Jackson leaves Kosova with praise of alliesBY MICHAEL EVANS, DEFENCE EDITOR
LIEUTENANT-GENERAL Sir Mike Jackson, whose command of the Nato-led Kosova Force is handed over to a German general today, dislikes the idea of being regarded as a cult figure. But such has been his personal involvement in the Balkans crisis that he has become a household name. There can be few detractors, not even General Wesley Clark, Nato's Supreme Allied Commander in Europe and General Jackson's superior, with whom he had a now legendary disagreement over the order to seize Prishtina airport from the Russians on June 11.
Since that confrontation and a subsequent blazing face-to-face clash at Kfor headquarters in Prishtina over who was in charge of the peacekeeping operation, General Clark has been careful to praise General Jackson in public. Kfor's entry into Kosova on June 12 and the rapid deployment of the Nato forces throughout the province went according to the "Jackson plan", and his tough personality saved the operation from disaster on many occasions. Never more so than over the affair with the Russians. Nato was lucky that in selecting the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps for the Kosova mission, it had a commander who not only had considerable Balkans experience from his time in Bosnia and had built a reputation for being a soldier's soldier - and not all generals are - but he could also speak fluent Russian.
One of his worst moments came when he landed by helicopter at Prishtina airport late afternoon on D-Day - June 10 - and had to give a press conference on one of the runways in pouring rain, with Russian armoured personnel carriers driving menacingly up and down to remind everyone that they had got there first.
In such conditions, General Jackson can have been in no mood to make the speech he had scribbled down on a piece of paper, but a press officer from Downing Street had been sent along to mastermind the show and he duly obliged. But while the event bordered on the farcical, General Jackson then went on to meet the Russian general, who at that stage was effectively in charge of the airport.
His fluency in Russian, as well as his skills as a diplomat, played a crucial part in resolving an issue that could have upset the whole peacekeeping mission.
If only the Russian general had known then what part General Jackson had played 24 hours earlier in preventing what could have been a fatal firefight with Russian troops. The Clark-Jackson bust-up has been reported extensively but its resolution, in favour of General Jackson, raised important issues about command responsibilities in a Nato operation.
General Jackson, 55, now returns to Germany, continuing his role as commander of the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps, before taking up his new appointment as Commander-in-Chief Land Command - as a four-star general - next April. No one doubts that he has the right stuff for the top army job of Chief of the General Staff in due course.October 8, 1999
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