Profile of Lt Gen Michael Jackson, Bloody Sunday and Kosovo commander
BY FERN LANE
In Star Wars, Darth Vader -- the one with the weird scary voice who
commands a legion of nameless, faceless automaton stormtroopers -- is
the enforcer of a cruel and decadent empire which is hell-bent on
crushing the rebellion of a small nation trying to escape its ageing
imperialist clutches.
How appropriate then, that Lt Gen Sir Michael Jackson, formerly of the
Parachute Regiment and presently head of NATO's ACE Rapid Reaction Corps
and British Commander of the NATO forces in Kosovo, should labour under
the sobriquet 'Darth Vader' and how unsurprising, too, that the man with
an unfeasible number of nicknames, 'Macho Jackson' 'Action Jackson' and
the 'Prince of Darkness' should turn out to be a veteran of Bloody
Sunday, when he was Adjutant to the 1st Parachute Regiment.
Although he was never called to give evidence to the Widgery Tribunal,
according to Italian photo-journalist Fulvio Grimaldi's 1972 book, Blood
on the Streets, Jackson "carried the responsibility to a great extent of
what was going on." In his account of Bloody Sunday, Grimaldi -- whose
photographs together with sound recordings made by his colleague Susan
North, are vital evidence of the events of that day -- described the
paratroopers as "soulless mechanical tools, little stuffed men,
incapable
of speaking, of looking into your face and seeing your eyes, incapable
of hearing and listening, incapable of understanding and knowing. Little
robots programmed on the use of a gun against a target." Whether or not
Gen Jackson appears before the Saville Inquiry remains to be seen but he
is, he says, determined to "defend the integrity" of the Parachute
Regiment, describing the last 30 years as an "ethnic conflict".
The tiny detail of Jackson's participation in Bloody Sunday seems to
have been overlooked by the English press in their ecstatic media
coverage of his career, particularly by those sections which have been
falling over themselves to establish more spurious connections between
the deployment of the Parchute Regiment in Kosovo and their activities
in the Six Counties. They have preferred to concentrate on a more
non-specific reputation for 'toughness' and monastic lifestyle - well,
monastic apart from being married and being partial to prolonged
whisky-drinking sessions that is.
On 5 June, the BBC opined that "the Serbian military will perhaps find
him more palatable that other commanders as his role so far leaves him
with no Serbian blood on his hands" a sadly misplaced sentiment in view
of the Paras' shooting dead of a Serbian hours after they were deployed
in Kosovo. And by 14 June, despite his alleged role of 'peacekeeper' the
BBC had changed its tune, saying of him that, "when we are about to
engage the enemy, we want an officer who looks the part".
Jackson spent a total of six years in the North of Ireland on three
tours of duty, the second as company commander from 1978-1980 and the
third from 1989-1992, when he was commander of the 39th Infantry
Brigade. He comes from a military family and joined the army at 19,
before taking a degree in Russian at Birmingham University in the late
1960s, a skill which
may have come in useful during his time in the security services in
Berlin during the height of the Cold War. He joined the Parachute
Regiment in 1970 and other active service includes a role as commander
of British forces in Bosnia. According to some reports the Prince of
Darkness' hero is the Duke of Wellington and like Margaret Thatcher, he
is reputed to sleep less than four hours a night.
Jackson was also described as a "throughly cerebral officer" by a
history professor at Cambridge University, where he spent six months in
1989. That said, his press conferences so far have been marked more by
rudeness and impatience than by the quality of his intellect.