like the sergeant who had been killed by
a land mine the previous August, or the carelessly handled rifle
that killed a Canadian in Somalia. Gunther, however, had been
killed by soldiers who deliberately aimed a rocket at a clearly
marked UN vehicle. His tragedy signalled the opening of a new and
ominous chapter in Canadian peacekeeping, and should have started
a public debate about the dangers of sending peacekeepers to an
active war zone. And it also should have led to a debate in
journalistic circles about the glaring deficiencies in the way
military matters are covered.
Unsurprisingly,
there are conflicting explanations as to why the military didn't
admit immediately after the board of inquiry came to its
conclusion that Gunther had been killed by an anti-tank rocket.
Some see it as an act of deliberate dishonesty, one designed to
downplay the dangers that peacekeepers faced in Bosnia and thus
avoid a public controversy that might lead to withdrawal. "It was
politically unacceptable to have a murder of a Canadian UN
soldier," says Peter Gunther, Corporal Gunther's father. "That's
what the problem was." Esprit de Corps' Taylor
agrees with the assessment. "Six months after the Board of
Inquiry was concluded, the Public Affairs branch was still lying
to the people of Canada, claiming Gunther was killed accidentally
by random mortar fire," he stormed in the August 1994, issue of
his magazine.
National Defence Headquarters,
for its part, blames the discrepancy on bad information from the
battalion in Bosnia in the immediate aftermath of Gunther's
death. In response to written questions from the Ryerson
Review, Commander Barry Frewer, a military spokesman in
Ottawa, attributed the error to "initial reports submitted from
the field under the 'fog of war,"' and pointed to a press release
issued by army headquarters in Montreal in May 1994, correcting
the misinformation in NDHQ's statement the previous
June.
With Gunther's death causing few
political waves, there continued to be little public awareness of
the danger to which Canadian peacekeepers in Bosnia were exposed.
Little happened to change that perception until December 1993,
when a group of Serbs took 11 Canadian peacekeepers prisoner,
disarmed them, and subjected them to a mock execution. The story,
however, was not broken by anybody in the Canadian media. That
honour belonged to The New York Times, a
newspaper that hadn't let its military coverage atrophy. The
actions of the Serbian soldiers startled and disturbed the
public, and an anxious debate over the presence of Canadian
troops in the Balkans finally began.
Those on
both sides of the gulf that divides reporters from the military's
PR structure agree that coverage of the armed forces has, in the
last generation, become a weak spot for Canadian journalism.
There are several reasons: cultural barriers, the loss of a
tradition of military reporting, the clannish nature of military
societies, and the lack of a consistent presence of reporters
with Canadian troops on operations, particularly in Bosnia and
Croatia.
"On the ground," says military public
affairs officer Captain Bob Kennedy, "there have been 2,000
soldiers for the last three years being shot at, killing people
who shoot at them and, every day, generating fabulous stories.
And not a single Canadian news agency has been smart enough to
put somebody there with them [full-time]."
They have, however, sent journalists overseas on
short-term visits, which raises the sticky issue of costs.
Although the military is willing to support reporters from
resources that already exist in the field, most major news
agencies insist on paying the full cost to preserve their
independence-a process that Kennedy describes as "spending
hundreds and hundreds of dollars a day avoiding the hospitality
of the Canadian Army." Between transportation, reimbursing the
military (several news organizations demand to be billed) and
insurance, the cost of sending reporters and photographers to
cover Canadian troops in a war zone, let alone keeping them
there, quickly becomes prohibitive to a cashstrapped news
operation. The result: visits to Canadian troops abroad that are
relatively brief and rare.
Whether journalists
should go on the military's supervised tours of war zones (termed
"junkets" by some) is a debatable point. Unlike such easier
ethical judgement calls as rejecting gifts from the sub, jeers of
articles, there is little unanimity among reporters about the
degree to which news agencies should accept help from the armed
forces, or whether their objectivity would suffer if they did.
"You're going to be biased for the cost of a plane flight to
Somalia?" asks John Ward of The Canadian Press.
David Pugliese, who often covers the military for The
Ottawa Citizen, defends his newspaper's decision to pay its own
way: "I think that you do get respect from some military people
when you're not on a free ride. They seemed impressed by
that."
Be that as it may, having the military
pick up the tab hasn't always stopped embarrassing stories from
being told, Jim Day, at the time a reporter for the
Pembroke Observer, flew to Somalia in March
1993, on a trip mostly paid for by the armed forces. Day, who
happened to arrive in the immediate aftermath of the murder of a
Somali teenager by members of the Airborne Regiment, ended up
breaking the first story of what became the Somalia scandal.
Day's article led to a spate of revelations about bizarre
initiation rituals and anarchic violence in the unit, culminating
in the regiment's disbandment in disgrace on a parade square in
Petawawa in March 1995.
An organized tour is
probably the only way most Canadian reporters get military
experience-few of them grew up in a society in which the armed
forces were anything other than peripheral, Peter Worthington,
editor emeritus of The Toronto Sun, and an
infantry platoon commander during the Korean War, is one of the
few combat veterans left in Canadian journalism: "For a couple of
decades after World War II," he says, 11 the media was filled
with people who'd been soldiers, sailors, airmen or some, thing,
and had a visceral understanding of the mentality, and could
assess it."
Some lament the loss of the
old-fashioned Canadian war correspondents, people like Charles
Lynch or Ross Munro, who landed with Canadian troops in Sicily
and Normandy. But "there haven't been any Canadian wars to cover
for the last 40 years as a war correspondent," Kennedy observes.
"[That earlier] generation drank whiskey instead of Perrier,
chain-smoked, kept an eye on the track, and all that stuff: the
whole Hemingwayesque routine."
All the
reporters interviewed by the Review, like The Ottawa
Citizen's David Pugliese and John Ward of The Canadian
Press, agreed that the military, which often complains that it is
poorly (as distinct from negatively) covered, must shoulder much
of the blame itself.
Canada's military culture
is physically and intellectually isolated from the mainstream of
Canadian society. Its attitudes, especially its assumptions about
women, often seem to have sprung from another era; to this day,
soldiers' wives who go overseas with their husbands fall directly
under military authority, and the archetype of
wife-as-subordinate is alive and well in large parts of military
society. As well, the ethnic makeup of the fulltime part of the
armed forces reflects that of Canada half a century
ago.
"The military is a closed, regimented
structure, and the media are a group of people who are trained to
test authority," notes The Toronto Star's
Peter Cheney. Reporters are largely urban in outlook, liberally
educated, and temperamentally skeptical. Often, relations between
these two contrasting guardians of society are marked by mutual
anger and confusion.
"[The military] had a lot
of stuff to hide, and they did it for a long time," Cheney
contends. In January 1994, he published a large investigative
feature in the Star about the Airborne
Regiment's disturbingly anarchic and hyperaggressive subculture,
the first thorough look in the media at the regiment's problems.
He says he later got a death threat. "The military is a club.
It's like cops. If you get a story that involves the cops, you're
up against the entire police force."
While all
armed forces are closed to journalists to one degree or another,
some reporters argue that Canada's is too closed. "After the Gulf
War, I sent in a request for the war diaries," Ward remembers.
"What did we drop bombs on, and what were the bomb damage
assessments? They finally gave me an expurgated version of the
war diary, but without any of the bomb damage assessments. They
were done by the Americans, therefore this was a communication
with a foreign government, and it was exempt. My problem with
that is: the Americans didn't give a hoot. They were giving out
the bomb damage assessments on CNN. Who [is the Canadian
military] trying to hide it from? The Iraqis?"
In April 1993, a few weeks after Somali teenager Shidane
Arone was murdered by Canadian soldiers, an American
Court-martial in Mogadishu convicted a sergeant of wounding two
Somalis with a shotgun. "Unlike the Canadian military," Pugliese
pointed out at the time in The Ottawa Citizen,
"the Marines are open about investigations against their
soldiers. The log books of their military police are open to the
media."
Some reporters believe the military
sometimes crosses the line from guardedness to active deceit. At
two points in 1994, the CBC filed requests under the Access to
Information Act for briefing notes used by public affairs
officers. They had realized that the notes contained not only
information for release to reporters, but also background
information not intended for release. The CBC asked for copies of
both.
"We applied for them," explains CBC
Radio reporter Michael McAuliffe, "and we received a stack of
documents. And it wasn't until a month or two [later] that we
became aware that in fact the documents we'd been given had been
altered. In some cases they were edited. In some cases they were
rewritten. But basically the documents were re-created so that it
concealed the alterations that had been made." (At press time, a
military police investigation was in progress.)
AT 10 IN THE MORNING on October 30, 1995, referendum day
in Quebec, the public inquiry into the Canadian deployment to
Somalia began another week of hearings in downtown Ottawa. Across
the river in Hull, the polls were opening. Four reporters,
clinical about their chances of having their stories published on
the morning after the referendum, were in the press room. Others
dropped in during the day, always asking if new documents had
been released.
The inquiry was still studying
the period before the Airborne Regiment went to Somalia. In the
press room, the mass of released documents had already filled two
bookshelves. They covered a surprising range of issues-from a
major general's explanation of his grievances, to the rules of
engagement for the mission. There was also a copy of one of the
famous videotapes. Clearly, a rich mine of story
material.
Reporters welcomed the information;
it afforded glimpses of a hidden culture that is otherwise
difficult to penetrate. "What you need is something like this
inquiry, with subpoena powers, and the documents start coming
out," says CP's John Ward.
But one officer
sees the media focus on the inquiry as a cop-out. "The Somalia
story only became a story again it became an Ottawa story-who
told what to whom about what when. It is not a military story,"
says Kennedy. "It is a political story, which all of a sudden is
happening in Ottawa, and finally Somalia could be covered just by
strolling over to the National Press Theatre. My contempt is
unbounded."
But Esprit de
Corps' Scott Taylor feels that the inquiry, by
providing a starting point for a small group of journalists, has
done much to improve coverage of the military. "The facade of the
uniform is no longer enough to deflect [reporters]. They are
delving into it. They're now students of this whole thing. The
people, the characters, the personalities, the way it interacts
with the bureaucracy."
Taylor, who looks a bit
like former Maple Leafs' coach Pat Burns, has been a gadfly to
the military establishment for years. His Ottawa office is
decorated with military prints and clippings, trophies of his
magazine's exuberant war with the powers that be at National
Defence Headquarters. Founded as an in-flight magazine for
military charter aircraft, Esprit de Corps has since settled into
a role as an abrasive defender of the ordinary soldier against
what it sees as corrupt and careerist leaders.
It is these ordinary soldiers who supply the magazine
with an unceasing flow of brown envelopes, faxes and furtive
telephone calls. In his Ottawa office, Taylor gestures at four
linear feet of documents on a bookshelf: "Almost every one of
those is an unreported example of corruption which we can't get
to."
There is an argument about the coverage
of the Somalia inquiry that keeps coming back to me. It goes like
this: all of the daily revelations about the misconduct of the
Airborne are an indictment of the media's earlier relative
apathy. Why did we hear after the Airborne left for East Africa
that there were severe problems in the regiment on the verge of
its deployment-that members were eating their own excrement and
blowing up cars and that the brigade commander fired the unit's
commanding officer? Why didn't we hear about these things when
they happened, so that questions could have been raised publicly
about the regiment's suitability for its mission?
To this charge, I think the media has to plead guilty.
After all, the public, which pays for the armed forces and in
whose name they operate, deserves strong and aggressive military
journalism-strong enough to tell us about the problems in the
Airborne before they went to Somalia, and strong enough to make
sure that a family knew the truth immediately about how a son and
husband died.
"We still don't know who killed
our son," says Peter Gunther. "I'm sure somebody knows. What
really upsets me and my wife is: We had a Somali incident; there
was a Somali killed. And you notice all the hoopla that is going
on about that. The investigations, the boards of inquiry, the
courts-martial, because a Somali was killed by a Canadian. My son
was killed by someone, and that's it. That's all they did. Too
bad, he's dead. There was no effort to find out who did this, and
to bring that person to justice. That's what upsets us the most.
Somalia is a war zone, Yugoslavia is a war zone. Big deal. You
could still find out who the hell did this. There was no outcry
here in Canada, because it was never stated that this was a
murder, and it was a murder; the vehicle was directly
attacked."