The Balkans – when the world came to the Armed Forces (again)

In September 1997, I attended the setup period at Onsrud camp before deployment to Bosnia. Only that sentence contains two concepts that I had no experience with until then.

The Balkan engagement was in many ways a paradigm shift for the Norwegian Armed Forces. At the same time, it should be added that it should not have done this. After all, we had represented the UN in the Middle East since 1978. But during the Cold War, only one place of service was relevant, and that was Northern Norway. Abroad was a distraction.

Thus arose the paradoxical situation that INTOPS was not given significant occupational military value. Recruitment, deployment and deployment to Lebanon took place almost in a parallel circuit to the “ordinary Armed Forces”.

The lack of settlement for INTOPS could create bitterness among those who returned from the Middle East. When I was an aspirant before the command school, we had two recently returned Lebanon veterans in the squad. It didn’t give them any free points. I don’t remember them ever being asked to share their experiences.

The implosion of the Soviet Union

The approach to the foreign service was to slowly change during the Armed Forces’ involvement in the Balkans. Because suddenly the Cold War ended. The old enemy – the Soviet Union – imploded and was left in ruins. This was the beginning of a disarmament that has been reversed only very recently.

There is war in Europe today. But there was another one that shocked us in the early 90s. Yugoslavia began to disintegrate almost immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the summer of 1991, the dike burst, and one sub-republic after another declared independence.

By chance, I was to be on the very last train out of Yugoslavia before the borders closed, in the summer of 1991. In Zagreb, Croatian power patriotism was all over the city. In Belgrade, our next stop, we were berated by an angry Serb who asked what on earth we were doing there, if we didn’t understand what was happening.

There were many who did not understand what was going on. But Norway had a professor with outstanding knowledge – Professor Svein Mønnesland. He was the major professional authority on Yugoslavia.

He was in all the media. And it was good, because we were to learn about ethnic minorities, even this term had disappeared from everyday speech in post-war Europe. Serbs, Croats, Bosniaks, Albanians, Montenegrins, Macedonians and even more. It was incredibly confusing, all of it.

The world right in front of you

But back to the Armed Forces. In the early 1990s, the Armed Forces were still designed for an invasion defence. It didn’t go well with the new everyday life. We no longer had an enemy. Defense was to be reduced, and a “foreseeing foreign policy leadership” would warn if times were about to change.

It was to be an exception to the reduced status of the Armed Forces. International service. Through effort outside, we had to prove that we had value at home as well. And there would be many who traveled out in the following years.

We started in 1992 with logistics departments and transport control. It wasn’t as careful as it might sound. The first period was characterized by quite a lot of unpredictability and drama. Norwegian soldiers who drove criss-crossing a country still in civil war, and who made breakneck transport stages down Mount Igman at night to avoid being attacked by artillery, to reach a starving Sarajevo with emergency supplies.

Without night vision, without armor, without anything. Snipers, drunk militiamen setting up checkpoints, threats with weapons, attacks on civilians, destroyed cities, ethnic cleansing and mass graves. Everyone had heard of “Maybe-airlines” into Sarajevo, an air connection that went if the artillery density allowed it.

All this was new to us, this was nothing we had learned in our initial service, at the officer’s school or at the war school. It was simply a shock. We got the world right in the face, and it didn’t look like anything we had expected.

Strong impressions

It didn’t always go completely painless. In one contingent, as few as one in twenty could be constantly on duty. The rest were recruited directly from civil society. Few of them knew each other from before, and joint training was virtually non-existent. A lot of creativity and common sense came into play in situations where there was not always an SOP. At the same time, there were several symptoms that the departments were quickly put together.

Some of the soldiers may not have been in the Armed Forces for decades. Let us content ourselves with stating that there was a bit of everything that happened. Small units that lived decentralized under miserable conditions, with minimal supervision, lack of operating procedures, easy access to cheap alcohol and little mental processing before, during and after.

Stalls selling pirated CDs appeared outside every military camp. Brothels sprung up in many places. The local mafia had good days. We knew from old military history that this followed wars. But we were not prepared for these forces to be unleashed in our own time as well. We had not experienced this in Europe for fifty years.

Norwegian soldiers who arrived in Bosnia for the first time were struck by the sights, and also the smells. Entire villages and towns were burned down and destroyed. There were mines absolutely everywhere, there was talk of five million. We never walked on grass or soft surfaces. It took me several years to stop thinking that I was actually thinking about it when I walked on grass. Others may never have stopped to think about it.

A lot of learning

Like a river that is the same, but also not the same, each contingent had its own stamp. There were 27 different Balkan operations. And it wasn’t just the conventional Armed Forces that had Bosnia as a training laboratory, the Intelligence Service and the Special Command also gained valuable experience there.

The Balkans made the Armed Forces better prepared for the operations that followed, not least Afghanistan. We learned that quick in – quick out is not good for either the personnel or the mission.

The time in the Balkans may seem a long time ago, now. Was it a dream, with donkey-drawn carts, farmers brewing plum brandy, the eternal smell of wildfires, former Warsaw Pact soldiers we now patrolled with, blown-up houses, waving children, the mud we could never wash our boots off, the darkness, the was so dark in a country without a functioning electricity grid and without street lights, and the many, many, meetings with those who lived there?

Sometimes it can feel like this.