BY MARTIN BELL OBE, MP
In January 1993 in Central Bosnia I met a British officer who was introduced to me as Captain Mike Stanley of the Parachute Regiment. There was something quietly out of the ordinary about him. He was not in the usual Sandhurst mould. He was reserved, self-contained, intense and fiercely loyal to the cause he was serving, which was to save as many lives as possible under the inadequate mandate of the UN peacekeeping force. He was at that time the interpreter and adviser to Brigadier Andrew Cumming, the first commander of British Forces in Bosnia. He went on to work for Lieutenant Colonel Bob Stewart of the Cheshire Regiment, Brigadier Robin Searby and Generals Rose and Smith, the British commanders of UNPROFOR in Sarajevo. He served longer in the Bosnian war than any other British soldier.
His real name was Milos Stankovic. His father was a Serb and his mother was partly Serb and partly Scottish. Both had served the Allied cause in Yugoslavia in the Second World War, and had been lucky to escape to England with their lives. Their son, a British citizen, chose a military career. He was accepted by the Parachute Regiment, and served in Northern Ireland, Mozambique and the Gulf. When the Bosnian war broke out he was one of only three soldiers in the British Army who spoke the language fluently. It seemed an advantage at the time – or at least an advantage to everyone but himself.
His value to successive British commanders was that he could translate the people as well as the language. Tito’s illusion of ‘Brotherhood and Unity’ fractured into barbarism, and competing warlords dragged their peoples into an abyss of psychotic savagery and primeval horror. These leaders were as indifferent to suffering on their own side as on the others’. Betrayal, mendacity and manipulation were their common currency. At prisoner exchanges they traded in bodies both dead and alive – and the dead, it seemed, mattered more to them than the living. Stankovic called this necrowar. He did not share their values but he understood their mentality. The Balkan warlords on one side and the International Community on the other glared at each other with incomprehension across a great divide. The captain from the Parachute Regiment could make sense of each to the other across that barrier.
He also saved lives. He rescued a wounded Muslim woman under fire in Vitez. With another British officer of similar background, known to us as Captain Nick Costello, and with the approval of the UN Commander, he smuggled scores of people out of the besieged city of Sarajevo – Muslims, Croats and Serbs alike – to join their families abroad. He helped to unblock UN convoys and to negotiate cease-fires. His mission was to win the trust of the Serbs, and he did so. They knew of his origins, but they also knew that he was not ‘one of them’. ‘Captain Stanley is a nice enough guy,’ the Bosnian Serb Vice-President Nikola Koljevic was quoted as saying to a colleague, ‘but you must always remember that his loyalty is to his Queen and his Commanders.’
He served with honour and distinction and received the MBE from the hand of the Queen. He was the outstanding liaison officer of his time. He did for Britain in the 1990s what Fitzroy MacLean had done in the 1940s, and in the same turbulent corner of Europe. Whenever Milos Stankovic crossed over into Bosnian Serb territory he described it as going to the ‘Dark Side’.
In April 1995, after serving in Bosnia for the greater part of two years, he returned from that theatre of operations and resumed his military career. By this stage he had been promoted to major while in Bosnia. He served as a company commander with the 1st Battalion of the Parachute Regiment and was accepted into the Joint Services Staff College at Bracknell.
It was there on 16 October 1997, two and a half years after leaving Bosnia, that he was arrested by the Ministry of Defence Police under the Official Secrets Act, on suspicion of having spied for the Bosnian Serbs. Neither the origin nor the precise nature of the allegations was ever made clear.
By that time I had embarked on a new career as a Member of Parliament. He would not have been allowed to speak to me had I still been a journalist, but as an MP I could contact him. I offered to help because I knew the man and was convinced of his innocence. I also knew he was totally alone. There is no lonelier soul on the planet than a British soldier arrested under the Official Secrets Act. The Army at that stage had not even provided a ‘soldier’s friend’, the basic right of any soldier facing a serious charge.
His treatment at the hands of the MoD Police is a story in its own right. He was extraordinarily well served both by his lawyer, Steve Barker, and by his ‘soldier’s friend’, Brigadier Andrew Cumming, who was eventually appointed, as Milos Stankovic’s choice, into that role. All I will say at this point is that the conduct of the inquiry was hostile and prejudicial, and should be used in our police academies for years to come as the textbook case of how not to conduct an investigation.
One of the many injustices of the police inquiry, in which an innocent man’s rights were flagrantly violated, was the sheer inordinate length of it. Stankovic was thirty-four when it started, and thirty-six when the papers were finally passed to the Crown Prosecution Service. One advantage of this, however, was that it gave him the time to reflect on his years as a soldier of peace in Bosnia and to set down his account of them.
That account is what follows. It is the best book yet written on the Bosnian war, certainly including my own. It is more than that. It is the most extraordinary soldier’s story that I have ever read.