In 1989 I had put in an application to leave the army, but a colleague in the Ministry of Defence passed me the word that redundancy would soon be offered to officers in the British Forces. At the same time I was offered a position in the team being sent to Namibia to train their new army in preparation for the country’s independence. This job would last for a year and I knew that command of the Army Mountain Training Centre (AMTC) in Germany would become available at about that time. I agreed to go to Namibia on condition that I would then get command of AMTC – this was readily agreed to. I also knew that redundancy would be available in 1992 when my time at AMTC was due to come to an end, and for the first time in my army career I had a good idea what I would be doing for the next three years.
My year in Namibia was wonderful. Whilst I was based in the capital Windhoek, my particular job meant that I spent a great deal of time roaming throughout this amazing land. The flight out from London was full of junior diplomats who were going out to set up their new embassies prior to independence. It was very much a party atmosphere on the plane as we all walked around the cabin with drinks, chatting excitedly about being there as the world’s newest independent country was born. I started talking to two gentlemen, one of whom asked me what I was going to be doing in Namibia, and I explained that I was part of the British Army Training Team, to which he replied that he had heard about us. I then asked him what he was going to be doing to which he replied, ‘I am the new prime minister.’ In the weeks ahead I would learn to recognise Hage Geingob who was destined to be Namibia’s prime minister from 1990 to 2002. Needless to say, after our meeting on the aircraft, I didn’t meet him again.
We did, however, get to attend the independence ceremony. It was surreal sitting there in front of Archbishop Desmond Tutu with Yasser Arafat and Colonel Gaddafi only a few feet away. But the star of the show was Nelson Mandela, who had only been released from prison a month before. The ceremony ended in true African style when South African president de Klerk abruptly ended his speech because, in his words, it was past midnight and Namibia had been independent for five minutes, but the South African flag was still flying instead of the new flag of the new nation.
For anyone who likes a wild landscape Namibia has it all and I could not have been happier. Even during my weekends off I would drive into the desert, or through the numerous game reserves, marvelling at what this country had to offer. One of my favourite spots was Sossusvlei on the edge of the Namib Desert with its towering sand dunes reaching over 300 metres in height. I would regularly drive there after work on a Friday night to camp on the edge of the desert before reaching the dunes in time for sunrise.
Namibia had been a German colony until the First World War and even in the late twentieth century there were lots of reminders of this legacy. In particular, the very orderly way of life compared with other African countries, including several first class restaurants, which offered a very pleasant evening out when I wasn’t travelling. One of the odd results of sanctions against South Africa was that the country could not export much of its wine and the best of this wine was available at restaurants in Windhoek at a fraction of the price it would reach in later years.
Namibia was also a huge and sparsely populated country, twice the size of France and, with a population of only a little over one million in 1990, most of the country was isolated and uninhabited. There were stories that some Nazis had escaped to Namibia (or South-West Africa as it was at the time) at the end of the Second World War and bizarrely in the coastal town of Swakopmund members of the white population still celebrated Hitler’s birthday during my time in the country.
I could have happily stayed in the country for a lot longer than a year, but life moves on, and from the wilds of Africa I moved to command the AMTC which was based in the Harz mountains in the north of Germany. At the end of the Second World War the Americans occupied the south of Germany with its excellent skiing and mountaineering and the British got the industrial north of the country with its limited scope for adventure. We did get some regular snowfall in the Harz which enabled the centre to offer cross-country skiing and, less frequently, downhill skiing courses in winter, as well as rock-climbing and canoeing courses all year round. The remainder of the courses were held in Bavaria, Austria and France, and I spent a great deal of time travelling down to the Alps and back.
Following on from the super time I had in Namibia, my two years in command of AMTC, where I spent the majority of my time skiing and mountaineering, were a perfect end to my twenty-four years in the army. And, in addition, the payment I received when I was made redundant was significantly more than I would have got had my resignation been accepted two years previously.
After leaving the army in 1992 I initially went to work in Yugoslavia for the British Foreign Office as part of the European Community Monitor Mission, whose mandate was to monitor borders, inter-ethnic relations, refugee traffic and political and security developments. We operated throughout the war-torn former states that had previously made up Yugoslavia and, in order to identify us as being neutral, we wore an all-white uniform, which made us look like cricket players in the middle of a war zone.
It was a fascinating, but also on occasions a sad job. One of my first tasks was to find out what happened to hundreds of citizens of Vukovar who had disappeared at the end of an eighty-seven-day siege the previous year. It seems unbelievable that almost 300 people could disappear in Europe at the end of the twentieth century, but that is what happened. It would be over ten years before members of the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serb paramilitaries responsible for what became known as the Vukovar massacre were brought to trial.
The pace of work as a monitor could on occasions be slow, but it was never boring. On one occasion I went, accompanied by a Russian army colonel who was working with the UN, to witness a prisoner exchange between the Croatian and Serbian forces. As we crossed ‘no man’s land’, we were suddenly surrounded by Serbian special forces who had been hiding in the undergrowth. I was held at gunpoint with an AK47 pointing at my head. The EU were seen to be siding with Croatia and I was being berated by a very angry and menacing Serb special forces commander. Fortunately, after a tense couple of minutes, the Russian colonel came to my rescue, but I remain convinced that if he hadn’t been there I would in all likelihood have been shot, which would have made a real mess of my white uniform.
It wasn’t all gloom. Towards the end of my one year in the role, we thought that Croatia might cross Hungarian territory to attack Serbia and I was sent to the very pleasant Hungarian border town of Szeged to monitor the situation. For some two months I toured southern Hungary as well as exploring Budapest – if I had to work in a war zone, this was a very pleasant way to do it.
After finishing with the monitor mission I worked as logistics co-ordinator for the European Humanitarian Office, based in Belgrade, during which time I was responsible for thousands of displaced persons through-out Serbia.
Even during the war I found time to visit the mountains, but walks were more often limited by minefields than they were by bad weather.