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

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 Royal Marines driver and a peculiar mini four-tonner known as a Renault-Bowden 44 (RB44). Each carried a satellite communications dish in the back which, in theory, could track satellites and communicate on the move. The cab resembled Concorde’s flight deck and sported radios, computers and a fax machine. Each of the teams was thus independent, could range throughout Bosnia and communicate with Split. The concept was flawed, however, as there was no room to carry an interpreter. The Cheshires, who had their own liaison officers, unkindly christened them ‘Cumming’s Commandos’. Lastly, there were the international mass media, for the most part reporting from Sarajevo or Central Bosnia, each to their own editors or desks.

      From what we could gather from the blizzard of information presented by Richard Barrons and Chris Lawton, Croatia and B-H were full of people either trying to kill each other, or trying to stop them doing it, or trying to feed those being killed; and, lastly, there were lots of people charging around gathering all sorts of information and telling disparate groups and organisations all about it. A perfect nuthouse.

      All we really wanted to know was who we’d be working for, where and when we’d be off.

      Sam Mattock, our original contact on arrival at Split, brought us all down to earth. We were all farmed out to various locations. To my intense disappointment, I was to stay in Split as COMBRITFOR’s interpreter. ‘Up country’ was where things were happening and the last thing I thought I’d be doing was hanging around Divulje barracks kicking my heels. Fortunately, I kept my mouth shut.

      The remainder of the day was spent drawing Arctic clothing from the quartermaster’s stores and being processed into theatre, largely a matter of paperwork and queuing: the issue of blue UN ID cards, the filling out of next-of-kin forms and the surrender of our medical records to the Orderly Room. In return we were given a UN PX card which entitled us to buy spirits, wine and tobacco each month. Another card recorded the receipt of the only financial allowance in theatre – telephone money rated at $1.28 a day. This was supposed to offset the personal costs of phoning home. We were also issued, as medical aid, a 15mg morphine autojet syrette in its green polythene sleeve, which lived around one’s neck taped to the ID disc chain. Finally we signed for a pistol and thirty-nine rounds of 9mm ammunition, though these were kept locked in the armoury and only issued when needed.

      Divulje barracks was a large camp situated between the airport and the bay. Pre-war it had been home to a JNA air defence regiment and a seaborne special forces unit. As the rump of the JNA withdrew from Croatia into Bosnia and Serbia they had smashed up their barracks, ripped out fittings, broken windows, and, to ensure that they remained uninhabitable, had mined and booby-trapped the buildings and un-Tarmaced areas. When BRITFOR had first arrived the entire force, less the Cheshires’ Battle Group, which deployed straight up country, had been accommodated in the Hotel Medina while the Royal Engineers made Divulje habitable and safe in a rudimentary way.

      BRITFOR occupied five large, three-storey buildings in the north-eastern corner of the camp. Three were Messes – officers’, warrant officers’ and sergeants’, and 845 NAS. Another served as the HQ building while the fifth belonged to the HQ’s signal squadron. A central cookhouse fed all ranks on a rotational basis. Each of the long rectangular blocks was identical in build: three storeys high, at the end of each floor a large room, accessed by stone stairs, with a walk-out balcony. The room led to a long, gloomy corridor off which were a mass of rabbit hutch rooms or offices, depending on the function of the building. In the south-western corner of the camp was the helicopter dispersal area, hangars and 845’s Portakabin offices.

      The remainder of the camp’s buildings were given over to an HV unit of dubious identification. At least part of the unit was HOS, reputed to be the fanatical element of the HV and identified for the most part by its predilection for black uniforms and even blacker operations. A number of their members were foreigners from European countries including the UK and Eire. We were warned to keep well away from them. All official business was conducted between HQ BRITFOR and the camp’s HV commandant. The relationship was never an easy one and I suspect the Croats tolerated the British only because the latter had cleaned up the camp and were now paying through the nose for the privilege of using it. The pretence of mutual tolerance was only ever evident in that British and HV troops jointly manned the front gate.

      Sam Mattock was immensely friendly, cheerful and likeable, and always did his best to make me feel part of the team. When he told me of a New Year’s Eve party to which I was invited, I wasn’t too keen to go. I knew no one except John Chisholm, who, I discovered, was in charge of the United Kingdom Liaison Officers, UKLOs. Sam assured me that the Villa Sanda, on Ciovo island, was ‘an interesting place’ and that the evening would be a good laugh. On the grounds that it would at least be a good way to meet people, I reluctantly accepted his invitation.

      The restaurant was humming, crammed to capacity. The BRITFOR group was seated at a long table running the length of the room. Brigadier Cumming was at the far end, barely visible through a haze of smoke and a forest of green wine bottles. The more junior staff officers were seated at the other end, noisily cracking into the most enormous lobsters I’d ever seen. The rest of the restaurant was given up to two equally large parties of Croats who were doing their best to ignore us. The evening had started in the Mess, then a minibus had shuttled the party of about thirty to the Villa Sanda, about twenty minutes drive from Divulje. By the time we reached the restaurant, we were pretty well lubricated.

      The waitresses were all stunning, absolutely gorgeous, smiling and grinning, plump breasts bouncing above platters as they skipped between the tables. Must be something in the water I decided. They were all like that even in Split itself. With nothing to do during the day, five of us had begged a lift into Split,