Lieutenant General Emmanuel Alexander Erskine, the retired Ghanaian soldier and politician, has died.
The 86-year-old veteran is survived by a wife and eight children.
Family sources confirmed the death of the man who was the first commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) from 1978 to 1981.
He was also a chief of army staff of the Ghana army and commanded the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation as well as UNIFIL in Lebanon.
He received his training at the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst in Buckinghamshire, England, and also attended the Staff College in Camberley, Surrey.
Lieutenant General Erskine was one of the founding members of the People’s Heritage Party (PHP).
Memoire
The Daily Graphic’s regional editor Edmund Smith Asante filed the following report about Erskine in 2018.
Lieutenant General Erskine … The soldier’s soldier who was a proofreader
When Lieutenant General Emmanuel Alexander Erskine was appointed the first force commander of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), he knew he would be exposed to danger, but little did he know that several attempts would be made on his life.
In view of the “present and clear danger” that he knew he would have to contend with as a peacemaker-in-chief among the Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese, he fell down prostrate on the floor, thanked God and prayed for wisdom, protection and for common sense the moment he received his letter of appointment from the then United Nations secretary general, Dr Kurt Waldheim, on 19 March 1978.
It is exactly 40 years today since the UN Security Council unanimously passed its Resolution 425 authorising the SG, Dr Waldheim, to set up the peacekeeping mission – UNIFIL, of which the Ghanaian-born now retired general Erskine was made commander.
“That very day, I received a copy of the resolution together with the SG’s message [cable], appointing me as the acting force commander and instructing me to set up the force.
“I was surprised, excited and overjoyed. I immediately dropped on the floor of my lounge in my residence located on the slopes of Mount Scopus in East Jerusalem, and in a prostrate and prayerful position, prayed.
Prayer for protection
“I thanked our very kind, gracious and merciful God and His Son our Lord Jesus Christ for giving me the very rare opportunity to serve war-torn Lebanon, and more specifically the heavily war-ravaged South, with its deprived south Lebanese – the women, aged and children, together with Palestinians expelled from their homes in Palestine as a result of the 1948 and 1967 wars and from Jordan in the Black September 1970 episode.
“I also prayed for increase in knowledge and to be imbued with Solomon’s wisdom to execute my functions professionally as expected by the SG in fully supporting him to execute his task to achieve the four thematic objectives demanded by Resolution 425, since the accomplishment of this mission hinged, to a large extent, on me as his representative on the ground.
“I asked for God’s protection from all dangers which were prevalent in all conflict theatres and, finally, for common sense,” he recounted.
Sitting before him and listening to the man who once commanded forces from several nations under the UN flag to promote peace in the Middle East and, thus, held high the flag of Ghana internationally, was both intriguing and humbling.
Living dangerously
Most people know that retired Lieutenant General Erskine was once a force commander of UNIFIL but many are oblivious to the near-death experiences he had while leading the UN mission in Lebanon, and to his stint with the Daily Graphic as a proofreader in the early days of the paper.
In a one-on-one and exclusive interview at his residence near Kotoka International Airport in Accra, he narrated his brushes with death both on the ground and in the air while leading the multinational force, comprising troops from Fiji, France, Ghana, Ireland, Italy, Nepal, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Norway, Senegal and Sweden, among other countries.
Recounting when his UN-marked plane was bombed, he said: “I was coming from Beirut just outside Tyre. We were just about 300 metres over the Mediterranean when we heard a bang, so I asked the pilot and co-pilot if anything had happened. When we got to Naqoura after just three minutes’ flight and the ground assistants came to open the door (this was where I got frightened), there was no door.
“Whatever they fired had blown the door and the door fell straight down into the sea,” he said, adding that if the door had touched the propellers, the plane would have crashed into the sea.
He said there was another time when after a visit to the Fijian troops at Naqoura, shots were fired at the seat of the plane. He was also roughed up, resulting in his ranks falling off, when eight Norwegian soldiers had been abducted from their duty post and he went for a meeting with the abductors at a location in Nazareth to have them released.
No turning back
Looking back on those encounters, he said: “I enjoyed UNIFIL; I loved it but I wouldn’t like to go back again because my sitting here is by the grace of God. My room was bombed. I happened at that time not to be there. I have been manhandled; my aircraft has been shot. I thank God that when I was appointed I went down to ask Him for protection because I am sitting down here today by His grace. But I enjoyed it.”
Lieutenant General Erskine, described as a “one-man battalion” because he was the only Ghanaian in the force when UNIFIL was born, said the war became intense after an Israeli bus carrying Israeli citizens and heading towards Tel Aviv was attacked near the Israeli coastal town of Herzliya in the early hours of 11 March 1978, which resulted in the death of about 30 Israelis, and attracted a reprisal attack on South Lebanon on 15 March the same year.
He intimated that the force suffered many casualties because he and his troops had to contend with several landmines that had been planted all around as a result of the altercation and unending war between the Israelis and Palestinians, and also because the Lebanese who had become internally displaced persons (IDPs) in their own country were returning in their droves because of the presence of the troops, and needed to farm for food.
Life after UNIFIL
Lieutenant General Erskine completed his work at UNIFIL when he was posted back to the United Nations Truce Supervision Organisation (UNTSO) in his former position as chief of staff in February 1981 and given an additional job as the SG’s representative for peacekeeping operations in the Middle East. He retired in 1986.
“I came back home and I was tired, mentally and physically tired,” he said.
However, that did not prevent him from becoming involved with international organisations to share his experiences on conflict management. He worked with organisations such as the former Nigerian president Olusegun Obansanjo’s African Leadership Forum, the military staff colleges in Accra and Kaduna, Nigeria, and the International Peace Academy (IPA), New York. He was also involved in the Mozambique conflict resolution in the early 1990s.
Army commander
Before his UN days, Lieutenant General Erskine was the director general in charge of operations and planning of the Ghana army when General Ignatius Kutu Acheampong staged a coup in 1972 and made him the army commander and a member of the Supreme Military Council, albeit briefly.
He left for war college – the Royal College of Defence Studies (RCDS) – for a year and returned to his position as the army commander in 1973.
He left the army command in 1974 when the UN requested that a Ghanaian fill the position of chief of staff for the United Nations Emergency Force Two (UNEF 2), established after September 1976 following the Yom Kippur War of 6 October 1973.
There, he worked under Lieutenant General Ensio Siilasvuo as the chief of staff and second-in- command. He was later posted from UNEF to Jerusalem to head the UNTSO as the chief of staff (commander) and then became the Special Representative of the Secretary General (SRSG) in 1981.
Joining the army
Erskine’s desire to be in the Ghana Armed Forces was whipped up during regular visits to his school, Fijai Secondary in Takoradi, by senior military officers, during which they encouraged the students to join up. He opted for the army.
“I was very much enticed to go into the army because I couldn’t continue my education in the university – I didn’t have the money,” he said.
Lieutenant General Erskine joined the army in March 1958 with the tenth intake of the Regular Officers Special Training School (ROST 10), the predecessor to the Ghana Military Academy (GMA). “Some of my colleagues at that time were General Acheampong, Tachie-Menson, General Obasanjo, whose room was just behind mine in Teshie [they still maintain a very good relationship],” he disclosed.
After training in Ghana for six months, he proceeded to the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst (RMAS) in January 1959, completed the two-year course and was commissioned in December 1960.
General Erskine said he was commissioned into the Signals Regiment in 1961 after doing his young officers’ course in communications. “My coming back coincided with the ‘Ghanaianisation’ of the Ghana Armed Forces, which means the British leaving and Ghanaians taking over,” he recalled.
He subsequently became the military secretary, working under five generals who were all chiefs of defence staff (CDSs) – Kotoka, Ankrah, Ocran, Otoo, who later became Air Marshal Otoo, and Addo.
Foray into politics
Describing how he got into politics, Lieutenant General Erskine said in the early 1990s, he was visited by a group of elders of the Convention People’s Party (CPP) who asked him to join the party.
He obliged and joined in 1992, but “unfortunately the CPP had been split and I took part of it. We called ourselves the People’s Heritage Party (PHP) and it was interesting. The end result is that I didn’t do well.
“The funny thing is that where I voted, in Jack ‘n’ Jill [nursery school], I got zero, so I yelled and when I yelled, the zero turned to be ten,” he recounted, breaking into laughter. Changing his countenance, he said: “Today we can laugh about this, but back then it was a very serious matter.
“So the end of 1992 was the end to my political life but I learned. One important thing I learned in politics is the human being. It was a great lesson,” he said.
He stood in the 1992 presidential election with four other candidates, Jerry John Rawlings (NDC-Progressive Alliance Party), Albert Adu Boahen of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), Kwabena Darko of the National Independence Party (NIP) and Dr Hilla Limann of the People’s National Convention (PNC).
According to the retired general, he went back to lecturing and being part of conflict resolution until 1999, when he had an invitation from the UN headquarters on contract to one of its new units opened to share lessons from conflicts and past peacekeeping experiences so that newly appointed force commanders could stop by and get briefing, because there was nothing written. He worked there until 2001, when he retired fully from the UN.
But just after a year, in 2002, he was called back from rest and given a national assignment to serve on the National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) through an invitation of President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, who was then the foreign affairs minister.
Describing his service on the NRC as “a very, very interesting assignment in my life”, he recalled that he served until 2004. “Then I was tired, I was truly tired, and ever since I have been home.”
Biography and early life
Lieutenant General Erskine, who hails from Winneba (father) and Ekumfi (mother) in the Central Region, has a wife, Rose, a retired nurse/midwife, and eight children (four men and four women) who sometimes visited him when he served as the UNIFIL commander in Lebanon.
The children, some of whom are in the Bahamas, Canada, London, Ghana and Washington, include a dental surgeon, a lawyer, a nurse and a media practitioner, Anita Erskine.
A staunch Anglican, born on 19 January 1935, he says the military has been good and he had no regrets serving the Ghana Armed Forces and the UN.
He disclosed that as a young boy of 14 who had just completed primary school, he had the privilege of working as a proofreader for the Daily Graphic during its formative years in 1950 and 1951.
“I spent my primary years here in Accra with my late elder sister’s husband and incidentally he was one of the earliest senior officials – a feature writer called Sorgbordzo. I finished up in Gold Coast International School and, on leaving school, I worked briefly with the Daily Graphic. And what is more interesting, I was a proofreader, checking the mistakes and spellings – but I worked under one Mr Awuley Mensah,” he said.
According to Lieutenant General Erskine, when his brother-in-law was sent to Takoradi to open up an office for the paper, he followed him and assisted with the distribution of the papers for two years until he left for Fijai in 1953.
He said he decided to write about UNIFIL at 40 because he believed it was imperative that the general public know what the force was all about. It would also keep the troops better informed about how the mission started and allow them to understand that it hadn’t been easy and that “they must respect the customs, cultures of the people and the communities where they work”.
“There is the need to respect the Muslim culture, all the taboos, because Ghana has a good name in peacekeeping operations. And they must not do anything to soil our reputation, and not abuse the privileges and immunities that they enjoy because we are with the UN,” he said, urging along all GHANBATT troops in Lebanon.
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