Bosnian Inferno

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‘I thought he’d retired.’

‘He had. He’s been reinstated, presumably just for this one show.’

‘Christ, he must be about forty-five by now. It can’t be anything too strenuous.’

Chris laughed. ‘I shouldn’t say anything like that when he’s around. He didn’t look too decrepit the last time I saw him.’

‘Maybe. Who’s Number Four?’

‘Sergeant Wilkinson. Training Wing.’

‘I know him. At least, I’ve played football with him. He must be about thirty-five…’

‘Hey, I’ve turned thirty, you know. Someone obviously decided they needed experience for this one, and you were just included to provide some mindless energy.’

‘Probably,’ the Dame said equably. ‘Wilkinson always reminds me a bit of Eddie. London to the bone. A joker. He’s even a Tottenham supporter.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Chris said, and both men were silent for a few moments, thinking of their old comrade, who had died in the village by the jungle river in Colombia. Probably with some witty rejoinder frozen on his lips.

‘How was your Christmas?’ the Dame asked eventually.

‘Fine,’ Chris said, though he’d spent most evenings desperately bored. ‘Yours?’

‘It was great. My sister got married yesterday, and I had to give her away. It was great,’ he said again, as if he was trying to convince himself.

Chris looked at his watch as he turned the jeep in through the gates of the Stirling Lines barracks. ‘Time for a brew,’ he said.

The water-buffalo’s head which reigned over ‘the Kremlin’s’ briefing room – a memento of the Regiment’s Malayan days – seemed to be leaning slightly to one side, as if it was trying to hear some distant mating call. Forget it, Docherty thought, you don’t have a body any more.

He knew the feeling, after the previous night’s evening in the pub with old friends. The good news was that he and Isabel couldn’t be drinking as much as they thought they were – not if his head felt like this after only half a dozen pints and chasers.

‘Bad news,’ Barney Davies said, as he came in through the door. ‘Nena Reeve seems to have gone missing. She’s not been to work at the hospital for the last couple of days. Of course, things being the way they are in Sarajevo, she may just be at home with the flu and unable to phone in. Or she may have been wounded by a sniper, or be looking after a friend who was. They’re trying to find out.’

‘MI6?’

‘Presumably. Did Robson get here all right?’

‘Yes, boss,’ a voice with a Wearside accent said from behind him. The Dame and Chris filed in, swiftly followed by Razor Wilkinson.

Docherty got to his feet, shook hands with the new arrivals, and then took up a position half-sitting on the table at the front, while the other four arranged themselves in a semicircle of upright chairs.

He began by introducing everyone. ‘You two have been recommended to me by the CO,’ he told Chris and the Dame. ‘Though you may wish he hadn’t by the time we’re finished. We’re going to Bosnia, gentlemen,’ he added, almost as an afterthought.

He went through the whole story from the beginning, all the while keeping a careful watch on the two new men’s faces. The mere mention of Bosnia seemed to have brought a gleam into the eyes of the lad from Sunderland, and as Docherty talked he could almost feel the Dame’s intense eagerness to get started.

The Essex lad was a different type altogether: very cool and collected, very self-contained, almost as if he was in some sort of reverie. There were a couple of moments when Docherty wasn’t even sure he was listening, but once he’d finished his outline it was Chris who came up with the first question, and one that went straight to the heart of the matter.

‘What are we going in as, boss?’ he asked.

‘That’s a good question,’ Barney Davies said. ‘You’ll be flying into Split on the coast of Croatia, and while you’re there waiting for transport to Sarajevo – which may be a few hours, may be a few days – your cover will be as supervisory staff attached to the Sarajevo civilian supply line. Once you’re in Sarajevo…well, not to put too fine a point on it, you’ll just be one more bunch of irregulars in a situation which is not too far from anarchy.’

‘But we have troops there, right?’ the Dame asked. ‘The Cheshires and the Royal Irish.’

‘One battalion from each,’ Davies confirmed, ‘and a squadron of Lancers, but they’re under UN control, and that means they can only fire off weapons in self-defence. Their own, not yours. You should get some useful intelligence from our people out there, but don’t expect anything more. The whole point of this op, at least as far as our political masters are concerned, is to restore our reputation as peace-keepers, with the least possible publicity…’

‘You make it sound like the Regiment has a different priority, boss,’ Razor said, surprising Docherty.

‘I think it might be fairer to say we have an additional priority,’ Davies said. ‘Looking after our own. John Reeve has been an outstanding soldier for the Regiment, and he deserves whatever help we can give him.’

There was a rap on the door, and an adjutant poked his head around it. ‘The man from the Foreign Office is here, boss,’ he told Davies.

‘Bring him through,’ the CO ordered. ‘He’s going to brief you on the local background,’ he told the four men.

A suited young man, carrying a briefcase in one hand and what appeared to be a large wad of maps in the other, walked confidently into the room. He had longish, curly hair, circular, black-framed spectacles, and the overall look of an anorexic Malcolm Rifkind.

‘This is Mr Castle, from the Foreign Office’s Balkan Section,’ Davies said formally, as he walked across to make sure the door was firmly closed. Docherty suddenly realized how unusual it was for the CO to introduce a briefing. He wondered how many other members of the Regiment knew of this mission. If any.

‘He is going to give you a basic introduction to what the newspapers now like to call “the former Yugoslavia”, the CO went on. ‘I know you all read the Sun voraciously,’ he added with a broad smile, ‘so most of what he has to say may be only too familiar, but just in case you’ve missed the odd page of detailed analysis…Mr Castle.’

The man from the Foreign Office was still struggling to fix his unwieldy pile of maps to the Kremlin’s antique easel. Chris gave him a hand.

‘Good morning,’ Castle said finally, in a voice that was mercifully dissimilar to Malcolm Rifkind’s. ‘Despite your CO’s testimonial to your reading habits, I’m going to assume you know nothing.’

‘Good assumption,’ Razor agreed.

Castle grinned. ‘Right. Well, Yugoslavia, roughly translated, means Land of the Southern Slavs, and these Slavs originally came south to populate the area more than a thousand years ago. The peoples we now call the Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Bosnian Muslims are all descendants of these Slavs. They are not separate races, any more than Yorkshiremen are a separate race from Brummies, no matter what Geoff Boycott might tell you. If you visited an imaginary nudist colony in Bosnia you wouldn’t be able to tell a Bosnian Muslim from a Slovene, or a Serb from a Croat.’

He paused for breath, and smiled at them. ‘What these peoples don’t have in common is history. I’m simplifying a lot, but for most of the last five hundred years, up to the beginning of this century, the area has been divided into three, with each third dominated by a different culture. The Austrians and sometimes the Italians were dominant in Slovenia, Croatia and along the coast, imposing a West European, Catholic culture. In the mountains of Bosnia and Hercegovina – here,’ he said, pointing at the map, ‘there was a continuous Turkish occupation for several centuries, and many of the Slavs were converted to Islam. In the east, in Serbia and to a lesser extent in Montenegro, the Eastern Orthodox Church, with its mostly Russian cultural outlook, managed to survive the more sporadic periods of Turkish domination. In fact, fighting the Turks was probably what gave the Serbs their exaggerated sense of identity.

‘So, by the time we reach the twentieth century we have a reasonably homogenous racial group divided into three cultural camps. Rather like what Northern Ireland might be like if a large group of Arabs had been settled there in the seventeenth century, at the same time as the Protestants.’

‘Christ almighty,’ Razor muttered.

‘A fair comment,’ Castle agreed. He seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘The problem with people who only have cultures to identify themselves is that the cultures tend to get rabid. Since much of the last millennium in the Balkans has been a matter of Muslim versus Christian there’s plenty of fertile ground for raking up old Muslim–Croat and Muslim–Serb quarrels. And in both world wars the Russians fought the Austrians, which meant Serbs against Croats. In World War Two this relationship reached a real nadir – the Croats were allowed their own little state by the Nazis, managed to find home-grown Nazis to run it – Ustashi they were called – and took the chance to butcher a large number of Serbs. No one knows how many, but hundreds of thousands.

‘But I’m getting a bit ahead of the story. Yugoslavia was formed after World War One, partly as a recognition that these peoples did have a lot in common, and partly as a way of containing their differences for everyone else’s sake. After all, the war had been triggered by a Bosnian Serb assassinating an Austrian archduke in the mainly Muslim city of Sarajevo.’

Castle checked to see if they were awake, found no one had glazed eyes yet, and turned back to the map. ‘There are a few other minor divisions I should mention. The Albanians – who are a different racial group – have large minorities in the Serbian region of Kosovo and in Macedonia. Macedonians are not a separate ethnic group, and their territory has been variously claimed by Bulgaria – which claims that Macedonians are just confused Bulgars – and Greece, which claims etc., etc.’ He grinned owlishly at them.

‘It’s a right fucking mess, then,’ Razor observed.

‘But all their own,’ Chris murmured.

‘At the end of the last war a temporary solution appeared – communism. It was the communists, under Tito, who led the guerrilla war against the Germans, and after the war they took over the government. The ethnic tensions were basically put on ice. Each major group was given its own state in what was nominally a federal system, but Tito and the Party took all the important decisions. The hope was that the new secular religion of communism would see the withering away of the old national-religious identities – everyone would have a house and a car and a TV and be like every other consumer.

‘But when Tito died in 1980 there was no one of the same stature to hold it all together. The system just about stumbled along through the eighties, with the Party bosses holding it all together between them, but when communism collapsed everywhere else in eastern Europe, the rug got pulled out from under their feet.

‘What was left was an economy not doing that badly, at least by other communist standards, but a country with nothing to bind it together, and of course all the accumulated grievances came pouring out. Under Tito the richer areas like Slovenia and Croatia had been forced to subsidize the poorer ones, but they hadn’t been given much of anything in return. The Serbs, who dominated the Party and the federal institutions – and particularly the national army – had no interest in changing things, and the power to stop those who had. Not surprisingly the Slovenes and Croats decided to opt out.

‘Slovenia presented no great problems, except that it set a precedent – if Slovenia could go, then why not Croatia? The trouble was that Croatia had a large Serb minority, and the Croat leaders made no effort whatsoever to reassure it.

‘By this time everyone was acting very badly, like a bunch of mad prima donnas. The Croats decided to secede from Yugoslavia, and their Serb minority areas decided to secede from Croatia. That was a year and a half ago, the summer of 1991, and both secessions have stuck, so to speak. Croatia has been recognized as an independent state, but since the cease-fire at the beginning of this year the Serb areas are nominally “UN-protected” – in other words under Serb military control. There’s no foreseeable hope of Croatia taking them back.