by Alex Lochrie
When I eventually left the Legion I should have perhaps taken more photographs with me but those I took in my official capacity as regimental photographer belong to the Legion and I have no moral or legal right to use them.
Any delay in aid coming into the city meant real hardship for its inhabitants and the arrival of an aid convoy was always a big event. Normally we were warned well in advance of their arrival but every now and again something would go wrong. All convoys arrived by the same route, even if it meant a hundred mile detour to get onto it.
On 6 March, everyone was taken by surprise when at exactly 10.00 am, eight unescorted civilian lorries came to a halt outside our gate at the northern entrance. It must have passed the Serbian barracks, but because no convoys ever came that way they had been able to drive right up to the barrier without passing through a checkpoint. Our men at the guard post could see that both sides were nervously taking up battle stations. They were as much in the dark about the situation as we were. To further complicate the situation, the lorries were all old, had Serbian number plates and did not look like an international aid convoy.
Our Colonel was not at the airport and the senior officer in charge would not make a decision about whether or not to let them pass into the airport. He paced about the ops room, unable or unwilling to take control of the situation. Our guard post was reporting ever-increasing activity and could see a Bosnian unit armed with RGP7 anti-tank rockets taking up position opposite the convoy. It was obvious that someone would open up on the vehicles at any minute but still our officer would not make his mind up.
The decision was taken out of his hands when the Bosnians fired three rockets at the lead lorry, killing its occupants. Immediately both sides opened up on each other, with the convoy stuck in the middle. The Bosnians obviously thought that this was a Serbian convoy trying to get into the city through the back door. The Serbs didn’t know what the hell was going on but they were Serbian lorries and they were under attack.
At this moment our Colonel came on the air from his vehicle and ordered our men at the guard post to open fire on both sides with everything they had, to keep their heads down. He also ordered reinforcements to the area to back them up. He was only minutes from the airport and immediately he arrived in the ops room he got on the hotlines to arrange a ceasefire.
The leading vehicle of the convoy had burned out and the rest were badly shot up. As soon as the exchanges of fire began to ease off our Colonel ordered the NCO in charge of the guard post to get a UN flag onto a pole and lead a patrol out onto the road to bring any survivors into the base. We didn’t know who they were or where they had come from but there were civilians out there needing our help. Six civilians lost their lives, four had serious wounds and, miraculously, six came out of it unscathed. We had no idea how many casualties there had been among the opposing factions. It turned out that the convoy was from a Serbian Christian organization trying to bring aid into the city. It took three days to drag the lorries into the airport and clear the road of debris. They had been carrying perishable goods which were now only fit for dumping.
It is impossible to convey to anyone who has not been in a war zone the effect incidents like this have on you when your nerves are already stretched to breaking point. Everyone is under enormous stress and incidents like this get blown up out of all proportions in your mind.
One evening I was asked to run the French Military Attaché to the Bosnian Army (he was not a Legion officer) from the airport into the city where he had accommodation. It was getting late, darkness was beginning to fall and I didn’t much fancy running the risk of driving back to the airport after the UN roadblock had been withdrawn. On my way into town I made sure that the checkpoint commander knew that I was intending to come back as soon as I had dropped off my passenger and asked if he would delay his withdrawal to the airport for as long possible. It was up to him to make the decision and it would be a close call. I couldn’t ask him to put himself and his men in danger – I could always spend the night at the UN HQ in the PTT building.
My little VBL was not exactly a sports car, but we made it to his quarters in the centre of the city on record time. I was on the move before my passenger even had time to say thank you or good night and headed off on the return journey. The city was closed down for the night and the habitual nightly shelling was just starting. The streets were totally deserted, there was no one, not even a dog and it was very eerie. By now the sky was getting pretty dark, there was heavy cloud cover and it looked like it might snow. As I flashed past the Holiday Inn, I got on the radio to the checkpoint to confirm that I was on my way, but couldn’t raise them. Reception in this part of the city was not good but I could hear a broken transmission coming over the air and assumed that it was the checkpoint trying to reply to my call. As I passed the PTT building I saw that I was doing almost 80 mph in a vehicle designed to do 50.
At the point where I would turn off the main road for the airport, I had to pass the Bosnian checkpoint under the flyover. Fortunately for me, they had taken cover inside their shelter for the night and were probably hitting the bottle. There was no way that I was slowing down or going to stop and when I looked in my wing mirror I saw several Bosnian soldiers dashing out of the bunker into the road to see what it was that had roared past them at high speed. The UN checkpoint was by now only a couple of hundred yards down the road and I was very relieved to see that the VAB was still in place. They pulled back to let me through and fell in behind me as we made our way to the safety of the airport. Our departure was greeted by the rattle of gunfire from both sides of the road, but nothing hit us and I am sure that both sides were having a good laugh at our expense.
On my return to the command centre I thanked the checkpoint commander for waiting for me. Unknown to me calls had been made on the hotlines advising them of my late return. I was still not happy that our lives had been put at risk. The officer could easily have stayed at the airport overnight. I was so uptight about it that I was in danger of overstepping the mark so was taken aside by my boss who told me to go and calm down. He was right, of course, I was blowing the incident out of all proportion, but it was just another sign of the stress we were all under.
Our daily contact with the outside world was by a sat-link telephone which we were allowed to use for ten minutes once a week. There were no mobile phones or laptops in those days and they would have been banned anyway for security reasons. I am astonished to see soldiers on the front line these days using mobile phones, never mind phones with cameras. It is not that you shouldn’t be able to keep in touch with your friends and family, it is just not professional or safe to have unsecure communications in a war zone. It’s a security nightmare. With modern technology you can pinpoint the exact position of any mobile phone. Once that is done all you have to do is feed the coordinates into a guidance system on a missile, and bingo, you have a direct hit. It’s crazy. Even if you are not using it but it is switched on, it can be tracked. This is not the stuff of fictional films, it exists now and can be bought by anyone over the Internet.
Our secure phone link was operated by a great bunch of lads from the Danish signals unit. They bent over backwards to provide us with this fragile link to our families. You had to pre-book the call and the clock would start as soon you started to speak. You were interrupted thirty seconds before the end of the call to give you a chance to say your goodbyes. It was like speaking into a tin can and you had to get used to the few seconds delay every time you spoke or you ended up talking over each other. The ten minutes flew past and at the end you found that you hadn’t said half of what you meant to say. But it was still a great morale booster. We knew that the calls were listened in to and that we would be cut if we said anything that could be interpreted as confidential in a military sense.
There were times when you felt like revealing the truth about was really happening, especially when you were told what had been on the news back home. Some countries gave a far better factual coverage t
han others, and you felt like saying, ‘That’s nothing like what’s happening here.’ Some reporters were great to work with and were more interested in telling the true story than they were in making themselves out to be the story. There were also incidents that made it very hard to believe that what you were doing was right, or to have any faith in the honesty and motives of those who were supposedly trying to bring about peace.
CHAPTER 16
My Personal Shame
In 1993, the Ukranian battalion working with UN (UKRBAT), was assigned to keep the peace in the demilitarized Muslim enclaves of Zepa, as well as the Serbian district of Ilidza, where the Serbian military headquarters were. They seemed to be keeping the Bosnians prisoner in the Bosnian enclaves rather than keeping the Serbs out. This observation became a fact when we visited the Muslim enclave of Zepa. I have already recounted how they manipulated the system for financial gain, and were openly hostile to the Muslim population in Sarajevo. We were getting intelligence reports from a region on the southern frontier of Bosnia with Serbia, that entire villages were being burned to the ground and that the inhabitants were being herded like cattle into the mountains round the enclave of Zepa.
After pressure was applied on the UN authorities by our Colonel, it was reluctantly decided that the allegations would have to be investigated. 1st Company was given the task, and Captain D and myself were attached to them to gather and record evidence of any genocide. My problem was that I had to hide my photographic equipment to get it past the many checkpoints we knew we would encounter en route. I took the panel off the engine cover inside the VAB we were sharing with the CRAP, and wrapped my photographic equipment and video camera inside heat-resistant foil, before putting it inside the engine compartment. There was no access to this part of the engine from outside the vehicle so I was confident that the equipment would not be found.
Our route took us through Pale where the Serbs had set up their regional parliament. It was also the home town of Radovan Karadic, leader of the Serbian Democratic Party in Bosnia, who has at last been caught and will be facing charges before the International War Crimes Tribunal. Pale was, or had been, a prosperous market town which also profited from the 1984 Winter Olympics. How different it all was now. The civil war was not only tearing the country apart, but had plunged it into poverty that was affecting everyone. There will always be those who profit from situations like this –the criminal gangs, arms dealers, politicians and journalists.
We didn’t stop in the town, but everywhere there were the signs that Pale played an important role in the Serbian war effort. We got glimpses of heavy armament, anti-aircraft weapons, tanks and all the other trappings you associate with a major military force. I couldn’t risk taking any photographs in case I jeopardized the principal mission, and we were still a long way from our destination.
We were delayed at a couple of checkpoints, but on the whole we did not detect any particular delaying tactics out of the ordinary. We were quite a large force with twenty-one VABs, sixteen of which carried a full combat group, the other five being a command unit, a signals unit, an ambulance, our own VAB and a unit of the CRAP acting as our escort – 160 legionnaires are not a force to be messed about with.
As we got closer to the region in question, we began to see evidence of villages having been attacked. Every Muslim family had been forced out of their homes and if a Serb did not want the property, it was burned to the ground. We had no idea at this stage as to the whereabouts of the evicted families. No one we spoke to had seen or heard anything and all questions were answered with a shake of the head and a shrug of the shoulders. If the reports coming in were correct, they were all being shepherded towards Zepa. We had no idea just how many people we were talking about, but it was obvious from the number of burnt-out houses that we were talking about thousands rather than hundreds. Our final push into Zepa was quite tense. The Serbian troops gave way to large numbers of Ukrainian soldiers, and they were not happy to see us. There was a distinct lack of friendly waves or smiles as we passed through their lines - none of the usual friendly greetings normally exchanged between one UN force when it met up with another.
The countryside we had been passing through was typical of farming communities anywhere in the world. There were rolling fields and a few animals here and there. We were a lot further south and although well out of the mountains that surrounded Sarajevo, it was still cold at night. There were signs that spring was approaching but we were some way inland and still well above sea level. The mountains were replaced by hills scarred by deep gorges and fast-running rivers. The hillsides were covered with huge pine forests and if it had not been for the circumstances we found ourselves in, it would have been a pleasure to be there.
The other strange thing was that this area had been declared a UN safe haven. Even after we had passed through the Ukrainian lines, we came across Serbian soldiers dug in facing into the zone. This could only mean that the Serbs were free to come and go as they pleased which was in contravention of UN Resolutions.
As we descended into to the gorge cut out of the hillside by the River Drina, it was like descending into another world. It was quite beautiful but there was no sign of any human life until we broke out of the tree line near the bottom of the ravine. With its steep-sided gorge and fast-flowing river we could have been back in Corsica. The road crossed the river beside a watermill, before following the river towards the town. Our first sight of Zepa was of the minaret of the Islamic Mosque towering above the small stone cottages. We stopped in the middle of the village, which appeared to be deserted, but I could see that we were being watched from behind drawn curtains.
Captain D and I got out and decided to replace our helmets with our berets. It was less aggressive looking and we were going to have to gain the confidence of anyone who came out to speak to us. We had brought one of our female interpreter with us, but for the moment she stayed inside the safety of the VAB. We had no idea what their response to us turning up in the middle of the village was going to be.
A good twenty minutes passed before an elderly man tentatively approached us. He didn’t speak any English or French so we called on our interpreter to join us. He said that we were the first outsiders they had seen, other than the Ukrainians, since the start of the war. We explained who we were and that we had come to investigate the rumours of ethnic cleansing. That made him laugh and he shouted out that it was OK for others to join us.
They claimed that the Ukrainians had come into the village a couple of months earlier and had beaten some of the younger inhabitants who they claimed were Islamic terrorists. They had threatened to hand everyone over to the Serbs if they didn’t do what they were told. A large number of people had been hoarded into the region and their numbers had risen to such an extent that the village could not accommodate them. A combination of the overcrowding, shortage of food and the beatings had forced all but the most infirm and elderly to flee into the hills and on a high plateau to the south of the village. The only access to the area was by a steep and narrow forest track which was just wide enough for a VAB to be driven along.
One of the village elders eventually agreed to go into the hills to make the initial contact while we waited overnight in the village for his return. 1st Company’s VABs were loaded with basic food aid packages and these were offloaded into the Mosque. We explained that it was up to the village elders to distribute what we had brought but it was evident that it was not anywhere near to what was needed, never mind the thousands they said were up in the hills.
In the morning, Captain D, the interpreter and I left the Company in the village and drove up into the forest until we came to a large clearing where trees had been felled to form a barrier. The elder with us explained that we would have to go the last half mile on foot. The three of us had to carry my photographic and video equipment up the hillside until we came out onto a plateau which had been left by old logging operations. The elder asked us to wait five minutes while he went to collect th
e group who were going to talk to us. We would have to convince them that we were genuinely there to help them – no one else had so why should they believe us?
Half an hour later he returned with two gaunt-looking men armed with AK47 assault rifles. We had made a small campfire and had brewed some fresh coffee. We had taken off our flak jackets but had left our weapons within easy reach should things go badly. Captain D was gambling that our gestures would help to ease the fears of the men now approaching us.
After an hour’s dialogue we persuaded them to take us into the forest to see how they were living. They also agreed that I could take photographs and video their living conditions to show the world how they were being treated by the Serbs, with the help of the Ukrainians. What I saw shocked me. I can claim to have seen a bit of life in my time, but nothing prepared me for this. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of human beings were living in conditions that man has not experienced since cavemen inhabited the planet. There were very few adult males in the community – they had been executed by the Serbians when they burned down their homes.
They were living in shelters made out of branches covered with leaves, in exactly the same way I had seen pygmies in Africa build their shelters - the difference was that the pygmies were good at it. The other difference was that this was central Europe, not tropical Africa. Some had managed to find clothing, but the majority had resorted to making clothes out of animal skins. They were living off the forest, catching what little food they could find. Their diets were supplemented by fish caught in the river, but they explained that it was too dangerous to go down to the river when it was still daylight because Serbian snipers would fire on them from the other side of the ravine. This also meant that the Serbs were operating almost 10 miles inside the supposed ‘UN safe haven’. Now we understood why they doubted why we were there.