Blazes Along A Diplomatic Trail

About the Book

BLAZES is divided into four parts.

The first part deals with South Africa where the author was the deputy to the High Commissioner from 1958 to 1962. The country's troubled race relations were already under scrutiny in the United Nations and pressure was mounting at home and abroad for reform. All this was resented and resisted by the governing minority of the population represented by the National Party which was supported by most of the Afrikaans-speaking majority of the South African white population. Black African resistance led to the major protests of March 1960 which were suppressed with bloodshed at Sharpeville and led to measures that ended any pretence of democracy in South Africa. Sharpeville resulted in the withdrawal of South Africa from the Commonwealth and set the stage for the events of succeeding decades which eventually resulted in the establishment of a non-racial government under Nelson Mandela in 1991.

The second part concerns the Soviet Union where Brown was deputy to the Ambassador, Robert Ford, for a brief 16 months from mid-1964. Ford was a foreign service icon whose career had been marked by bad luck: he had been stationed in Moscow but absent on holidays during all the important Soviet events of the fifties and sixties. That included the coup d'Žtat when Nikita Khruschchev was removed from power and the author was in charge of the embassy. The Russian experience was rich and demanding ÷ and rewarding, for it lead to his first ambassadorial posting.

Part three deals with the Congo plus much of central Africa including Zambia, Malawi, Rwanda, Burundi, and Congo-Brazzaville: a lot of the dark continent that proved even in that time how dark it could be. Within weeks of Brown's arrival, he had experienced a dramatic coup in the Congo and found himself in charge of the airlift of oil and gasoline to Zambia occasioned by Rhodesia's unilateral declaration of independence. There was much more ahead as the crisis of Canadian unity led to confrontations in Africa between Canada, on the one side, and France and Quebec on the other.

Part four is about Cyprus, divided between Greek and Turk for centuries and kept in peace by the United Nations Force ÷ nonetheless a civilized piece of cake after the Congo. Canada was one of the major contributors of peacekeepers on the island. Then we blew it, closing our diplomatic mission, and abdicating an honourable role in a situation that lingers on. That was the 1968-1970 farewell to the decade of "Blazes".

Since those days in South Africa, Russia, the Congo and Cyprus, none of the countries can be said to have solved all of the problems that faced them then. Instability concerns all, making Blazes Along a Diplomatic Trail of contemporary relevance.

About the Author

Growing up on the Alberta prairies, Gordon Brown was involved with school- and, later, university-student publications, often as a writer of doggerel but more usually as one confined by the duties of editor. He graduated in history from the University of Alberta in 1942 and spent the next four years in the army, mostly with an Alberta regiment, serving in Canada and overseas. In 1946, on demobilization at the age of 24, he accepted a position at the University of Alberta with responsibility as, among other things, editor of the university quarterly. The latter was a daunting assignment because he took over from a distinguished professor of English, Frederick Milton Salter, who had been the tutor of W.O. Mitchell of Who has seen the Wind fame.

In 1947, Brown became a foreign service officer of the Department of External Affairs, with which he remained until 1979. The diplomatic profession is one dedicated to accurate and truthful reporting of events, descriptions of personalities, analyses of situations. External Affairs was then run by people who demanded excellence.

Of his 32 years in the service, the most rewarding were a dozen that formed the middle period of his career. From mid-1958 to the beginning of 1970, he served abroad in South Africa, the Soviet Union, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Cyprus with only a two-year stint in the early sixties at headquarters in Ottawa. Troubling events took place during his postings in each of the four countries: their situations were of international concern and impinged on Canadian interests. Their problems and the unfolding of our bilateral relations provided this Canadian diplomat with challenges and great job satisfaction.

The years marked great changes universally. A few months after the South African posting began, a rocket lifted the chirping Sputnik into orbit. Gagarin became the first man to travel into space. By the end of the 1960s, rocketry would land man on the moon. The wide-bodied jet aircraft superseded the ocean liner, transforming the journey to a foreign post from a period of thoughtful reflection into a physical and spiritual jolt. Colonial powers rushed to rid themselves of empires and, for many former colonies, independence was soon to be tarnished by corruption, ethnic hatred and worse. The nuclear arms race and rocketry development steadily intensified the peril to civilization. Everywhere the Cold War diminished the freedoms that most of this generation of diplomatic practitioners had served in war to defend.

From 1958 to 1970, each of the three very different men who were Prime Ministers of Canada reacted in very different ways to foreign affairs and the conduct of foreign policy. All three enter into this story. Seen from South Africa, John Diefenbaker's deep respect for human rights appeared as the motor of both his condemnation of the regime that had brought on the Sharpeville massacre of 1960 and his role in the departure of the country from the Commonwealth. There was some truth in his suspicion that Canadian diplomats were "Pearson's old gang", although "Dief" was off base in that as a general assessment. L.B. Pearson's hand at the helm was usually ÷ but not always ÷ comforting to the professionals serving in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. However, his decency would be evident during the Congo years as was his determination when Canada's existence was under attack at home and from abroad. The last year of the sixties exposed the Department of External Affairs to the intellectual arrogance of Pierre Trudeau and his declared preference for the views of The New York Times to those of Canada's professional diplomats.