Ing., Colonel Ľubomír Kolenčík

Well, that's how time went by, two years, and I had to deal with it. I had to deal with myself. Family at home, wife and two teenage daughters. Two years away from home. I don't know what's going on, at home. But of course, all of this had consequences. It wasn't until I got there that I realised that there is a toll for everything. So from that moment when I said yes, I'm going to be that first commander, I'm still in a whirlwind to this day. I was escorted out by the President, after two years of a successful mission where I brought the highest honours from the United Nations, from New York, a written assessment of my performance and the performance of the whole body that I could really claim high positions, I also lost the post that I left. Because that was guaranteed to me that if nothing else, I would come back, but some two months before I arrived, that was also filled. So I came in and I was on the curb.

Nothing. Nobody. You know. It's not an act when they raise their hand to go. It's not an act when a person unfortunately dies that you go for him personally and by plane and bring him home, these are gestures of empty people who don't understand life at all. But young people have lost their homes, their existence, their psychological life, and nobody deals with them. For twenty years I've been trying to get some kind of a facility built for veterans, some kind of a social home, so that these people would have a place to go, so that they would have at least a little bit of security that they have a place to go to live when they return, because there are a lot of stories like the one I told about myself that aren't talked about, and which are not even made public. A lot of marriages have broken up, a lot of people have lost their existence, a lot of people are psychologically scarred. Nobody is doing anything about those people. When you set up a non-profit organisation and you try to solve things for the benefit of people and you substitute the role of the state, the state keeps turning its back on you for 25-30 years and doesn't want anything to do with it, so just what can be the answer to all this, tell me.

Well, from the first of May, a contingent, 600-man contingent, dozens, hundreds of wagons of material, equipment and people were supposed to leave, and now anyone who is the least bit reasonable probably can't, can't, nobody can imagine that it can be done in two months. And people were not enough people, basic service soldiers under the current constitution could not serve outside the republic, so only reserve soldiers could go, that is, fathers of families, which was almost 70% in the line-up. That 30% was made up of existing conscripted soldiers - officers, warrant officers, and such a mixture of untrained people, unfamiliar with themselves, were drafted, they didn't know what was awaiting them, because of what they are going there, they just knew why are they going there. They knew that the monthly UN supplementary allowance, the so-called mercenary allowance, in terms of this mission, was 999 US dollars for everybody equally, whether for the commander or for say a soldier who was doing some end tasks there. Of course, this was a big draw for the Slovaks, because 999 dollars at that time, in 1993, had a lot of economic power for them, it was around, I think, 30 000 crowns. But it didn't mean anything. So no collection, but it was a proper recruitment, a proper collection, because we didn't have the people. Nobody was flocking there. And those who wanted to go didn't know what they were getting into, and there were very few people who could even explain to them what they were getting into. Nobody knew.