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

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СКАЧАТЬ and amongst this little lot, I’ve still got Jackson’s bloody parcel to deliver. Again, the opportunity comes out of nowhere on the back of the PWO’s visit. Lieutenant-Colonel Alistair Duncan and some of his staff who’ll be taking over from the Cheshires in May are out doing their recce. One day Bryan Watters takes his opposite number, the PWO’s 2IC, Major Richard Watson, into Sarajevo. BRITBAT had a responsibility under the UN withdrawal plan called Plan 006 whereby the route through the Sierras into Sarajevo would be held by them while the city is evacuated of UN personnel. It was a distant prospect but the plan existed. Brian and Richard decide to go in and review the plan with whomsoever in HQ Sector Sarajevo. I offer to go with them as interpreter for the checkpoints. Neither of them has been into Sarajevo before. The day before, I grab the SQMS and liberate the stores of as much food as I can stuff into my bergen: whole Edam cheeses, blocks of UHT milk, bags of sugar, coffee, tea, matches, candles, just about anything I can lay my hands on. So I’m sitting in the back of this Land Rover, bergen weighing a ton, the parcel hidden away under a blanket. We bluff our way through the Sierras and get into Sarajevo.

      As before, Peter Jones takes us all to Ulica Romanijska, where the Pijalovics live. I’m hoping Minka Pijalovic will be in. Bryan Watters insists on accompanying me up the stairs. This time they are in. A plump, middle-aged lady with a sweet face opens the door, sees me, and starts wailing, ‘My Aida! My Aida has come!’ We’re in her tiny kitchen and she’s hugging me, wailing and crying, asking me one question after another. We’ve only got a few minutes so I’m unpacking the bergen like mad, dumping everything on the floor. Minka is crying her eyes out. Her husband, Munir, a thin man, is weeping silently and all the while Bryan is just standing there shocked and shattered, gawping. There’s no time to hang around and we depart but not before she’s given me a bottle of Slivo and a letter for Aida. We leave them crying over the pile of food on their kitchen floor and the parcel. The experience was gut-wrenching. That’s the first time I met Minka and Munir Pijalovic and we didn’t even have time for a proper conversation. Shortly after that yet another parcel came out to Vitez and sat there until I could deliver it. Peter Jones’ BRITDET were leaving on 30 March and he’d invited me to their leaving party on the 27^th. That offered me an opportunity to deliver the parcel, but whether I’d be able to get into Sarajevo was another matter.

      We’re now into the second week in March. The Lasva valley pressure cooker is bubbling away. Up north Alan Abraham, Nick Costello and a few 9/12 Lancers have managed to get into Konjevic Polje where there are some 2,000 Muslim refugees holed up and on the run from the Serbs who are closing in. They’ve got into the valley, assessed the situation and got out again. UNHCR is desperate to get aid to them and a second trip in is planned. Meanwhile the Army system has caught up with me. Despite all this madness, the cogs of the wheel have been grinding on and I find myself having to report to Split on Friday 12 March to sit the Staff Selection Test exam on the following Monday. I’d sat my Promotion Exams in Umm Qsar in Iraq. I’d passed them but failed the SST and now had to re-sit the paper. There were about five British officers across Central Bosnia who were in the same boat, among them Ken Lonergan, a Cheshire, Lee Smart the PInfo captain, and Dave Bennett from Tuzla. Exams don’t stop for any war, so we jump on this Sea King at Kiseljak and hop down to the sunshine in Split straight into a disaster.

      All hell has been let loose over the last forty-eight hours in Konjevic Polje. Nick and the others have got back into the valley but the situation has changed dramatically. The Serbs had closed in and the Muslims are desperate and panicking for their lives. Naser Oric is there too with some of his fighters and they’ve surrounded all the UN vehicles with bales of burning straw and the group has been held hostage like that for nearly two days. Oric has told Nick and Sasha Vassiliyev, a Russian Special Forces/UNMO major, that if they’re to die then the UN will die with them. Nick and Sasha have been out of the vehicles trying to calm the crowd and negotiate. They’ve been doing this for nearly two days. Eventually the thing splits open and the Serbs start shelling the valley. People are dropping everywhere. Simon Mardell, a WHO doctor, assisted by WO2 ‘Jock’ McNair, the medic interpreter, whom I’d first met at Wilton, is conducting roadside surgery and amputations without anaesthetics. The shelling intensifies. A Muslim woman rushes up to Nick and tries to make him take her decapitated baby, only seconds before a shell fragment removes her own head and leaves Nick splattered with blood and gore. And I’ve just walked innocently into the Ops Room in Split at the height of this tragedy. The only link with them is with Major Alan Abraham giving regular sitreps from a Spartan APC. Cumming is just standing there, tears of frustration in his eyes as he listens to his men dying more than a hundred miles away. And there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it except listen.

      I escape from the Ops Room. I can’t listen to it. I can’t listen to Nick dying, knowing that if I’d been able to get up that morning I’d be there instead of Nick. He was due to get married in a couple of months’ time. I’m sick inside and go up to the Mess where I sit and wait. An hour or so later I can’t help myself and I return to the Ops Room. The atmosphere has changed, relief mixed in with nervous tension. Cumming is shaken. They’d got out … just, and in appalling circumstances. As the shelling had intensified the crowd had disintegrated, an opening had been formed and the vehicles just went for it, driving like mad. Nick and Sasha were nearly left behind along with a destroyed Spartan and a recovery vehicle. I remember Cumming swearing blind that he would never again allow any British troops to be abandoned in a situation where they couldn’t be reached, helped and supported. He swore blind and he meant it.

      Shortly after that we had a minor drama of our own in the Vitez area. Bob Stewart was concerned about complaints made by the BiH and HVO in the Tesanj salient that the Serbs were using their helicopters in defiance of the No Fly Zone, Op DENY FLIGHT. He tasked John Ellis, his LO for the area, to take in a patrol and establish an OP to confirm this. It fell to me to go along as the interpreter since it was unreasonable to expect any of our locals to sleep out for a week.

      We set off after lunch on Saturday 20 March – John and his driver, with me and a Fusilier, Corporal Stone, in the back of the Land Rover. Behind us was a Spartan APC with a few more blokes. We got through Novi Seher, but just short of Tesanj we were met by the HVO liaison officer to the BiH, Colonel Josic, a former JNA Naval officer. Despite the dramas in GV and elsewhere the HVO and BiH in the salient were still rock solid. They had to be for mutual survival, just as in Tuzla. Josic was hugely charismatic and made a point of wearing boots with no laces to show he had no intention of running away. He told us that it was too dangerous for us to drive through Tesanj as the town was under heavy shell and rocket fire. More than that, the entire ‘light bulb’ (we called it that because of its shape) was being pressed on all sides. That same day some 600 shells impacted in Sarajevo and Tuzla was also being shelled. The war had gone mad. We could hear it all going on and just sat it out and waited all afternoon.

      At twilight the shelling eased. Josic scooped us up and we scooted through Tesanj, the gateway to the ‘bulb’. Then the shelling started again and we were effectively trapped inside this ‘light bulb’ which measured about ten by ten kilometres. They wouldn’t let us select our own OP, but told us exactly where to put it and even provided us with two young military policemen to ‘watch over us’. It was quite dark when we occupied this bit of high ground and parked the vehicles up in some bushes. We set up the HF radio, a PRC 320, but couldn’t get through to anyone because the allocated frequency numbers were too ‘high’ for night-time transmission. After much bleating and repositioning of the wire we finally got through to Tuzla and gave them our exact grid reference. In fact we gave it to everyone in the world because UN comms were not encrypted. We had no choice: tell no one or tell everyone.

      By this time, the shelling had intensified. One landed about 500 metres from us, and that was enough for me to get a bit flaky and to suggest we dig a couple of deep four-man trenches. That didn’t go down too well. Soldiers don’t like digging and this lot were keener to take cover in the Spartan. Shades of TSG, and I told them so in no uncertain terms. After much muttering and dragging of shovels and picks from the vehicles we set about split-locking and de-turfing the two trenches. There was little enthusiasm for the work until something exploded СКАЧАТЬ