by Ray Dick

Governor General Adrienne Clarkson and Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Day unveil a Commander-in-Chief Unit Commendation presented to the PPCLI in Winnipeg.

The Canadian soldiers who were attacked while trying to enforce a United Nations ceasefire in the former Yugoslavia nearly a decade ago and fought back valiantly against superior forces have finally been recognized for their valour.

The largely unknown firefight was the largest for Canadian troops since the war in Korea.

At a special ceremony in Winnipeg Dec. 1, Governor General Adrienne Clarkson presented members of the 2nd Battalion of Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry with the Commander-in-Chief Unit Commendation for their actions in 1993 when they were attacked near a Serb enclave in an area of Croatia known as the Medak Pocket.

As the Canadians entered a battle zone where Croat forces were advancing on Serb paramilitaries, they were met by machine-gun fire, grenades and mortar shells. After taking shelter in barns, houses and behind other cover, the Canadians returned the fire. The battle left 27 Croat forces killed or wounded. Four Canadians were lightly wounded by shrapnel.

The Governor General said the Medak battle was “a military deed of a rare, high standard” in hazardous circumstances.

“In those 15 hours on Sept. 15 you represented the concerns and the credibility of the United Nations, putting yourself in harm’s way, exposing yourselves to deliberate, sustained machine-gun fire from Croat forces, to which you rightfully and skilfully replied,” she told the troops at the ceremony. Although the Canadians finally secured a ceasefire, the killing of Serb villagers continued until the Croats pulled back from the area.

“Between the time of that negotiation and the withdrawal of Croat forces the next day, your battalion watched helplessly as the Croats engaged in a last frenzy of ethnic cleansing,” she said.

Clarkson told the troops that few Canadians know what they did in 1993. “Your actions were nothing less than heroic, and yet your country didn’t recognize it at the time.”

In fact, when the soldiers were rotated home about four weeks later there was no hero’s welcome from Canadians who were then focused on revelations that Canadian peacekeepers had tortured and killed a teenager in Somalia. The government of Kim Campbell was facing a federal election and didn’t want the increasing dangers Canadian troops were facing in the Balkans raised as an issue. It wasn’t until five years after the event that the man who commanded the PPCLI group told members of Parliament about the horrific scene that followed the battle. Lieutenant-Colonel James Calvin said Serbs were found murdered, their houses and livestock were burned and their wells were poisoned.

The fierce battle took place more than a year after Canadian peacekeepers had arrived in the former Yugoslavia with the task of disarming and separating the various warring factions amid vicious fighting and appalling acts of ethnic cleansing. A particularly volatile area was a mountainous region of Croatia called Vojna Krajina, home to an isolated pocket of some 500,000 Serbs who had begun to drive out the Croats. In response, Croatian commander Rahim Ademi launched an attack to capture an area of Serb-controlled territory in Krajina called the Medak Pocket. And the UN, fearing that 400 Serbs living in four unprotected villages in the area were at risk of being slaughtered by Croatian troops, ordered the Canadian soldiers into the area.

The Canadians observed for several days as the 2,500 Croat troops with tanks, rocket launchers and artillery attacked the Medak Pocket. The Serbs fought back, and after they had launched rockets into the Croatian capital of Zagreb the Croats accepted a UN ceasefire. Colonel Calvin, now retired, ordered his troops to occupy the Croat positions and his men began taking fire from the Croats, almost immediately and for the next 15 hours. When the Croats had suffered 27 casualties in the exchange of fire and realized the Canadians would not back down, Ademi offered a truce and said the Croats would pull out at noon the next day.

The Croatian commander, however, seemed determined to terrorize the Serb civilians living in the area before he left, and by 10 a.m. the next morning smoke covered all four towns in the Medak Pocket. When the noon deadline passed, the Canadians moved in and witnessed scenes that still haunt many of them as the Croats tried to kill or destroy everything in their wake. “They could see what was happening from their foxholes,” Calvin told Maclean’s Magazine in 2002. “My soldiers knew their role was to protect the weak and the innocent,” he said, “and they were absolutely incensed.” Every building in their path had been demolished and many were still smouldering. Corpses lay by the side of the road, some badly mutilated and some burned beyond recognition.

The Canadians documented everything they saw, and Calvin’s subsequent report helped convince the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to indict Ademi on charges of crimes against humanity. “Ademi should be called to account,” Calvin said. “No soldier should be able to get away with that.”

The Commander-in-Chief Unit Commendation was created in 2002. Its first recipients were both the PPCLI and the 1st Battalion of Royal 22nd Regiment for its work in securing the airport at Sarajevo in 1992.