bout de papier, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2004) — Winter/Spring 2004 // Hiver/Printemps 2004, pp. 9–13

Roames Bateman, papie tenant oven borothat and formerly a member of the Canadian foreign service, has written a sequel to his extraordinary memoir Out of Muskoka. As with his earlier volume, Bartleman’s recollections of his peripatetic diplomatic career, with interludes in mysterious but unexotic Ottawa, are characterized by acute observation, empathy and wit, as well as an engaging literary style. Some of those mentioned in the book may not share this positive assessment, notably Eugene Whelan, whose peculiar encounter with our man in Havana, as well as Cuba’s president, has already been highlighted in newspapers.

Undoubtedly some will examine On Six Continents with reference works at hand to identify anonymous others.

However, the real attraction of this memoir is the author’s willingness to confront not only the occasional (or frequent) absurdities of foreign service life but also his own strengths and weaknesses when dealing with these challenges. The result is a remarkable account, sustained by analytical and anecdotal skill, that demonstrates how effective diplomacy and survival in bureaucracy both require ample doses of patience and adaptability as well as sufficient reserves of humour (and support from family and friends) to cope with situations for which no prior education or training can prepare either a new recruit or a veteran representative. The extracts below, which are reprinted with the kind permission of the publisher, deal with a few of the diverse difficulties confronted by James Bartleman, in Ottawa and abroad.

Extracts from: On Six Continents: A Life in Canada’s Foreign Service 1966-2002 by James Bartleman. Published by McClelland & Stewart Ltd., the Canadian Publishers. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Prologue

I first saw Dhaka on a sweltering afternoon in June 1972. The two-hour flight from Bangkok over Burma and the Bay of Bengal gave me time to sit back in air-conditioned comfort and feel that everything was going my way. Here I was, from the wrong side of the tracks in small-town Ontario, setting out at the age of thirty-two to open up the first Canadian diplomatic mission in Bangladesh. Life was good. Around me elegant flight attendants served exotic foods and supplied ice-cold beer in the luxury of Thai International business class.

Approaching landfall, the aircraft descended through black monsoon clouds until we could see the lush green delta of the Meghna, Ganges, and Bramaputra Rivers. From that far up, there were no signs of the recent catastrophes that had hit the new country of Bangladesh: the cyclone of 1970 that killed half a million people; the just-ended civil war against West Pakistan in which hundreds of thousands died; the massive smallpox epidemic that was still ravaging the population.

The landing at Dhaka International Airport was rough – the tarmac was still pockmarked with crudely repaired craters left over from the heavy bombing by the Indian air force the previous December. Workers rolled the airport’s only functioning set of stairs up to the aircraft door and the petite attendant smiled as she opened the door to … another world. A stench of humid, sweet-and-sour air poured in, smothering the sterile air-conditioned comfort of the cabin. A mob of half-clad beggars waited, clamouring piteously for baksheesh, or charity, as I descended the rickety staircase. Some with hands but no feet hobbled on their knees, grabbing at my clothes. Others, with feet but no hands, stuck damp stumps of their festering limbs in my face. Their eyes were wild and their skin pitted with smallpox scars. Within seconds I was drenched in sweat.

There was no protocol officer to greet me, even though I was Canada’s new acting high commissioner. In fact there were no officials of any sort present to keep order as I fought my way through packs of mendicants to the immigration counter and then to the baggage reception area. Once again I was besieged, this time by porters fighting among themselves to carry my one bag. I grabbed it myself and joined a half-dozen other expatriates competing for transport into the city. A solitary taxi waited at the exit. Watching all those old American war movies then paid off. Like Milo Minderbinder of Catch-22 in wartime Italy, I pulled out a carton of American cigarettes and held it aloft as our safari-suited band of brothers bore down on the driver. I was the chosen one. The driver flashed me a smile, opened the back door, and, leaving the others behind, drove me to the only modern hotel in the city, the Intercontinental.

Afterwards, curious to learn more about this city that was now my new home, I made my way, fascinated and appalled, through the crowds that choked the roads and sidewalks day and night in Bangladesh’s capital. The streets were filled with bicycle rickshaws decorated with hand-painted scenes from the civil war, pushcarts manned by sweating labourers, buses with more passengers on the roof than inside, wandering cattle, and wagons and stagecoaches drawn by skeletal horses. Overhead, tangles of wire cluttered the telephone poles and the sky was black with crows and, yes, vultures. Cloying smoke from the burning dried cow dung used for cooking hung in the air, mixing with the acrid smell of black exhaust fumes spewing from ill-maintained bus, truck, and car motors and the odour of tens of thousands of unwashed bodies.

Women modestly enveloped from head to foot in burkas, black garments with openings for the eyes and nose, and men dressed in hotis, a type of skirt, thronged the thoroughfares. Mentally disabled people, often naked and filthy, competed with stray dogs foraging for food among the garbage heaps. In the absence of sanitary facilities, men and women, their mouths crimson from the juice of betel nuts, squatted in the gutters with as much dignity as they could muster. Others exposed the corpses of their loved ones on the sidewalks, begging for money to accord them a decent burial. In this, my initial encounter with South Asia, the colour, vibrancy, and authenticity of local life that I was later to discover were overwhelmed by poverty and human misery.

Beggars surrounded me just as they had at the airport. About five hundred metres from the hotel, I gave a small coin to a half-blind man crawling along on the sidewalk. Another, more robust, individual snatched it from him and a crowd sprang up clamouring for more. I turned and headed back to the hotel with the wretched of the earth following behind, howling. The wronged recipient of my bounty wobbled after me, crab-like, wailing that he had been robbed and appealing for another handout. I did not want to run – after all, I was Canada’s acting high commissioner.

JAMES BARTLEMAN

I walked faster. Somehow the beggar kept up. The crowd followed, hoping I would weaken and offer another coin that they could steal. I went faster but the half-blind beggar kept coming. The crowd stopped at the hotel property line but the poor unfortunate continued through. The uniformed doorkeeper opened the heavy glass door to let me in and slammed it in his face. Literally. I looked back his face and body were squashed against the glass, his tongue hung from his open mouth, and his protruding eyes met mine. I went up to my comfortable room but did not sleep well that night, and not for many more to come. I had not counted on this when I joined Canada’s foreign service.

Foreign Affairs in 1966

Despite my expectations, I found that the glory days of Foreign Affairs, now celebrated by nostalgic editorial writers and academics, were over by the time I reported for work. Certainly I had detected no superhuman individuals wandering the halls of the East Block, the Langevin Block, or the five or six other buildings in downtown Ottawa that housed Canada’s foreign-service elite until Foreign Affairs moved into its new home, the Pearson Building, in 1973. The three officers most cited for putting Canada on the post-war map, Hume Wrong, Lester Pearson, and Norman Robertson, were gone. Wrong had been dead for more than a decade. Lester Pearson was still around: he was our prime minister, but seemed to be more respected abroad than in Canada, where his foreign-policy triumphs were a decade old. Norman Robertson was still alive but deathly ill; I would occasionally see him in the Centre Block of Parliament as he carried out special advisory duties for his good friend and erstwhile rival, the prime minister.

U Cravo Norte was like a Wild West town in a Hollywood movie. There was no electricity and the one road was unpaved. Horses were tethered to hitching posts before the numerous cantinas, or bars, from which drifted raucous Colombian cowboy music. Not anxious to spend the night in one of the cutthroat hotels, Brian [Moser] and I called on two missionaries, who agreed to provide accommodation for a small fee and to rent us their motorized canoe for the final leg of our journey.

Venturing out in the evening for some local colour and to escape the kind-hearted but boring missionaries, we strolled into what seemed to be the most respectable cantina, where we struck up a conversation with several of the locals. The patrons, however, were heavily armed and suspicious, not welcoming. Two tough characters identified themselves as members of the Colombian secret police and demanded to know what we were doing in Cravo Norte. They thought we might be Cuban agents sent by Havana to foment insurrection. Producing my diplomatic passport, I declared in a self-important way that I was third secretary of the Canadian embassy in Bogotá on an official mission. The secret police were unimpressed, perhaps wondering what official business I was trying to conduct in the cantina. The meaner-looking of the two, unshaven and with a scar running diagonally across his face, told me that anyone could falsify a passport. He was, he said, the law in Cravo Norte and did not take orders from anyone in Bogotá. We beat an undignified retreat back to the house of the missionaries.

Since Canada was one of the first to establish a diplomatic mission in Bangladesh, we had first pick of available houses and quickly rented seven for the Canadian staff. Unfortunately, we had no furniture. Headquarters tried to be helpful by sending the very best furniture Ottawa stores had to offer, by air at enormous expense. Nothing was too good, they said, for Canada’s brave employees in Dhaka. The thought was commendable, the initiative excellent, but the execution faulty. Apparently the only people in Canada unaware that East Pakistan was by then Bangladesh were the Foreign Affairs shipping experts who dispatched our precious cargo to the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, for onward transit. Pakistan and Bangladesh were still in a formal state of war, and links between the two, other than via the Red Cross, were non-existent. We never saw our furniture.

• As had been the case for a generation — and as would be the case seventeen years later when I took my turn as Canada’s ambassador at the same table – the permanent representatives of the United States and France, each vying for the security leadership of Europe, could be counted on to clash on all issues, big and small, whatever their merits. Their combat in my initial years at NATO was worthy of the two great nations. Donald Rumsfeld, scion of a wealthy Chicago family, Princeton University graduate, and captain of the wrestling team, an American filter-tip cigarette always in hand, faced off against the Compte de Rose, haughty, brilliant, and Cartesian, and never without a potent Gauloise in his ivory cigarette holder. We all enjoyed the princely combat and felt cheated when Rumsfeld departed to become chief of staff to President Gerald Ford (and was later secretary of defence for the Ford and George W. Bush administrations, and a prominent player during the 2003 war with Iraq). His replacement was the legendary David Bruce, a cultured, wealthy Southerner, who had been European head of the Second World War Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the CIA) but was now a septuagenarian past his prime. The Compte de Rose was victorious in every dispute with Bruce, who had to rely on cue cards in the cut and thrust of council debate.

• • • Our embassy staff was not immune [to violence in Guatemala]. In the coming months, a first secretary had to depart in a hurry after he witnessed an assassination. Returning to work after lunch one day, he brought his car to a halt behind another one waiting at a red light. A man with a pistol got out of the car behind him and walked calmly past him to the car ahead and shot the driver twice in the head. The killer then strolled back to his car after taking a careful look at the Canadian diplomat and his licence-plate number. Later the same day, the Canadian received an orchid – the code indicating that he was next on the hit list. I ordered him to leave the post at once. We later repatriated another staff member who was chased home by an attacker who riddled his car with gunfire but did not hit him.

• • The Cuban ambassador called on me in my office to express his outrage. He said President Castro had recently allowed more than one hundred thousand disloyal Cubans to depart the port of Mariel for Florida, overwhelming the capacity of the United States to deal with them. He was instructed to tell me that any repetition of the antics of the night before [at Gander, during a defection] would lead Cuba to unleash thousands of boat people on Canada. I rather undiplomatically asked if he had looked at a map recently: Nova Scotia was somewhat further from Cuba than Florida.

OO • The president [Fidel Castro of Cuba] became a regular visitor to our residence, coming to dinners and remaining until the small hours of the morning, reminiscing about his days as a student revolutionary in Colombia and elsewhere in Latin America and about his years as a guerilla leader in the Cuban mountains. For security reasons, his office rarely confirmed his acceptance of invitations before he appeared at our door. It did not take a genius, however, to read his intentions. Ministry of the Interior troops would seal off the neighbourhood, guards would materialize in the garden, the president’s personal food taster would take up his position beside the cook in the kitchen, and technicians would hurriedly install new telephone lines. The president would then roll up in his big, black Soviet Ziv limousine, Leave his Uzi pistol machine gun on the back seat, and come in to spend the evening with the Bartlemans, wearing, as always, a bulletproof vest under his well-pressed military shirt.

• • • At one meeting, a rabbi, asked to introduce us to the audience, delivered an impassioned speech about the Bartlemans and their commitment to Israel. Confusing the incident Marie- Jeanne had in 1975 as an employee of Sabena with another incident at roughly the same time in which terrorists had seized a Sabena aircraft en route to Israel and shot crew members, he ended his speech with passionate praise, saying Marie-Jeanne had suffered and almost died for Israel. Breaking down in tears, members of the audience rushed to embrace her. I rose to my feet and tried to explain that the rabbi had confused Marie-Jeanne with someone else. No one paid any heed and Marie-Jeanne’s reputation was born.

• • • The mood in the nation’s capital was grim that spring of 1994. The worst recession in years was deepening and tens of thousands of public servants were being given their walking papers in an effort to cut a massive government deficit. The country’s foreign-policy agenda was overloaded and the staff in Foreign Affairs were struggling to cope. Their morale was poor for understandable reasons. Record numbers of political appointees had been parachuted into choice jobs as heads-of-mission in the late 1980s and early 1990s, closing off opportunities for advancement for the professionals. Their place of work, the Pearson Building, was overcrowded and showing signs of two decades of wear and tear. Salaries had been frozen for years, junior officers were grossly underpaid, promotions were few, and middle-ranking officers were resigning in droves. Foreign Affairs remained mired in decades-old jurisdictional disputes with other government departments. No one knew who was in charge at the top. Leadership at the political level was exercised by a confusing triumvirate of ministers responsible for general affairs, trade, and aid, backed up by another layer of ministers. And the real power and often the day-to-day management of foreign-policy issues was shifting from the ministers at Foreign Affairs to the prime minister, increasing an already crushing workload for the officers who had to serve the Privy Council Office as well as their own department. The rank-and-file foreign service officers who joined in the 1980s and 1990s were keeping the ship afloat. Despite aspersions cast their way by people nostalg better with the passage of time, they etimes better than those who had come t ation. Often more highly educated than their predecessors on entry, they benefited from training at a foreign-policy institute before starting work. Many had seen the world, some were older and more mature, a number (if not enough were visible minorities, and a group of outstanding women had assumed positions of senior responsibility. Contrary to assertions that they were narrow technocratic specialists lacking humanist attributes, there was more than their fare share of authors, philosophers, and original thinkers in their ranks, including Emile Martel for literature, Rob McCrae for philosophy, and Jill Sinclair for outlawing anti-personnel land mines.

I already knew dozens of these excellent colleagues and would extend my circle of contacts even more in the coming years. Some of the issues, for instance those concerning human-security initiatives such as the creation of the International Criminal Court and the banning of child soldiers taken by Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy, were ones that would only rarely call for the participation of my team in the Privy Council Office. Others that demanded close attention by the prime minister I was familiar with from previous postings: conflict in the former Yugoslavia, enlargement of NATO, the peace process in the Middle East, political and economic change in Latin America, the evolving role of the United Nations, and relations with many of the countries where I had served over the years.

However, many subjects on the common agenda of the prime minister and his foreign minister would be completely new. The campaign to ban anti-personnel land mines, which would take up so much of the prime minister’s time, especially in the critical last six months before the treaty was signed, was only the most visible of the topics on the new foreign-policy agenda. Another one, of greater intrinsic importance since it was central to the economic health of the country, was the prime minister’s unprecedented crusade to pull Canada out of recession by export-led growth through free-trade initiatives and Team Canada trade missions. Other new issues included contending with modern globalization, with its emphasis on the pursuit of wealth in a digital world, with the mistaken assumption that the security of Canada and its allies would never again be threatened as it was during the Cold War, with the rise in importance of the Asia-Pacific and Latin American regions, with humanitarian crises in the failed states of Africa, with confrontation over fish with Spain, with reform of the international finance institutions, with global warming and the Kyoto Accord, and with the emergence of the anti-globalization movement.

Much was accomplished in these years, which corresponded to the first half of Prime Minister Chrétien’s time in office. By the summer of 1998, the recession was a thing of the past, banished in large measure by a spectacular growth in Canada’s exports (aided by a weak dollar as much as by trade promotion). Relations between 24 Sussex Drive and the White House were better balanced than they had been for a generation and were marked by mutual respect between President Clinton and the prime minister; it did not hurt that Anthony Lake, the president’s national security advisor, and I had become friends. Canada had made a name for itself by insisting that the G7 nations address the issue of reforming the international financial institutions at the 1995 Halifax summit, even if the organizations proved resistant to change. We had saved the turbot fishery by staring down the Spanish navy in March and April 1995 in a high-risk operation unprecedented outside of wartime in Canada’s history. With the vigorous efforts of Canadian diplomacy, NATO relented and accepted Central European states as members at its summit of July 1997. And of course, there was the anti-personnel land mines treaty of December of the same year.

These successes, however, masked an erosion of Canada’s place in the world that had been in progress for years, largely outside the control of whatever government was in power. Economically, Canada’s relative position was failing as countries with larger populations, such as Mexico, Brazil, and India, caught up. Politically, crucial fundamentals of our foreign policy that had conveyed prestige and support for our sovereignty in the Cold War era were also changing. Old-fashioned peacekeeping, at which Canada had excelled for more than a generation, was being discredited and buried in the charnel house of Bosnia. Our traditional alliances were shifting. Canada was drifting economically and militarily away from the new Europe. We would seek new partnerships in Latin America and Asia and attempt to maintain our independence as our country was drawn even more closely into the economic orbit of the United States. Our international influence and economic prosperity would henceforth be a function of our special relationship with Washington – for good or ill.

• • The Europeans, for their part, had little time to spare for Canada. With the end of the Cold War and the closure of our last NATO bases in 1992, we were no longer important to them in military and security terms. Our peacekeeping contributions to the Balkans were regarded as “nice” and “useful” but not essential; after all, Bangladesh and the Czech Republic provided as many troops as did Canada. Economically, Canada to Europe was just another mid-size industrial nation, ranking somewhere between Taiwan and Singapore as a trading partner. Canada’s image remained that of a supplier of raw materials, even though manufactured goods had long dominated Canadian export sales.

Epilogue

In January 2002, Marie-Jeanne, Alain, and I spent a week in Senegal. It was the first time we had set foot in Africa since our escape from South Africa to Australia following the mugging of 1999. I was anxious to see if I had put those events, irrationally associated with Africa, behind me.

It was a good visit. We saw a different Africa. Senegal may have been one of the world’s poorest nations, but its people embodied a rich, confident, coherent fusion of francophone culture and language with indigenous African values. It was also safe — at least in Dakar, where we stayed. I also had the sense that the people had come to terms with the injustices of their colonial past. The South Africans, I realized, were making great strides under Mandela but still had a long way to go.

On a day’s outing to Gorée island, a former notorious embarkation point for slaves and now a UNESCO heritage site, we saw Americans with tears in their eyes. Their ancestors had left this region hundreds of years ago in chains and now they, their descendants, were back, trying to come to terms with the harsh reality of their roots. Meanwhile, the locals gossiped, children frolicked in the sea, young men dove for coins tossed by middle-aged European tourists from the docks, hawkers sold crudely carved statuettes of African fertility gods, sunglasses, soft drinks, and colourful shirts, and property developers offered gentrified houses of former slave owners to members of the jet set. Life went on oblivious to the distress of American pilgrims trying to ascribe meaning to a massive historical injustice and to a former Canadian high commissioner brooding on an obscure incident in a Cape Town hotel room. The time was overdue for me, I now knew, to bury the past and move on.

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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2004) — Winter/Spring 2004 // Hiver/Printemps 2004, pp. 9–13. Read the rest of this issue →