Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness. Martin Bell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ convoys, bound for the UNHCR warehouse in Zenica, were frequently frustrated by the Bosnian Serbs and rarely managed to cross the front line at Turbe, just west of the Cheshires’ Vitez base. That crossing operation was christened Op SLAVIN after a footballer who never quite managed to get the ball over the line. The aid from the warehouse in Metkovic, a small town south of Mostar and just inside the Croatian border, usually made good progress up the Neretva valley but, because the road into Sarajevo disappeared into Serb-held territory, it slowed down as it negotiated a mountain route into Kresevo and onwards to the warehouse in Zenica. A second, and much more tortuous, route into Central Bosnia went via Split, TSG, along a mountain track which had been widened by the Royal Engineers, known as Route Triangle, through Prozor, GV, Vitez and thence to Zenica.

      Aid almost never reached Sarajevo by road and had to be flown in by transport aircraft operating a Berlin Airlift-style shuttle from Ancona in Italy, Zagreb and Split and the USAF base at Ramstein in Germany. The airlift was by far the riskiest of operations. Sarajevo airport lay astride a hotly contested front line and was reputed to be ‘the most dangerous place on earth’. Aircraft were intermittently hit by small arms fire on approach and take off. An Italian transport aircraft had been shot down in August by a surface-to-air missile fired from somewhere in Central Bosnia and had crashed in the Fojnica valley killing the crew. Confusingly, the RAF contribution to the airlift was known as Op CHESHIRE – nothing to do with the Cheshires in Vitez.

      Thus, UNHCR had distribution warehouses and offices in Sarajevo, Tuzla, Banja Luka, Metkovic, Split, Zagreb and Belgrade. From the B-H warehouses UNHCR handed over the aid to the local authorities who disposed of it as they saw fit. In addition to UNHCR there was a host of Non Governmental Organisations, NGOs all doing their bit; the International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC, Medicines Sans Frontieres, MSF, Caritas, Merhemet, to name but a few. Wackier still, there were one-man-band, go-it-alone outfits bringing aid from across Europe in broken down old lorries and vans. ‘The Serious Road Trip’ was one of these. In short the aid effort seemed to be a loosely co-ordinated patchwork of well-meaning do-gooders who exposed themselves to horrible risks for no return other than the satisfaction of having delivered some aid.

      In addition to the military component, UNPROFOR also had a legion of civilians welded into the organisation: Civil Affairs officers, financiers, accommodation officers, communications officers, mechanics etc. all of whom were professional ‘UNites’ who seemed to drift around the globe from one mission area to another. We even had two civilians in HQ BRITFOR to assist Brigadier Cumming. Both were ‘ours’ in the sense that David Arnold-Foster, the Civil Secretary, was a senior MoD finance officer who controlled the purse strings and the Civil Adviser, from the Foreign Office, advised the Commander on political matters.

      Richard Barrons completed his address by telling us that somewhere, high above this tangle of military and civilians, Lord Owen and Cyrus Vance of the International Conference on Former Yugoslavia, ICFY, were conducting a frantic shuttle diplomacy effort to end the war in B-H and were currently negotiating with the leaders of the warring factions in Geneva. A Vance–Owen Peace Plan, the VOPP, would shortly be announced.

      It was time for a break. That was lecture one over. It couldn’t possibly get any more complicated, could it?

      Wrong. Within five minutes Major Chris Lawton, the S02 G2 Intelligence, or Military Information as the UN euphemistically calls it, had us in a double arm lock. He was attempting to explain the background to the conflict, which seemed to have started with the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 and was giving us a detailed picture of who was doing what to whom – how, where and why. The UN/international community side of it was bad enough, but what the locals were up to and why was almost impossible to follow.

      The universal bogeyman was the Serb, but it seemed there were three different types of Serb. There were the Serb Serbs, from Serbia proper beyond the River Drina, led by their president, Slobodan Milosevic. Their army was still called the Jugoslav National Army, JNA, or what was left of the Federal Army now that Slovenia, Croatia and B-H had seceded. There were the Krajina Serbs of Croatia who, refusing to acknowledge Croatia’s secession, had revolted, fought a six-month war with the Croats, and were now established in their breakaway Republika Srpska Krajina in the UNPAs: UN Sectors North, South, East and West. Their army was known as the Army of Republika Srpska Krajina or ARSK. Finally, there were the Bosnian Serbs who, like the Krajina Serbs, had refused to recognise the secession of B-H and were now locked in a civil war with those who had voted for secession. Their leader was Dr Radovan Karadzic and the army commander of the Bosnian Serb Army, BSA, was General Ratko Mladic. Received wisdom suggested that the revolts of both the Krajina Serbs and Bosnian Serbs had been orchestrated by Milosevic himself in order to achieve a dream of creating a Greater Serbia. All three were universally termed the aggressor, particularly by the media.

      The Croatian president was Franjo Tudjman and the Croatian army was called the Hrvatska Vojska, HV. Then there were the Croats of B-H led by Mate Boban in his Hercegovina HQ at Grude, not far from Mostar. Their army was called Hrvatsko Vece Odbrane, the Croatian Defence Council or HVO. Politically, they aspired to the creation of their own mini-statelet called Herceg-Bosna and closer ties with Croatia proper with whom they shared a common border, the western border of B-H. They therefore effectively controlled the access into B-H and access to the Adriatic from B-H. They were in alliance with the Muslims of Bosnia led by President Alija Izetbegovic whose army, Armija Bosne i Hercegovine, Army of Bosnia-Hercegovina, ABiH, was commanded by General Sefer Halilovic. The alliance was shaky in the extreme and only held together in the face of the common enemy – the Serb.

      Along an impossibly long and convoluted front line, in red on the map, which snaked through Croatia, swung north into B-H near Split, meandered northwards creating bulges and salients, looped around Tuzla and then wandered south-westwards to the east of Mostar before swinging south towards Dubrovnik, the HV and ARSK stared at each other across a bleak no-man’s-land in Croatia, while the HVO and ABiH fought the BSA in World War One-style trench warfare in Bosnia. Sarajevo was besieged by the BSA. To the east the Muslims were besieged in a large pocket backed up against the river Drina at Gorazde, while in the north-west corner of B-H they were holding out in a sizeable but isolated pocket called Bihac. Somewhere in and amongst all this the UN was either attempting to keep the peace in Croatia or trying to deliver aid in B-H.

      It was all thoroughly confusing.

      The greatest shock was the revelation that the UN was not particularly popular in Croatia. In fact the Croats called it ‘Serbprofor’ on account of the fact that they viewed the UN as protectors of the Krajina Serbs in the UNPAs. The British in particular seemed to have been singled out for particular hatred and a number of off-duty soldiers had been set upon by local louts in Trogir and Split. Officially the UN was tolerated, mainly because of the huge sums of hard currency being injected into the local economy through the hire and leasing of barracks, warehouses and port facilities. Indeed, the local hotels up and down the Dalmatian coast survived only because the UN was desperate for over-spill accommodation. Thus it was a love-hate relationship – they loved the colour of our money but hated us.

      To complete our confusion, we learnt next that a number of independent organisations were floating around FRY, each with its own reporting chain of command. The Brussels-led European Community Monitoring Mission, ECMM, which had been monitoring the collapse of Yugoslavia from the start, had small teams of ECMM monitors, all seconded or retired military officers, dotted throughout FRY and its bordering countries. Dressed from head to toe in white, their remit was to hob-nob with local politicians, assess the political, economic and military situations in their areas and to report back to Brussels via their Zagreb HQ in the Hotel I. In parallel, the UN had its own unarmed Military Observers, UNMOs, again, dotted about in small teams and reporting the military situation up their own separate chain of command to HQ UNPROFOR in Zagreb.

      Finally, not to be outdone, BRITFOR had its own version of information gatherers and liaison officers called United Kingdom Liaison Officers or UKLOs. They were armed and consisted of eight teams each of one captain, one СКАЧАТЬ