That Wasn’t the Plan. Reg Sherren
It’s like the Bangladesh of Canada.”
Sterling stood bolt upright, reached across me, and grabbed this fellow by the collar. He also said a few choice words I will not repeat here before I managed to get him off the guy. People were turning to see what the fuss was about. Our French friend scurried away. We decided to scurry away too.
The next morning, I was down in the lobby by six o’clock. Sterling was already there, stomping around. “That little so-and-so,” he said. “He put me right off my cornflakes. I just wanted to see if I could spot him.” Oh, the fun we were having.
In the end they pretended there was a deal, when really there wasn’t, and everyone defaulted to their respective legislatures for a final vote. Turned out it wasn’t necessary. Before Newfoundland cast even one vote, former chief and member of the Manitoba legislature Elijah Harper rose in his place and torpedoed the good ship Meech Lake on behalf of an Aboriginal community that felt completely left out of the process. His explanation?
Well, I was opposed to the Meech Lake Accord because we weren’t included in the Constitution. We were to recognize Quebec as a distinct society, whereas we as Aboriginal people were completely left out. We were the First Peoples here—First Nations of Canada—we were the ones that made treaties with the settlers that came from Europe. These settler people and their governments didn’t recognize us as a Nation, as a government, and that is why we opposed the Meech Lake Accord.
Chapter 5 Off to War
During the summer of 1990, our lives changed in the best of ways. In August our son Mitchell was born. I have often said I never really knew why I was on the planet until I became a father. Then it all made sense. It was a proud moment.
But other things were happening too, dark things on the world stage, and they would soon land much closer to home than I had ever imagined. Over in the powder keg known as the Middle East, Iraq, under the leadership of Saddam Hussein, had invaded nearby Kuwait. Now it looked very much like US president George Bush Sr. wanted to do something about it. Throughout the summer there was a lot of sabre rattling, but little public support for an American intervention.
Then a fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl, who was given the name Nayirah to protect her identity, appeared before the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in Washington. With tears in her eyes, she spoke about seeing little babies being ripped from their incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals by Iraqi soldiers who apparently then left them on the cold floor to die.
The president himself told the story over and over. By late September the public sentiment was now overwhelmingly in favour of military intervention to pull the Iraqis out of Kuwait.
Operation Desert Storm was born, a UN-sanctioned combat operation undertaken by a coalition of thirty-five countries led by the United States. Canadian forces would be part of this plan, with their component code-named Operation Friction and based in Bahrain. Initially three warships would be used to help form a blockade in the Persian Gulf and around Kuwait as coalition forces ramped up to attack.
Through research, I learned some interesting facts. Newfoundland’s population represented less than 2 per cent of the population of Canada, yet Newfoundlanders made up over 30 per cent of the forces being sent to the Gulf. The province had a strong Sea Cadet program and going on to serve in the Navy was a career choice for many young Newfoundland men and women. To me, the fact that they were now about to get tangled up in this drama unfolding on the world stage—that was a story.
Don’t forget, until then our armed forces had primarily been involved in peacekeeping missions. Many of those had been dangerous, but this was something else altogether. I pushed hard with our newsroom leaders, arguing that we/I should go and show those at home what that fellow from Carbonear or that young woman from Mount Pearl, now proud members of the Navy, had gotten themselves into.
I worked for weeks to get the Canadian military on side, and spent days—countless hours using a fax machine (my only available form of reliable international communication)—trying to persuade the government of Bahrain to let me in. The Canadian Navy, along with Americans and some Brits, would be based in Manama, the capital. That was the place to be.
Finally, I was able to secure permission to videotape in their country. I’m still not sure how exactly it happened, but one day the fax arrived, and the last obstacle had been removed. Well, almost the last obstacle. I still had to persuade my employers. I argued that this was a huge shift in the way our military operated—these were Newfoundlanders, clearly in harm’s way. I promised that I would also do stories for other regions and produce a half-hour TV show, and all the material would be sent out through the syndicated news service. This would help pay for the trip.
Back in 1990, the CBC regions still had a great deal of autonomy and more control over their budgets. You could negotiate and find little pockets of money from other regions or programs to help make a project more viable. The bosses went for it. To be fair, the leadership in St. John’s didn’t take much convincing. They were always willing to find their own path to a story involving Newfoundlanders. I had just managed to talk myself into going to war, with a three-month-old son at home. My wife was not impressed.
But our team would travel there before the intervention was scheduled to begin, arriving in late October and staying for two weeks. We would have no way to feed tape back to Canada; instead, we would have to carry it back ourselves (feeding it by satellite was much too expensive, even if you could secure an uplink). We had only the fax machine for communication. There were phones, but you could rarely get them to work, certainly not for international calls, and if you could, the cost was astronomical.
The fax machine, for those who don’t know or remember, gave you the ability to send a printed document through the phone system. You fed it into the machine, and on the other end the fax machine spat it out. It worked most of the time. We would make do.
Cameraman Mark Thompson and I would make the trip. With our many cases of gear we flew to Toronto, then on to London. The next day, we jumped on a British Airways jet that would take us down the Suez Canal, across Saudi Arabia and into Bahrain. The flight was twelve or thirteen hours, and the plane was practically empty, with fewer than a dozen passengers including us. At that point the Middle East was hardly a popular destination. Planes flew in to take people out, not the other way around.
The State of Bahrain was a very rich country. It also had a reputation of being somewhat lax in security, and we soon learned it was a reputation the country was trying to dispel. When we landed, there were soldiers everywhere with automatic weapons—and no sense of humour.
They went through everything in our big camera-gear cases. They went through everything in our luggage. They even squeezed some of my toothpaste out of the tube. It went on for hours. In the end they removed all our camera gear, left us our luggage and sent us on our way to our hotel, the Ramada Inn downtown.
As I walked out the front doors of the airport, I was hit by a wall of heat. Daytime highs were 40° to 45°C and the humidity was 100 per cent. I had never experienced heat like this; it took my breath away. The hotel had a cool-water pool. It was so hot outside they literally had to cool down the pool water. Here we were, in the Persian Gulf, as the coalition prepared for war. Without a camera.
It did show up the next day, but we were not allowed to shoot anything without our government escort. One day passed, then another. I was getting nervous. This was a big assignment, and so far I had zilch.
But I was learning a bit more about the country. The Bahraini currency was the most powerful I had ever seen. One Bahraini dinar was worth well over US$3. The economy was based on offshore banking and finance with some tourism, in better times, mixed in. For many years the British had control in the region, but in 1971 Bahrain had declared its independence.
That former British influence had an upside. Besides the roundabouts and even a fish-and-chip shop, you could buy beer there. It was the only one of the Arab Emirates that imported beer, if you could afford it. One beer, which you could find only in the hotel lounge or in the mini fridge in your room, was about $15 Canadian. That was one expensive frosty one.
The other