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

base at Vitez, the Dutch had a conscript transport battalion at Busovaca.

      In addition to BRITBAT, which numbered about 800 troops, the British had insisted on the deployment of a National Support Element, NSE, logistics battalion and 35 Engineer Regiment, which was located at Tomislavgrad, TSG, in the south in Hercegovina. Their primary tasks were to open, widen and maintain routes running northwards and to keep the Cheshires supplied from points of entry at Split airport and harbour, where the Royal Fleet Auxiliary supply ship Sir Galahad was moored. The controlling HQ for the NSE was in Divulje barracks: based on Cumming’s 11^th Armoured Brigade HQ, now called HQ BRITISH FORCE, BRITFOR, (he himself being Commander BRITFOR, or COMBRITFOR), it answered to the Joint HQ, JHQ, in Wilton. Thus the total British strength came to a shade over 2,400 troops.

      Co-located at Divulje barracks was half a squadron of Royal Navy Sea King helicopters from 845 Naval Air Squadron, 845 NAS, who were known as ‘junglies’ and their French equivalent with their Pumas, known as DETALAT. Although they were unable to fly over the Croatian border into B-H, the junglies and DETALAT busied themselves conducting navigational exercises in preparation for the day when diplomatic clearance and the situation in B-H would permit the first proving flights north.

      Somewhere over the horizon lurked the ships of a multinational flotilla, Op SHARP GUARD. High above both of us ran yet another operation, Op DENY FLIGHT, which consisted of two E3A Sentry AWACs, one above Hungary and the other above the Adriatic, which controlled fighter aircraft from NATO’s 5^th Allied Tactical Air Force, 5 ATAF, who were charged with preventing the warring factions in B-H from using their fixed and rotary wing military aircraft.

      All this military effort was in support of United Nations High Commission for Refugees, whose in-theatre head, Jose Maria Mendeluce, a Spaniard, was based in Zagreb. He was charged with the provision of humanitarian aid throughout Croatia and B-H. UNHCR’s logistics operation was even more complex than UNPROFOR’s. Bought by the UN’s World Food Programme, WFP, using donor countries’ money, aid would be moved into theatre by a variety of means, most usually by sea or road, to UNHCR’s primary depots at Zagreb and Metkovic in Croatia, and Belgrade in Serbia. From those nodes the aid would be trucked into Bosnia. Aid from Belgrade travelled through Serbia, crossed the River Drina into B-H over the Karakaj Bridge near Zvornik, moved through Serb-held territory to the front line at Kalesija just east of Tuzla, where it was escorted over the line and into Tuzla by B Squadron 9/12 Lancers. That operation had been unofficially christened Op CABINET by an exasperated Major Allan Abraham, the Squadron’s OC, who had been heard to comment that it would take a Cabinet decision to get a line crossing approved by the Serbs.

      The aid from Zagreb travelled south into B-H destined both for the Serbs in Banja Luka and the Bosnians in Central Bosnia. These 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,