In Harm's Way E-Book

Martin Bell

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 529

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Martin Bell's was BBC TV's principal correspondent during the war in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995. The original version of this passionate and personal account of the conflict was written while the war was still going on, some of it late at night in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo. In Harm's Way is not only about the progress of the war; it is about its origins, how it began and how it could have been avoided; it is about the human costs of war in which all the peoples of Bosnia became the victims; it is about a massive failure by the United Nations, beginning with an inadequate peace-keeping mandate and ending with the Srebrenica massacre; and it is about the practices of war reporting itself. And it is about the journalists in the thick of it, the oddballs and the idealists, the wild adventurers and hardened professionals who were caught up in this war and tried to make some sense of it. In the introduction to this new edition, marking the twentieth anniversary of the outbreak of hostilities, Martin Bell reflects on the impact of what he calls the most consequential war of our time.

Leseprobe

In Harm’s Way

‘Compelling … This acid, self-effacing and tautly written book is a journalistic jewel. The notes I made as I read it confirm gems of either description or analysis on almost every page … His caustic appraisal of the medium’s limitations must be read by all in our business … accurate, balanced and self-critical … It has humbled us all in the news business. I consider Martin Bell one of the greats’

– Nik Gowing in the British Journalism Review

‘In its portrayal of the ordeal of Bosnia, and especially Sarajevo, this is a powerful book. It is also one which has much to say about the process of television news-gathering’

– Richard Crampton in The Times Literary Supplement

‘[Bell’s] story is that of a civilized and passionate man cast into situations fraught with danger and livid with mankind’s bestialities … His sanity, clarity of vision and humanity are rare, especially coming from the savage world he inhabits and records for others’

– Martin Booth in the Independent

‘A travel book of the conscience’

– John Simpson

About the author

Martin Bell started as a trainee news assistant in the BBC Norwich newsroom in 1962. He joined the staff of BBC TV news in 1965, and his first foreign assignment (covering the overthrow of President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana) was in 1966. Since then he has worked on assignments in more than a hundred countries, including eighteen wars. From 1978 to 1989 he was the BBC Washington correspondent.

Martin Bell was awarded an OBE in 1992. He was also voted Royal Television Society Reporter of the Year in 1977 for his reports from Angola, and again in 1993 for his work in Bosnia.

On leaving the BBC he entered politics and was Independent MP for Tatton from 1997 to 2001. Since 2001 he has been a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF.

He has written six books of which this was the first.

Printed edition published in the UK in 2012 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

Previously published 1995, 1996 by the Penguin Group

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012 by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-84831-389-7 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-390-3 (Adobe ebook format)

Printed edition (ISBN 978-184831-388-0)

sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street,

London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

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Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Printed edition published in Australia in 2012

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PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Printed edition distributed in Canada by

Penguin Books Canada,

90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario M4P 2YE

Text copyright © 2012 Martin Bell

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

For Melissa and Catherine

Contents

In Harm’s Way

About the author

Title page

Copyright

Dedication

Map of Bosnia Herzegovina

Introduction to the 2012 edition

1. Marching As To War

2. Peacekeepers’ Accomplices

3. The Road To War

4. Homes From Home

5. Staying Alive

6. One Day in August

7. Tuna

8. Of Serbs and Satellites

9. Panorama – The Destination of Choice

10. Forcing the Peace

11. ‘Something Must Be Done’

12. Colonel Bob

13. Soldiervision

14. Court Martial By Blue-Eyed Stare

15. Of Men and Mandates

16. Shading the Truth

17. War is a Bad Taste Business

18. Arm Your Children

19. Days of Foreboding

20. A Day in the Life

21. Showdown

22. Darkest Before Dawn

23. Fainthearts Confounded

Epilogue

Map of Bosnia Herzegovina

Introduction to the 2012 edition

In Retrospect

Events pass from news into history and memories fade. In the blur of headlines and the frenzy of rolling news we regularly attach significance to things that are trivial and transitory and of no real importance at all, here today and completely forgotten tomorrow. This is especially so in an age when in politics and journalism we skim surfaces and confuse celebrities with heroes. Yet there are other events which cast long shadows and which we know, even at the time, will have a lasting impact. The war in Bosnia, which began in April 1992 and ended in December 1995, belonged in that second and more enduring category. After it was over, I chose as the location of my farewell report the Lion Cemetery in Sarajevo, a public park where the Bosnians had buried their dead because the city’s main cemetery was in no man’s land. Then and there, with the roll call of the victims as my witnesses, I called it the most consequential war of our time. And so it turned out to be.

This is a book about war and news and truth and the fault lines between them. The first edition was published two months before the Dayton agreement which silenced the guns. I wrote it entirely in the course of the war, concluding it by candlelight in my room in the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo: ‘It is night-time in a war without end, and the supposedly fearless war reporter is flinching from the snipers’ bullets as they whip past his window.’ The rattle of gunfire and glare of the parachute flares over the Jewish Cemetery seemed to give the project an added urgency. What I was attempting, not by design but by necessity, was not just a conventional account of the progress of a war – what we in TV news like to call the ‘bang-bang’ – but an explanation, driven by the circumstances, of how and why this appalling conflict began, whether it could have been avoided and why it was not stopped earlier. I was first of all trying to explain it to myself. We sleep-walked into it. How could it ever have happened? Did we really think that it was none of our business and that if we closed our eyes we could wish it away? Had we so little history that we had forgotten in which city Europe’s Great War began in 1914? Were ‘ancient hatreds’ a sufficient alibi for hand-wringing, shoulder-shrugging and passing by on the other side? It seemed to me then, and I believe even more strongly now, that the blame did not lie exclusively with those who were doing and directing the fighting on the ground. It was spread more widely. And there are lessons still to be learned from it twenty years later.

Having been there at the time, and seen the documents provided to me by a diplomat of insight and experience, I am more than ever convinced that the charge I made in Chapter 3, of Western complicity in the war in Bosnia, was not only true and justified but understated. It was not thought through but had to do with unintended consequences. I could hardly believe that anything so cynical could have been contemplated, but sadly I had no need to be tentative. The truth itself is sometimes hard to believe.

The British in particular had a compelling case to answer. They reached an understanding with the Germans, for reasons of domestic political expediency on both sides, which lit the fuse for the war in Bosnia.

Early in December 1991 Prime Minister John Major paid a private visit to Chancellor Kohl in Bonn. With a general election imminent, he was seeking German agreement to the vital British opt-out clauses in the Maastricht Treaty. Based in Germany at the time, I waited in vain outside the Chancellor’s bungalow that night to discover what went on. The delegation came and went and I was none the wiser. But the Prime Minister was able, on his return, to subdue the clamorous Euro-sceptics in his party (then as now) by delivering victory on the politically toxic issue of the Maastricht Treaty. Was it ‘Game, set and match’? asked a helpful hack. The Prime Minister’s spokesman gratefully agreed. Our Parliament still resounds to similar arguments.

Ten days later the foreign ministers of the twelve EEC countries met in Brussels, as Yugoslavia disintegrated, to decide whether or not to recognize the embattled and newly independent nation state of Croatia. The river town of Vukovar had fallen and Dubrovnik on the coast was under attack. The Croats exploited their sacrifices. When the meeting began the pro-recognition Germans were in a minority of three to nine. Then the arithmetic changed. Late at night Germany’s long-serving Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher reminded his British counterpart, Douglas Hurd, of the German helpfulness over Maastricht. Seeking instructions, Hurd passed on this politically freighted reminder to Downing Street. In the early hours of the morning of 17 December 1991 the British agreed to the recognition of Croatia and all twelve countries swung into line.

The rest is bloodstained history. The Bosnian authorities, mainly but not entirely Muslim, pressed ahead with their own independence referendum, in March 1992. The Serbs boycotted it. Bosnia declared its independence. The war began a month later, as had been predicted by Lord Carrington, Chairman of the now doomed Hague Conference, to devastating effect. Some of its episodes were genocidal. I wrote this book of instant history because I felt it would not wait and would better be written by someone who was there. Historians are seldom eyewitnesses.

I know two things now that I did not then. One is the body count. The final figure is still not exact, for not all the dead were found. But thanks to the work of the International Commission for Missing Persons we now know that some 98,000 people were killed in the course of that war. The other was the planned and coordinated nature of the Bosnian Serbs’ putsch at the start of it to defend themselves with maximum aggression. With a little over 30 per cent of Bosnia’s population they seized 50 per cent of its territory.

After it was all over I gave evidence four times to the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. On the last of these occasions, in December 2010, I was a witness in the trial of Radovan Karadzic, the former President of the Bosnian Serbs. In a tract called ‘My Defence’, written during his time as a fugitive and what he now calls his ‘period of avoidance’, he had singled out Christiane Amanpour of CNN, John Burns of the New York Times and me as ‘media monstrosities’. When I visited him in his guarded cell in the basement he could not have been more affable. In open court he called me a ‘precious witness’. The Prosecuting Counsel introduced as evidence a speech he had given to the Bosnian Serbs’ Parliament during the war revealing that in April 1992 they had used the reserve structures of the old Yugoslav Defence Force (the TO) to seize strategic towns in which they were numerically a minority but a well armed one. Zvornik on the River Drina was one of these. My account of its capture and ethnic cleansing appears in Chapter 2.

All war reporting is glimpsed and fragmentary and seen through a glass darkly. Mine is no exception. Mostly you get the small picture but not the big one. But having re-read the chapters written sixteen years ago, I can find nothing that needs to be corrected except the casualty figures (some were too high and others too low) and no judgements that I would change or modify, except that the Maastricht trade-off seems even more disreputable now than it did then.

These judgements include the degree of Western complicity in the tragedy and the inadequacy of the UN force, UNPROFOR, with its softball mandate and lethally unsafe ‘safe areas’; it was a protection force that spectacularly failed to protect. They include my belief in the failure of the traditional ‘bystander journalism’ of the time, championed by BBC orthodoxy and hiding behind the mantra of neutrality, to deal capably with the horrors of a prolonged civil war which was also a war of external aggression. They include my insistence that there was no monopoly of evil or of suffering in the course of this war. The Serbs also suffered, terribly: visit their military cemetery at Sokolac and you will see the extent of their casualties. And most of all I stand by my conviction that none of this had to happen.

A great deal happened between the first edition of In Harm’s Way in 1995 and the second in 1996. Not only did the Dayton agreement end the fighting, but there was a growing awareness of the reality and horror of the Srebrenica massacre in July 1995. The two were related. It was the massacre, in which more than 8,000 Muslim men of military age were killed in cold blood, which made the NATO action of late August and early September 1995 imperative. The Serbs themselves were no longer in denial after footage of some of the killings, by a Serbian police unit known as the Scorpions, was introduced as evidence in The Hague in 2005. It was a ‘tour video’ of their excursion from the town of Sid, a souvenir, starting with a religious blessing and ending with a hellish sequence of roadside executions. Only Nora Beloff, former political correspondent of the London Observer and an ardent pro-Serb, believed to the end that the massacre was an anti-Serb fiction and slander. She would summon me to her flat in Swiss Cottage and try to persuade me that it never happened. But she was right about one thing: she called it ‘The avoidable war’. She died, still in denial, in 1997.

Truth and Reconciliation

The years that followed have been notable more for truth – because the emerging truth is undeniable – than for reconciliation. Ten years after the Srebrenica massacre the UN Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, made a statement acknowledging that while the blame lay first and foremost with those who had planned it and carried it out, great nations had failed to respond adequately. The UN itself had made serious errors of judgement and the memory of it would haunt the UN’s history for ever.

But Mr Secretary-General, we knew that at the time and I am sure that you did too. Yet what did you say at the time? You called Bosnia a ‘rich man’s war’ and on your well-remembered visit to Sarajevo on 30 December 1992 you said: ‘l can give you a list of ten places where you have more problems than in Sarajevo.’ This was addressed at the height of the war to the hundreds of thousands caught up in it. And if to this day it haunts the UN’s history that is because it damned well should.

Douglas Hurd took a similar view to the Secretary-General’s in answer to a blame-laying speech I delivered in Chichester Cathedral on the first anniversary of the massacre. I said: ‘A foreign policy based only on considerations of national interest, and not of principle, is not only immoral but inefficient.’ He replied: ‘I can think of eight civil wars raging at this moment, with others simmering. Britain cannot be expected, even with allies, to intervene each time.’ (Evening Standard, 16 July 1996)

The international community remained disengaged, or no more than half interested, and the Bosnians were warned by its representatives that it would not lift much of a finger to help them. ‘Don’t dream dreams’, said the British negotiator David Owen on one of his many peace-seeking visits to Sarajevo. The Bosnians stored that one in their memory bank.

Historical gestures matter in the Balkans, where history seems so recent and immediate that it can reach out and grab you by the throat. The Bosnian Serbs, under pressure from the European Union, made a formal apology in November 2004: ‘The Bosnian Serb Government shares the pain of the families of the Srebrenica victims, is truly sorry and apologizes for the tragedy.’ The Serbian President Boris Tadic, who was himself born in Bosnia, tearfully laid a wreath at Srebrenica in July 2010 on the fifteenth anniversary of the massacre. He also visited the still shattered Croatian town of Vukovar in the cause of reconciliation. He explained that the arrest of Karadzic and Mladic was not done primarily – or at all – to ease Serbia’s path into the European Union. It was done because it was a moral imperative for his country. Serbia has been under new management since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in September 2000. Croatia is also under new management. Only Bosnia remains either under the old management or in the hands of new nationalists (and in many cases extremists) who have taken the place of the old ones. And that applies on both, or all three, sides.

The General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia Herzegovina was reached at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio and signed in Paris on 14 December 1995 by Presidents Tudjman of Croatia, Izetbegovic of Bosnia and Milosevic of Serbia (on behalf of the Bosnian Serbs). There is an account of its implementation in Chapter 23. It was negotiated by the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who died in December 2010. It bought peace at a high price. The price was a constitution so unworkable that it was a complex formula for seventeen years of constitutional deadlock. As I noted at the time, the Serbs were bombed into accepting their own peace plan. They were left with their own autonomous mini-state, Republika Srpska, with its own police force and its own institutions of government, within the supposedly unitary state of Bosnia Herzegovina. The Serbs were still part of Bosnia but in all essential functions they governed themselves. And 49 per cent of its territory was theirs, only 1 per cent less than what they seized in the first place.

The whole dysfunctional contraption was supervised by the European Union through a succession of High Representatives, with more powers than a colonial governor, and further powers added in 1997. The most vigorous of these viceroys was Paddy Ashdown, from 2002 to 2005, who did his best to kick-start the contraption by encouraging national institutions, dismissing recalcitrant politicians and freezing their bank accounts. But the Dayton agreement, which could not be overturned, stood in his way. The Bosniaks (the new name for the Bosnian Muslims) challenged its legality and became ever more insistent in their demands for the establishment of central authority. Their former Prime Minister and later President Haris Silajdzic, whom I knew and liked and had thought of as a moderate, turned out at this point not to be so moderate at all.

The peoples of Bosnia grew ever further apart. Nationalist politicians were elected and re-elected. Edicts of later High Representatives were increasingly ignored. Bosnia became a failing state, a nursery for crime and a byword for corruption.

The peace enforcers did their best to turn things around. They patrolled unceasingly and on one occasion even mounted a bank raid. In April 2001, soldiers of the NATO force, then called SFOR, blasted their way into the Herzegovcka Bank in Mostar. They included British Special Forces, who were a bit surprised to be ordered to rob a bank, but cracked on with the operation as soldiers do, and by all accounts rather enjoyed it. They did not take away cash, but computers and hard drives containing evidence of the funding of a secessionist movement by hard-line Croatian nationalists. For long periods since Dayton, Mostar had no municipal government at all. Despite the rebuilding of its famous bridge, it limped along as a city of two halves, its principal businesses being tourism and crime.

One of the effects of a civil war is that long after it is over people live not with each other but around each other, with as little contact as possible, like an estranged couple in a half-ruined house. That was the Croatian war’s legacy in Vukovar and the Bosnian war’s in Mostar, Srebrenica and other divided communities. You can encourage people, but you cannot force them, to live in peace and at ease with each other. The tensions were already there in Tito’s time. Some of the fiercest battles I have ever witnessed were fought on his Highway of Brotherhood and Unity.

Fourteen years after the Dayton agreement, and with Bosnia ignored by the international media and its ‘cold peace’ under serious threat, William Hague and Paddy Ashdown, once rival party leaders, sounded a warning about Bosnia’s drift and deadlock. They wrote: ‘What happens in Europe’s backyard matters: the consequences of Bosnia’s disintegration would be catastrophic. The breakdown of the country into independent ethnic statelets would not only reward ethnic cleansing – surely a moral anathema – but would also risk the creation of a failed state in the heart of Europe; a fertile breeding ground for terrorism and crime, and a monstrous betrayal of all those who survived the concentration camps, mass graves and displacement of the 1990s. Bosnia will not solve itself, nor will the prospect of EU integration be enough to pull the country back from the brink.’ (Financial Times, 30 December 2009)

The most consequential war? Just look at the context. Alongside the 1991 Gulf war and the war in Croatia it was an early test of the new world order (or I would say disorder) after the fall of the Berlin wall and the collapse of the Soviet empire. In 1991 the Arabs, including the Egyptians and Syrians, joined the Western democracies in reversing the Iraqi annexation of Kuwait. In early 1992 the United Nations brokered a ceasefire in Croatia. But Bosnia was just left in limbo to be fought for, year after year after year. And those doing the fighting were not only Muslims, Croats and Serbs, but a contingent of foreign fighters (we called them Mujahedin) allied to Bosnian government forces but not under their control.

The TV images that we broadcast worldwide, of tens of thousands of fleeing Bosnian Muslims, of broken mosques and toppled minarets, had a powerful impact in the Arab and Islamic world. Most of the response was humanitarian: in August 1992 I was flown into Sarajevo on the floor of a Saudi aid aircraft. Some of it was military. Fighters from a number of countries, including Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Iran, slipped across the border and set up bases in central Bosnia, starting from the summer of 1992. The hook-handed Abu Hamza was one of them. They fought against Croats and Serbs. They killed aid workers. None of their prisoners survived. Some were beheaded. They hacked to death 50 Serbian prisoners of war in Vozuca in September 1995. Despite this, no foreign fighter was ever indicted in The Hague. Their actions were hardly mentioned in the news coverage, because we knew so little of them, which was to our discredit. We spoke of the Muj in hushed tones and never went anywhere near them for fear of our lives.

Someone one day should write a treatise on The Power of the Road Block, the most effective form of censorship yet devised. I can now assert what I could merely hint at before, that Bosnia’s war and its war crimes were not evenly reported on all sides. Some of us were partisan. None of us had an unobstructed view. We were sometimes blind-sided. From August 1994 we were denied access to Serb-held territory. It was the crimes against the Muslims, being preponderant and so publicly known, that had the worldwide impact. When the war was over the history and legend of those atrocities, whether committed by Croats in Ahmici or by Serbs in Srebrenica, were powerful agents in recruiting jihadists to fight their holy wars in other countries and other ways.

Two of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, in their martyrdom videos, gave the war in Bosnia as one of their reasons for signing on. So there was actually a linkage between the siege of Sarajevo and the destruction of the Twin Towers. It could hardly have got more consequential than that.

But then it did. When regime change came to the Western democracies after the Bosnian catastrophe, as in Britain in 1997, incoming governments believed the lesson to be learned from earlier weakness, both perceived and real, was that they should be more robust in facing future challenges to the new world order. In his landmark Chicago speech of April 1999 Tony Blair declared: ‘We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure.’ His government responded forcefully and with some success in Sierra Leone and Kosovo – and then, with the direst consequences, in Iraq. Put simply, the outcome was that in seeking to avoid another Bosnia we found ourselves in another Vietnam.

So why was intervention right in Bosnia but wrong in Iraq? Here I can speak only from my personal experience of war zones. Each case is unique and different. Certain conditions have to be met. First, the intervention must be unambiguously lawful under the Charter of the United Nations or a specific authorising resolution. Second, it must be proportionate, as required by the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war. Third, it must have widespread public support: there is no lonelier soul on the planet than a soldier in an unsupported war. Fourth, it must be doable. Bosnia in 1995 met all four conditions. Iraq in 2003 met none of them. And in Iraq there wasn’t even a plan for peace. As one of the British commanders put it: ‘We had no plan for day two.’ Another described it as a ‘catastrophic success’. Our political leaders’ military inexperience can have the most perilous consequences, both for us and for others. Having never served in uniform themselves, they have insufficient understanding of what the use of armed force can achieve – and, just as important, what it cannot.

News, War and Politics

Looking back on it, I would say that the quaintest parts of this narrative from all those years ago were the ones about our way of doing the business – the logistics, the ‘homes from home’, the techniques of newsgathering, the encounters with warlords and the ever-changing strategies for surviving the war as well as reporting it.

A working relationship with warlords was crucial to the enterprise. I was once taken to task for my friendship with a notorious paramilitary commander. If we had dealt only with people we liked we might just as well have packed up and gone home. We used to report wars among the people at least some of the time from being among the people ourselves. All that changed after 9/11. Reporters were singled out for kidnapping, ransom and execution. They therefore retreated to green zones, bunkers and the rooftops of hotels and TV stations, or else they became embedded with military units. (There is an account of the birth of embedding in Chapter 1.) Independent and free-ranging journalism lost its foothold. At the same time TV news, being more remote from the here and now, became less of a reporting and more of a performing art. There was much arm-waving and use of style coaches and lip gloss, even by the men. This blend of the journalistic and the theatrical was promoted by the BBC’s Head of Newsgathering Vin Ray, who had been my producer in Sarajevo when I was wounded. He called it ‘telling a story’ and ‘being in the moment’. I took a dim view of it and wrote a gloomy piece for an American academic magazine which I called ‘The Death of News’. Look at it now: is it TV news any more, or Strictly Come Reporting? We used to do things differently, and how we did them is recorded in these pages.

Today’s practitioners may find it hard to believe, but in those days the satellite dish was our servant and not our master. We travelled around, found things out and then reported them, by way of the dish but without being chained to it. There was little editorial interference, except in the censoring out of the bloodshed. (I deal with this in Chapter 17.) Mark Damazer, then the editor of BBC TV’s main news programme, told me once that he wished to know more about what I was up to, but since I was in the line of fire and he was not he would continue to leave me alone. The foreign duty editor did ask one day what my report was going to be about; I told him gently that it was too early to know, but I was confident that it would be about a minute and forty two seconds.

The principal players in this war story met with mixed fortunes thereafter. The Serbian warlord Arkan (Zeljko Raznatovic) was gunned down in the Intercontinental Hotel in Belgrade in 1999. Presidents Izetbegovic of Bosnia, Tudjman of Croatia and Milosevic of Serbia are also no longer with us. Milosevic died in custody in The Hague. After prolonged manhunts, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were also sent to The Hague. Both are on trial, Karadzic conducting his own defence and Mladic defiant but in visibly failing health. Nikola Koljevic, the Bosnian Serbs’ Vice-President, shot himself at the time of the Dayton Agreement. Jovan Zametica, their foreign policy adviser, went into exile in Montenegro with the intention of writing a book. (He had with him a pile of documents and was looking for a publisher.) He, like Koljevic, had been a professor. So many professors, I reflected at the time, but so little common sense and understanding to show for their professorships. Sometimes clever people can be more stupid than stupid people. And so it was not only in Bosnia but in some of the gilded chancelleries of Europe.

Most of the press gang too are no longer in the field. My friend and principal cameraman, the brave and mountainous Nigel Bateson, decided that he would soldier no more and retreated to South Africa. Christiane Amanpour of CNN went on to TV super-stardom in the USA and beyond. Kurt Schork of Reuters, the standard-bearer of the press corps who had survived so many hazards in Bosnia, was killed by rebels in a tin-pot ambush in Sierra Leone in May 2000. The road to Sarajevo airport was renamed in his honour: it is now the Ulica Kurta Schorka. Kurt stood his ground and shook the tree. He was the most admirable man I ever met.

The UN soldiers moved onward and some of them upward. Very few are still serving. The UNPROFOR liaison officer Captain Mike Stanley of the Parachute Regiment (real name Milos Stankovic) was disgracefully arrested in 1997 by the Ministry of Defence Police on suspicion of spying for the Serbs: he was of course completely cleared, but it ended his army career. Lieutenant-Colonel Bob Stewart, commanding officer of the Cheshires from 1992 to 1993, is now Conservative MP for Beckenham. Brigadier Richard Dannatt of 4 Brigade, who invented ‘manoeuvre peace-keeping’ in 1995, rose to be Chief of the General Staff. Major Graham Binns, the company commander of the Prince of Wales’s Own in Gornji Vakuf in 1993, became the general responsible for a larger-scale withdrawal from Basra in 2008, which was Gornji Vakuf writ large; he specialized in tactical retreats. General Sir Michael Rose became Adjutant-General and, on retirement, an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. General Sir Rupert Smith wrote an acclaimed book about modern warfare, The Utility of Force, in which he drew on his tour of duty as commander of UNPROFOR. And on his retirement General Lew Mackenzie stood for the Canadian Parliament, for which I gently and most unwisely chided him.

For I too fell into politics, as much to my own surprise as anyone else’s. I entered the House of Commons in unusual circumstances as an Independent MP in 1997 and stayed there for four years. I found it as shocking as the war zones, perhaps even more so: I had expected to be shocked by the war zones, and met many inspiring and heroic people there and have written about them in this book. In the House in June 2000 I paid Kurt Schork of Reuters the tribute that was his due. And I initiated two debates on behalf of Milos Stankovic, formerly of the Parachute Regiment.

Wars bring out the best as well as the worst. That was not my experience of Parliament. With its petty point-scoring, institutional sleaze and regular sacrifice of principle to party politics it seemed to accentuate the negative. MPs routinely voted against measures that they believed in and in favour of measures that they didn’t. I once even saw a man trade in his vote for a peerage. With some distinguished exceptions, they seemed to me to be the most unprincipled group of people I had ever met. And this was before the expenses scandal. The greater their sense of entitlement, the less we admired them.

Which brings me back to the war in Bosnia, which began when it did, lasted for as long as it did and in some respects took the course that it did because in the Western democracies, including our own, expediency prevailed over principle. Our governments believed that the lives of their blue-helmeted soldiers mattered more than Bosnian lives and acted accordingly – in which case, why were they there? I am not being wise after the event, for I stand by every word I wrote during the event and with the gunfire of Sarajevo ringing in my ears.

‘The fact that war and genocide on a large scale have returned to the continent of Europe within fifty years of the last war and the last genocide, brings to the conflict in Bosnia an extra urgency and resonance. … So the debate about it is about more than Bosnia. It is about the future of the United Nations – if, after Bosnia, it has a future – and relations between the great powers. It is about the danger of a return to the anarchy of competing nation states. It is about the new world order, if there is one. It is about policy and principle, and whether we may insist on keeping a connection between them. It is ultimately about whether we care or who we are.’ (Epilogue to the first edition)

I observed at the time that we should need no lessons on the repercussive effect of a first shot fired in anger in Sarajevo. Twice in a hundred years it triggered a war. If we ignore this history it can so easily strike back at us again.

Martin Bell, 2012

1

Marching As To War

As the most junior soldier in the British army, Private 23398941 Bell M., I reported to Gibraltar Barracks in Bury St Edmunds on 18 June 1957. It was at that time the regimental headquarters and training depot of the Suffolk Regiment, in the days when there still was a Suffolk Regiment. It was built like a fortress in Victorian red brick, and indeed for all practical purposes it was a fortress. It kept the soldiers in and the rest of the world out with walls as high as a prison’s, and for all practical purposes it was a prison too. But I had no choice but to turn up for this particular rendezvous with destiny. For those were still the years of National Service.

My platoon sergeant, ‘Mac’ Sennett, was one of those larger-than-life characters, loud and proud, without whom the army would cease to function. Then as now it was run by its non-commissioned officers. Upon the arrival of yet another intake of unschooled recruits his first task was to instil into us a sense of our good fortune in happening to belong to the finest regiment the army had ever known. Others might be more fashionable, ours was the best. His way of doing this was to shout abuse at us. ‘Private Bell,’ he would exclaim, on spotting some perceived misdemeanour in my turnout or bearing, probably both, ‘you are a horrible little man. What are you?’

‘A horrible little man, Sergeant,’ I dutifully replied, since one’s faults are usually more obvious to others, and he didn’t seem open to persuasion. And so he went on down the line of Suffolk’s finest.

For one who was to hang out so much with soldiers from so many armies in so many wars, my own career in uniform was short and inglorious. I spent two years with the Suffolks, mostly on Internal Security duties, which was how the army classified its mission in trying to deal with the EOKA insurgency in Cyprus, then a British colony (I was one of those who failed to capture Colonel Grivas) and in putting down countervailing riots by Turkish Cypriots in Nicosia. Riots were our regimental specialty. They were to us as polo was to the cavalry or Arctic warfare to the Marines. The casualties in the riots of 1958 were not insignificant, and few of them were ours. Yet we were one of the more docile and disciplined county regiments. The Scots and Irish were exiled to the Troodos mountains. And so innocent of the politics was I, that I never for a moment inquired why we were there, or doing what we were doing.

The training depot also provided me with the first of life’s hurdles to fall at. This was the dreaded WOSB, the War Office Selection Board, the process used by the army to separate its sheep from its goats. Our intake included an unusually high number of recruits identified by the regular staff as ‘college boys’ – to be singled out for double punishment, extra fatigues and possible selection as officers. This led to a daunting leadership and initiative test in the grounds of a decaying country house in Wiltshire. We were divided into competing teams and given impossible tasks, for instance crossing an imaginary river using an assembly of poles, planks and ropes. I failed the test emphatically – on the grounds, I was told, of being too aggressive. (For ‘aggressive’ read ‘insecure’: I knew I was out of my league.)

Years later one of my favourite brigadiers, Robin Searby of the 9th/12th Lancers, was posted from duty in Bosnia to Westbury in Wiltshire, to preside over the Regular Commissions Board, and precisely the ordeal that I had failed in the place where I had failed it. (It hadn’t changed: this was a system that knew an ‘other rank’ when it saw one.) He kindly looked out my records from thirty-seven years back and sent them to me.

Unusually this candidate was invited to sit his intelligence tests twice. The first sitting disclosed an intellect that could best be described as adequate. An enlightened educational adviser was suspicious of the precision of the first result and ordered a resit. On the second paper clear evidence of the powerful intellect of which we are all aware shone through.

(Brigadiers use sarcasm as one of their principal weapons – they learn it on the sarcasm course at Staff College.)

According to the record, the deputy president of the board was wavering. But the president was adamant: ‘He directed that the candidate’s application was unsuccessful.’ Brigadier Robin concluded, ‘Was the nation robbed of the services of a great general?’ Hardly, I think: not even the services of an adequate second lieutenant. For two years I laboured in the intelligence section of the First Battalion, moving pins on maps and rising slowly through the ranks, but doing little to endear myself to the officer class that I had so signally failed to join.

‘The trouble with you, Corporal Bell,’ said Captain Pat Hopper, the Signals Officer, ‘is that you think too much.’ This was because I had amended one of his signals to improve the grammar. It was an unanswerable charge. I did then, and still do. The Intelligence Officer, Lieutenant (later Brigadier) Charles Barnes, put it more sweepingly: ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘am I always blessed with idiots in my section?’

The duties were not arduous and spare time was plentiful. To make use of it, I became secretary of the Corporals’ Mess and editor of the regimental magazine, Castle and Key. The first of these positions gave me a grandstand view of the drinking habits of the British soldier (a defending officer at a court martial described the absorption of nineteen pints at one sitting as ‘normal social drinking’). The second provided me with a platform for opinions about army life which, expressed otherwise, would have led me straight to the guardroom under close escort. Looking back on the file, I realize that the selection board fiasco was not forgotten. Rank still rankled. The following anonymous offering was entitled ‘Chain Reaction’:

The Major General cut himself while shaving,

And cursed the Brigadier, who madly raving,

Then cast the most chastising and infernal

Aspersions on the morals of the Colonel,

Who passed them to the Major; and he, rapt in

The darkest thoughts, relayed them to the Captain,

Who rocketed the Subaltern, who rose

To loose all hell among the NCOs,

Who in their wrath and mad acerbity

Picked on one last poor buckshee private – me.

The army in those days was still under Indian influence, and indeed had Indian camp-followers, but I am not sure that the word ‘buckshee’ is still understood today. In this context it means the last and most expendable character at the end of the chain of command. I am convinced that the process still happens.

Yet I learned. I learned so much that, against all probabilities and predictions, I am proud to have done my time in the Twelfth of Foot. I even acquired a tape of the regimental quick march and played it on Radio Two at Christmas 1993 along with ‘The Love Songs of Willie Nelson’ in what my foreign editor assured me was a selection of the most tasteless music he had ever heard. I counted that as a real achievement. I wear the regiment’s tie and attend some of its reunions. This is not simply because in this company I am one of the youngest old soldiers (it was amalgamated out of existence with a lesser-known outfit from Norfolk shortly after I left). It is also because of what Sergeant Sennett taught me all those years ago, on hazy summer afternoons in a field overlooking the Bury St Edmunds to Newmarket railway line. Some of it, about the naming of parts and judging of distances and identification of bushy-topped trees, has long since vanished from all but the vaguest memory. Nor have I been called on again to strip and reassemble a bren gun, or name its parts. But the fieldcraft stays with me still – about lines of fire and the uses of dead ground and the art of staying alive in dangerous places. I used it just about every day of my working life in Bosnia. I am convinced that helped to save my life and the lives of those I worked with. For which much thanks to Sergeant Sennett, who could galvanize the barracks and sound reveille with the unaided power of the human voice. It was actually worth being shouted at.

These days the BBC has devised its own form of National Service. It offers a Hostile Environments Course, run by exsoldiers, to teach fieldcraft and other survival skills to its camera teams and reporters. I excused myself on the grounds that I had already done mine – the theory with the Suffolk Regiment and the practice on various battlefields over the long years.

I left the army in June 1959 without regrets, except that I had been briefly and improbably promoted to the rank of acting sergeant, and I had wished to keep as souvenirs the red sash and swagger stick that went with it. Not many national servicemen got to be sergeants outside the Education Corps, and it was my single accomplishment in life to date, although I noticed that no one else was much impressed. I had no idea what the future held in store for me, except that it would begin with three years at King’s College, Cambridge. (If I had been smart enough to do the studying first, I could have avoided the soldiering altogether.) Of two things I was absolutely sure. One was that nothing I had learned in the army would ever be of the slightest use to me. The other was that I would never again be called on to wear its uniform. I was quite wrong on both counts.

There cannot be many people who get out of uniform at the age of twenty and back into it thirty-two years later, but that was what happened to me. They were different uniforms, of course. The old and scratchy battledress of ‘Dad’s Army’ had long since been replaced by more practical combat fatigues. My possible eligibility for these had to do with Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990. I calculated that there would clearly be an opening there for old-fashioned war correspondents, and I volunteered for the job at the same time as it came looking for me. It somehow seemed the natural thing to do – my last hurrah as a war reporter. So it was that in October 1990 I headed north on the highway from Dhahran into the Saudi desert, in search of one of the lost tribes of the British army. At least that was how I thought of them. I already suspected that my fate would depend on theirs.

What I found in their encampment was an hierarchical society in which power passed from one generation to another through the same ruling families, as it had done for hundreds of years. The chief man took advice from the elders of the tribe, but when he spoke they listened and obeyed. They had a strong sense of tradition and reverence for their predecessors. Their codes of dress were strict and sometimes eccentric. They not only lived in tents but wore them: after sundown, the tribe’s leaders sported strange green and gold tent-like hats, for no other reason than that they always had. Though they had a reputation as fearsome warriors, their conversation was generally pacific, about their pastimes of hunting and horse-riding. If they had ever touched strong drink before (and they sometimes spoke wistfully of it), they had none of it here. And much the same applied to their womenfolk, to whom they referred feelingly but with something of the same affection that they reserved for their horses. Neither wine nor women nor horses were with them here. This was my introduction to the British cavalry.

For the duration of the Gulf war – which was a short war with a long preamble – I was disconnected from civilian life and attached to the Queen’s Royal Irish Hussars, whose predecessors had charged at Balaclava but who were now better equipped for survival with the latest Challenger tanks. They belonged to the army’s Seventh Armoured Brigade, also known as the Desert Rats, part of the allied force arrayed against the Iraqis occupying Kuwait. Since they were preparing for what Baghdad had announced as the ‘Mother of All Battles’, I had expected to find them studying at least the Order of Battle of the Revolutionary Guards. They were immersed instead in back copies of Horse and Hound and Field and Stream.

They were professional soldiers, quite as tough as any infantry, but disguised as Irishmen of uncertain provenance, country gentlemen and various sorts of adventurer. Only the Londonderry accent of Arthur Currie, the Gunnery Officer, spoke plainly of where he came from. None came tougher, or gentler, than their commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Denaro, a former secret soldier whose exploits in the SAS were spoken of in whispers. Their numbers included a Deceptions Officer, Robin Watt, who was actually the regimental artist, with a sideline in sketching the desert wildlife. And they had resolved the problem of their Irish identity: the Irish Tricolour and the Red Hand of Ulster flew side by side among them. I liked them at once. But they knew as little of us as we did of them, and the period of mutual astonishment lasted for a while. They described us as PONTIs – Persons Of No Tactical Importance.

Each of the two brigades, the Seventh and the Fourth, had a team of seven journalists attached to it. These were divided into three categories: the pencils, the snappers and the oily rags. The pencils were newspaper reporters, the snappers were photographers and the oily rags were television people; a TV reporter was a hybrid, part pencil and part oily rag. The veteran pencil, Phil Jacobson of The Times, narrowly saved me from being the oldest man on the field of battle, for even brigadiers come so much younger nowadays. We were issued with finely printed accreditation cards: ‘Authority for a British War Correspondent Accompanying an Operational Force’. Mine had the serial number 001. The fiction held that we were with the army but not of it (which was supposed to be a significant distinction in the event of our being captured, though we somehow doubted if the Iraqis would see it that way). For all practical purposes we were soldiers without the means of self-defence. We were thrust into desert camouflage uniforms topped with a choice of steel helmets or sun hats. (Hats, floppy, ridiculous was the quasi-military way in which we described them, and only Kate Adie had the courage to wear one on camera – but then probably only she could have got away with it.)

We were under army command and discipline, we took battlefield first-aid courses, we were trained and equipped against chemical warfare, and we dug trenches. Did we ever dig trenches! We dug trenches until our picks broke and our hands blistered. We dug trenches until our news editors wondered why we weren’t filing any more. We dug trenches and then fell into them, because we were ordered to observe a total blackout at night. Our chief minder, Major James Myles, an infantryman of great charm but matching zeal, assured us that this was the professional and soldierly thing to do. It would earn us the respect of our peers, he said. He also then fell into a trench, and nearly missed the war on account of it. We dug trenches in the sand, and in the rock which lurked just under the sand, at every stop in that trackless desert from Saudi Arabia to Kuwait.

I had supposed that the era of trench warfare was over, but it was as if the new doctrines of rapid manoeuvre were for Staff College use only and did not apply to us peons in the desert. It gave the real soldiers great amusement to watch us, even more to photograph us for their family albums, with special focus on the discomfort of supposed television ‘celebrities’. And they never failed to advise us on our shortcomings. The Royal Engineers, the world’s leading experts in trenches and bunkers, and serious hoarders of mechanical diggers, talked a very good game indeed. One of them, surveying our attempt at a bomb shelter, said he would give us a nine point five for artistic impression but a rather lower mark for technical merit. I later forgave them in Bosnia, but only just, because of the dangers we shared.

At the time I suspected that these media response teams were no more than an ingenious scheme to raise the morale of the troops in the field and take their minds off the forthcoming war. We were the pick and shovel brigade, the Desert Storm cabaret act: we gave them something to laugh at and write home about. But what this was in fact, following the chaotic press arrangements of the Falklands campaign, was the army’s new way of dealing with the press.

It was not the preferred way. The preferred way, at least of the old army (cavalry and guards), was to summon the hacks to battlefield or barracks, inform them of the latest triumphs and achievements, and then send them packing back to their ink-stained lairs. But this was thought to be hardly appropriate in the world of the 1990s. The new way was not only to allow us full access under controlled conditions, with a travelling censorship system operating alongside, but to invite us to share the dangers and hardships of the front-line soldiers in such a way that we could hardly fail to identify with them. The process was called ‘bonding’, and – unusually for an army plan – it worked. Most plans do not survive their first brush with reality, but this was an exception. Or perhaps it was the Irish Hussars, and the Royal Scots Dragoon Guards and the Staffordshire Regiment with them, who made it an exception.

The plan was much criticized by those free spirits of journalism who operated outside the media response teams and who roamed the fringes of the battlefield gathering what they could. They believed that we had somehow defected from principled reporting and sold our souls for a mess of army combat rations. The most prominent of these, and the least restrained with his criticism, predicted a desert débâcle which never occurred. He wrote a lot about bodybags. Another denounced us as the tame press, ‘Mythmakers of the Gulf war’. To hell with them both, I thought, and went on shovelling.

In fact they probably had a better time of it than we did, and not only because they dwelt in hotels and dug no trenches. In the war’s long gestation period, which was an open season for creative and speculative journalism, they filed more than they knew. We, on the other hand, under canvas and censorship, knew more than we filed. Much more. We had the Desert Storm battle plan explained to us, all 120 pages of it, ten days before the first armoured units rolled across the Iraqi border. So did every front-line soldier: it was the way the modern army operated. But to have hinted at it, even had there been no censorship, would have endangered their lives as well as ours. Journalists are not good keepers of secrets, but only the desert knew ours.

We spent forty days and nights in that desert – there seemed to be some kind of resonance there. We filled our days with unusable briefings about the air war, and at night saw the distant flashes of falling bombs. Only one solitary Scud missile came back at us. We were assured that the opening ground bombardment would pack the explosive equivalent of 76,000 Scuds. We noted the language of euphemism in which this business was done: the Iraqis were never killed, but rather had their ‘assets written down’. It must have been quite uncomfortable for them. Military people talk this nonsense to hide from themselves the reality of what they are doing. Intercepted radio traffic was more direct, and included desperate pleas from forward Iraqi units for anything with four wheels on it to come and rescue their wounded. Censorship blocked that too.

Because of the censorship, and the total ban on anything operational, we were driven back on endless colour stories about Our Boys in the Desert. It was as tabloid as I have ever been – the Sun would have been proud of me. But we had in our gang of seven a real master of the art, Colin Wills of the Sunday Mirror, and I doubt if he gave me a passing grade on any of it, except for the story of Pedro the Rat. Pedro was the genuine article, a real desert rat, a rat with good PR. He was the friend and mascot of a military policeman, Andy Martorell, and lived in his top pocket. They directed the traffic together, on the principle that two pairs of eyes were better than one. The story generated such a response from the British public, who seem rather to like it when their army goes to war, especially in the company of animals, that not only did the soldier receive fan mail afterwards, but so did the desert rat: a parcel of hamster food sent by a home-front admirer.

Looking back on it, I confess that this was hardly serious journalism, and we probably were manipulated in some measure into composing such military mood music, if only because it was all that was available to us. But it was harmless enough, it satisfied a real public curiosity about what life was like for soldiers waiting for war – there were 32,000 families at home with a strong personal interest in the outcome – and it had us in the right place at the right time when the war eventually began.

Most of all it taught some necessary lessons both for this war and others that followed. These lessons were learned in the highly unofficial Arthur Denaro War College, a roughly landscaped patch of desert where the Irish Hussars held their regular study sessions, with their tanks and trucks parked around it. There was plenty of raw material for the inevitable sand-table, and a sign saying ‘Bad Guys’ was stuck into the map of Iraq. The curriculum was wide-ranging, from the plan of battle to the Iraqi defence belt and the role of the media in warfare. I was obliged to contribute a short speech, as the only one old enough to have served in Vietnam. I assured them that the American generals who now commanded them had been colonels in the Vietnam war, and had developed the current doctrine of overwhelming force from the incremental mistakes that had been made there. Whatever the Independent warned to the contrary, there was such a thing as the balance of forces, and it would not be a long-drawn-out war.

Most usefully, the desert academy taught me about fear and how to deal with it. These were lessons that applied as much to a reporter responsible for a TV news team of six or seven as to a colonel responsible for a regiment of 400: and I carried them over to the coming Balkan wars. ‘None of us,’ said Arthur Denaro, ‘can really conceive what a modern armoured battle is going to be like. We have to be aware that people are going to freeze up in the gunner’s seat and drivers will miss a gear.’ He taught us that there was nothing un-British in feeling fear or talking about it. ‘We are all going to be frightened. I’d be concerned if I had a guy who wasn’t frightened. It’s not fear that concerns me but how he is going to cope with it.’

I learned to cope with it by looking at the sunrise. It was a technique which I worked out in the Gulf and used again in Bosnia. As I always get up early, I would watch the sun rise and say to myself: today is the first day of the rest of my life, and I shall do whatever business I have to do, but I and those with me are going to conduct ourselves in such a way that we get to see that same sun set. So far we always have – with the shattering exception of a close and good friend who died in Bosnia. I was not with him at the time, and will never know whether it would have made any difference if I had been.

The prayer of Sir Jacob Astley before the battle of Edgehill in 1642 was also a useful standby: ‘O Lord thou knowest how busy I must be this day, if I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me.’

In truth we were more apprehensive about the Gulf war than we needed to be. I even went so far as to write a farewell letter to my daughters and to their mother, in case the worst should happen. (I left it in a safe place, and threw it away hurriedly and rather ashamedly afterwards: I had clearly been too much under the influence of the bodybag theorists.) But fear can strike unexpectedly, and is no respecter of rank. At Arthur Denaro’s last briefing, beside his tank ‘Churchill’ on the morning of the assault, I noticed that one of the officers was grey in the face and trembling badly; he bravely stayed with it – that was courage – but had difficulty functioning normally for the next hundred hectic hours.