Traveling the Rugged Path of Peace

Upon reporting for duty at the United Nations headquarters in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, I was immediately overwhelmed by the staggering amount of information I was required to absorb. As deputy commissioner of the United Nations International Police Task Force, I faced a millennium of complicated Balkan history, war upon war, culminating in the great war of 1992 through 1995 that left 250,000 people dead and a million more still outside their homes; a vast disconnected non-system of religious, ethnic and cultural nuances of infinite complexity; a dozen local police forces, each with unique characteristics, serving under leaders with wildly differing core values and perspectives. Further, there was the challenge of leadership in a working environment itself complicated: I was a U.S. State Department contract employee, loaned to the United Nations to act as second in command of a police task force with 2,000 officers from 42 nations wearing different uniforms, and with different standards, backgrounds, ideas and training.

In the middle of this dazzling array, a cheery voice spoke to me in the hallway of the U.N. headquarters. It was Alex Ivanko, public information officer for the U.N. Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “Mark,” he said, “when you will have been here a week, you will write a book. When you will have been here a month, you will write an article. When you will have been here a year, you won’t write anything.”

Until now, I have resisted the urge to write. But back with my family, friends and colleagues, at the close of the one-year mission, an unprecedented cheerfulness wells within me and freshly formed thoughts of peace and goodwill run wild. And so, against Ivanko’s predictions, here are some reflections, some moments, some observations and some conclusions from a peacekeeping or peacemaking perspective.

*

I have discovered, in introspective moments, that much of my perspective springs from my childhood years spent on a Mennonite mission station in the heart of the then-Belgian Congo. I was raised in a family given to peaceful, loving service to humankind in education, health, orphan care and, of course, spiritual needs. These were years before revolutionary war racked the country and our mission station, with its church, school, orphanage and clinic was sacked.

Across the years I have followed the oppression of the strongman who feasted on his own flock, and the most recent turbulence, which creates from Zaire the new Democratic Republic of the Congo.

There in Africa began within me the continuing passion for things of peace and the condition of humankind in the growing global turbulence. Across three decades of service in the Los Angeles Police Department, this passion has remained strong. It also led me to the founding of the World Children’s Transplant Fund. Then, almost organically, the calls began to come my way.

* As the planning for restoration of democratic rule in Haiti began, it became obvious that the crux of peaceful life at the Haitian neighborhood level was capable, professional and service-oriented policing. The rule of law had been subrogated. The strongman government with its dreaded Forces Armee D’Haiti, or the FAHD as it was called, dominated the life of Haitian people. When the call came from Washington, inviting me to participate in the design of the new Police Nacionale D’Haiti, I leaped at the opportunity. And now, as 1998 ends, there is in fact a young police force in Haiti, certainly not a perfect one, but the leadership is moving it forward in incremental improvements.

* In 1994, to my dismay, while African neighbors began the systematic destruction of their neighbors because of their tribal connection, I searched news reports for the role of law enforcement in the killing. I learned that there was deep complicity. When invited to go to Rwanda and to explore the possibility of a U.S. Justice Department training program for the local police, again I leaped at the chance and found myself in Kigali 40 years after departure from the region of my youth.

* In September 1997, my phone rang again from Washington. There had been a helicopter crash in Bosnia killing 12 internationals, including a highly regarded former FBI agent named David Kriskovich, who had been the deputy commissioner of the United Nations’ International Police Task Force. Would I be willing to take his place and serve in Bosnia for a year? After so many years stabilized and seemingly institutionalized in the LAPD, surprisingly, at least to me, it took me but a few days to agree, boosted in large measure by the unqualified encouragement and support of my wife, Diane, and family. They knew that this meant I was to leave home and take up residence in Sarajevo for a year.

I was in a country the size of Tennessee, at the scene of a hate crime that took the lives of 250,000 people in this decade, where 1 million remain homeless, where 1 million land mines remain in the ground, taking the lives of four or five people every week, and where the tensions between Serbs, Croats and Muslims remain just under the surface. The empty chair at so many dinner tables reminds people daily of the need to “always remember.”

My job was to provide leadership to the task force effort to monitor the local police forces, to train, develop and equip them and--the big challenge--to integrate them according to agreements based on prewar census figures taken from neighborhoods before the “ethnic cleansing” began. This latter objective turned out to be the most difficult because it flew in the face of every wartime ethnic-related objective, and yet it was deemed critical in establishing police forces open to the returns of refugees to their original homes. Mono-ethnic police forces simply perpetuated the mono-ethnic neighborhood result of the war. The unarmed task force, with its more than 2,000 police officers, including an American contingent of 200, seemed rather ill-equipped to deliver on this objective. And yet I have to say that in its own style, with its own odd character, the task force moved forward, perhaps not in major stages but with incremental, measurable progress. This incremental progress gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

I recall a moment coming back to Sarajevo from Banja Luka, a city in the north of the country. Aboard an American Blackhawk helicopter, flying low over snow-covered terrain with a clear sky and a full moon, I thought to myself, I am glad I am here, at this time and at this place and doing just this work. It made me happy.

Those moments came from time to time and made up for the constant battle against the seething hatred that remained among so many. Local police would often focus on the ethnicity of the occupants of cars rather than on the crime problems they were ostensibly trying to resolve. This they would do based on the car’s license plate, which clearly denoted the ethnicity of the occupant. Thus, I watched with great pleasure the highly resisted arrival of common license plates that gave no indication of ethnicity or the residence of the occupant. This systemic move allowed for a great shift in police operations and, based on traffic counts at key locations, improved the “freedom of movement.”

*

Upon my return home, and with my household goods still “out there” somewhere, I got another call from Washington. This one came from the Justice Department, asking if I were interested in being nominated to a group emerging out of the Israeli Palestinian Peace Memorandum signed recently at Wye Plantation in Maryland. The first meeting was the following week in Jerusalem. I sat at the head of a table with Palestinians on one side, Israelis on the other, leading a discussion of the mission statement of our committee and the agenda as we sought new ways to reduce old tensions that inflame, incite and provoke.

*

Across these experiences I have made some conclusions. First, that the police are at the intersection of durable peace or continued antipathy in every international hot spot as well as right here in Los Angeles.

Next, the rule of law must prevail, and it must be uniformly applied, sometimes in direct opposition to the intentions of self-serving, corrupt and misguided politicians.

Third, leaders are desperately needed to move the critical postwar or local issues forward in any society. Without them the inertia, or worse, the wrong direction, will be taken in the great vacuum that somehow plagues societies at the times of their greatest needs.

Fourth, things have to get a little bit dusty or messy to produce a more orderly and meaningful result. The first proverb I learned in Bosnia was this: “Samo se za dobrim konjiem, prajina dize,” which means it is a good horse that kicks up a lot of dust.

Finally, I have found--and it rings loudly in my ears at the holidays, when so many celebrate peace and goodwill among men--that peace is truly fragile.

Peace has a new character in a world so much more closely intertwined and at the same time so devoid of the old superpower connectedness that held things together, albeit in a distorted and perverse manner. Peace in the global neighborhood is worth fighting for. As a young LAPD rookie, I took the oath of office and pledged to support the law. I prepared himself for the possibility of dying for the cause of peace in the neighborhood. As a peace officer, I continue to believe this; peace must be worth dying for or there can be no living.

Mark Kroeker is a former deputy chief of the Los Angeles Police Department. His home is in Newhall.