‘A few days later Brigadier Cumming is back and five of us drive up to Kiseljak in the Discovery. That’s the three of us plus the Civil Adviser and Captain David Crummish who is the SO3 G3 Ops in the Split HQ. General Morillon has decided it’s time for a big pow-wow on how to withdraw the UN from B-H. As you can see, we were full of self-confidence. We called it the “Running Away Conference”. Cumming and all the COs have to attend. Come the day of the conference at BHC we’re all pretty redundant so Cumming suggests that, rather than hanging around the foyer of the hotel all day long, we take a trip into Sarajevo. He asks me to take along Jackson’s parcel and give it to Peter Jones to deliver. That morning the four of us – Simon Fox, the Civil Adviser, David Crummish and myself – leap into one of the Danish M113 APCs which run a couple of regular daily shuttles between the city and BHC. And off we go along that Dungeons & Dragons route of unpredictable checkpoints into Sarajevo.’
SEVEN Operation Grapple, Bosnia
Thursday 28 January 1993 – Sarajevo
She was quite the most fearsome woman I had ever seen. It wasn’t the one-piece blue camouflage ‘frontier guard’ uniform, nor the short-barrelled AK47 carbine slung over her shoulder. It wasn’t even the gruff manner of her questioning. It was the moustache, the beard and the horrible black hairy mole. I was quaking.
For ten minutes or so we’d clattered along the road out of Kiseljak. Since we hadn’t stopped we’d evidently sailed straight through K-l. The four of us were crammed into the back of the M113 along with one other passenger, a Ukrainian grinning like a maniac. Conversation was out of the question: the clattering of tracks, crashing of gears and high-revving engine all conspired to obliterate any other sound and threatened to loosen our fillings. Like rush-hour commuters we clung grimly onto leather straps as the tin can bounced and lurched alarmingly around corners and bends.
‘What’s in your bag?’ demanded the bearded woman after she’d inspected our ID cards.
‘Just personal effects … you know, for shaving and washing …’ I prayed she wouldn’t inspect it. Wrapped in a towel was the brown paper parcel. It was addressed to Pijalovic, Ulica Romanijska, Sarajevo and even had a photocopied map of the centre of town glued to it showing our destination. It was strictly against the rules by which the shuttle operated to smuggle letters or anything into the Muslims of Sarajevo. Fortunately, she didn’t seem too interested in the daysack and the door of the APC slammed shut again.
You have successfully negotiated the Bearded Woman of S-1 at Kobiljaca. Proceed to S-2!
After another twenty minutes of discomfort the APC once again lurched to a halt. We had no idea where we were. The journey in was utterly disorientating – no frame of reference, no windows. Just the incessant racket and the crazy Ukrainian. Again the door opened and this time an enormously bearded and long-haired Serbian soldier demanded to see our IDs. We were in a tight alley – S-4 – and close to the front line. As we set off, the Danish commander closed his hatch, rolled his eyes and with a sickly grin yelled, ‘Heavy shelling and fighting.’
First stop the airport. No one got out but a couple of UN soldiers squeezed in and off we sped again, racing through no-man’s-land. Even above the APC’s din the dull booming of mortar and shell rounds impacting somewhere could be heard. The APC swerved dangerously around the Stup graveyard and then accelerated down Sniper’s Alley. A couple of minutes later we ground to a halt. ‘PTT Building’ announced our taxi driver.
Stiffly we clambered out of our Tardis and blinked around at the unfamiliar surroundings. The experience had been disorientating, as if we’d stepped into an inefficient and sluggish transporter at Kiseljak. After much discomfort we’d popped out at the other end into another world. Gone were the steep sided, heavily forested, snow-covered valleys of Central Bosnia. Suddenly we were dumped into an unfamiliar world of urban warfare littered with burned-out high rise buildings, crumbling concrete, rusting and abandoned bullet-riddled trams, sagging, broken electric wires. And the incessant, dull booming of impacting shells and the popping of small arms which echoed up and down the valley that was Sarajevo.
Directly in front of us loomed a concrete monstrosity that resembled the superstructure of an aircraft carrier. Being some four or five storeys high and therefore open to shellfire damage, its windows were criss-crossed with brown masking tape. The edifice, something like an imaginery Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, was crowned with a shattered but still legible sign – PTT INZINJERING. The former Postal, Telephone and Telecommunications building was now UN HQ Sector Sarajevo.
To our left, beyond some dirty brown warehouses and what appeared to be a dilapidated cable-making gantry, rose a steep-sided hill. This was Zuc. To this clung myriad houses all with square brown roofs. With little apparent regard for town-planning, these houses had been carelessly and densely scattered across the hillside. Some were burned out. Most of the roofs sported gaping black holes which exposed shattered skeletal timbers. As we stared, one erupted in a cloud of dust. A boom echoed across the valley and bounced off the PTT building. It filled me with terror. This was worse than the valleys where the danger zones and front lines were at least known. This was completely random. A man could get killed here by accident.
We scuttled up a steep concrete ramp, past a French guard and across a raised car park filled with an odd assortment of vehicles, French APCs, armoured Land Rovers and Toyota Land Cruisers. All dirty off-white and adorned with various emblems – UN, UNHCR, UNICEF, ICRC. For such an imposing building, the back entrance was surprisingly modest: a small glass and aluminium door set into the far corner of the car park. The front, on Sniper’s Alley, was far too dangerous to use. A burly French Foreign Legionnaire Para from 2eme REP blocked our further passage to safety. Patiently we lined up and showed our IDs. The fact that we were in uniform and wearing blue helmets seemed to matter not a jot. This was the land of checkpoints, of ID cards and of hard men ‘with orders’.
Once we’d penetrated this UN citadel we found ourselves in a large foyer, at journey’s end. We hadn’t a clue where to go next. All the BiH and BSA liaison offices, as well as aid agencies, had been stuffed down a narrow, gloomy corridor. I was vaguely aware of civilians scurrying between offices, ID cards around their necks. I was sure I’d find Peter Jones here. It surprised me that all the aid agencies had been isolated in such a small part of the building but I later discovered that they were engaged in a bitter defensive battle with the military. Quite simply, the French wanted the civilians out of their military citadel. It seemed to me that we soldiers had already forgotten precisely why we were in Bosnia.
We went in search of somebody to brief us. David Crummish wanted to talk to someone, anyone, in Ops. The interior of the PTT building almost defied description. A wide, square, dark central well of cold stairs ran from the top of the building right down into its subterranean depths. A hawser of cables of varying degrees of thickness, all taped together into a knotted black snake, hung down the well. It was the core of the building’s central nervous system. At each level it sprouted nerves of black worms which meandered along gloomy, wooden-partitioned corridors leading to offices, Ops rooms, and, further up, accommodation. The inhabitants of the citadel were all escapees from Blade Runner. Coal-scuttle helmeted Legionnaires, FAMAS rifles strapped across their chests, long bayonets slapping loosely against their thighs, the buckles on their boots jangling, menaced the entrances like members of a Praetorian Guard. Elsewhere in the dim corridors the camouflage uniforms of a plethora of nations