Barry The Road From Sarajevo

British Army Operations in Bosnia, 1995-1996
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6863-8
Verlag: Spellmount
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 328 Seiten

In 1992 Bosnia descended into a savage and bitter civil war, which by 1995 had claimed over a quarter of a million lives. Following the Dayton Peace Agreement between the warring Bosnian Serbs, Muslims and Croats, NATO began its first land operation, taking over from the UN Protection Force. With a total of only 200 men, a British battlegroup was charged to enforce the peace in a 100km area, through which wound a front line separating the territory of the Bosnian Muslims from that of the Bosnian Serb forces. In this updated edition of the acclaimed book A Cold War, Brigadier Ben Barry has produced the definitive account of the British Army's dangerous and groundbreaking operations in Bosnia.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Barry, Brigadier Ben

Leseproben

Introduction

People sleep peacefully in their beds only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

George Orwell

In 1992 Bosnia descended into a savage and bitter war, which by 1995 had claimed over a quarter of a million lives. The United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) was deployed to protect the delivery of humanitarian aid. It succeeded in bringing this aid to the suffering civilian population which was being ravaged by the fighting, and lives were saved as a result. But its efforts to promote a cessation of hostilities between the Bosnian factions met with only occasional and partial success.

The first British troops in Bosnia were First Battalion the Cheshire Regiment, who joined UNPROFOR in November 1992. Further armoured infantry battalions continued to form the core of the ever-growing British UN forces in central Bosnia. In 1994, the British General Sir Michael Rose took command of UNPROFOR.

As the fighting between the Bosnian Serbs and the uneasy alliance of Bosnian Muslims and Croats intensified, the risk to the UN troops increased and their influence on the warring factions decreased. By May 1995 the UNPROFOR operation was in a state of perpetual crisis, with British, European, United States and UN policies on the Bosnian war under great pressure. Three years of international efforts to end the war had come to nothing. The UN mission appeared close to failure and, it seemed, would have to withdraw. Extracting the UN troops from a civil war would have been very difficult – NATO had contingency plans to do this by intervening in Bosnia in force – but no one doubted that this would be a hazardous undertaking.

Throughout that long bloody summer, the state of affairs in Bosnia continued to deteriorate, but the strategic situation was altered by a series of successful offensives by Bosnian Croat forces in western Bosnia. At the end of August NATO responded to Serb shelling of Sarajevo market by unleashing a massive air attack on Bosnian Serb forces. The effects of these actions reinforced each other, the Serb military position in western Bosnia collapsed and a truce was negotiated. A dynamic US negotiator, Richard Holbrooke, exploited this politically, persuading the three Bosnian factions to sign a peace agreement at Dayton. Many politicians, diplomats and senior UN officials considered this to be the very last chance for peace.

On 20 December NATO began its first land operation when the Implementation Force (IFOR) took over from the UN Protection Force. The alliance was to ensure the factions complied with the military provisions of the peace agreement, and had the mandate and rules of engagement to use force to achieve this. That same day a British battlegroup moved from Sarajevo to north-west Bosnia. Two thirds of the forces allocated to the battlegroup for this mission had not yet been released from other tasks in central Bosnia. The battlegroup had a single armoured infantry company, a reconnaissance platoon and six mortars – a total of two hundred men with thirty armoured vehicles. They had no tanks or artillery. Three liaison teams, a dozen more men, completed the force: the only British troops in this part of Bosnia.

It had an area of responsibility a hundred kilometres wide by seventy deep. Winding through it was a front line a hundred and twenty kilometres long, separating territory held by the Bosnian Muslims from that held by Bosnian Serb forces. Every single road or track through the no-man’s-land between the two forces was sown with land mines. During the previous three and a half years of war, the factions had denied the UN access to almost all of this area. The commanders of the two Bosnian Government corps manning the front line were renowned for their obduracy, intransigence and desire to constrain the freedom of action of UN forces. The Bosnian Serb forces had allowed the UN even less access across the front line.

As soon as it arrived, the battlegroup opened a crossing point between the two armies and began patrolling its vast territory. Little was known about the faction armies’ strength and locations, and intelligence was almost non-existent. The battlegroup set out to find the factions for itself. Liaison officers were despatched to the few known faction headquarters and patrols of Warrior and Scimitar armoured vehicles began working from the base at Sanski Most, forward towards the front line. All this movement was conducted with the support of the battlegroup’s mortars, ready to bring down fire on any potential opposition.

Communications with the British headquarters sixty kilometres to the south-east were tenuous and intermittent. Snow and ice covered the narrow, winding mountain roads, making vehicle movement dangerous and slow. Logistic support was severely overstretched – food and mail got through, but it was proving very difficult to provide the battlegroup with sufficient fuel and spare parts for its vehicles. The battlegroup commander was worried that these accumulating difficulties might make evacuation of casualties too slow.

The troops saw much evidence of recent fighting: minefields, damaged and burned out vehicles, shell cases, empty ammunition containers, enormous piles of rubbish and all the discarded paraphernalia of war. Patrols frequently came across corpses and body parts. Some were from livestock, killed in the fighting but most seemed to be the pathetically sad remains of soldiers from both sides.

Close to the front line, buildings and villages were occupied by faction soldiers: tired, dirty, hungry-looking men in assorted shabby uniforms and civilian clothes. Although a few were friendly, many seemed ill-disciplined, sullen characters who scowled truculently at passing British vehicles. Some villages were empty, their occupants having fled. Bosnian soldiers and civilians were systematically looting these settlements. Other villages were destroyed and abandoned. Most of these appeared to have been wrecked not by fighting, but by ‘ethnic cleansing’ – where one of the factions had expelled people from other ethnic groups. Violence had been threatened or applied to civilians to achieve this.

Each of the factions had approximately seventy thousand men under arms in the battlegroup’s area of responsibility. Both sides had more armoured fighting vehicles than the British force. The Bosnian Muslim forces included a battalion of thirty tanks and the Bosnian Serbs had over a hundred pieces of heavy artillery and an armoured brigade with a hundred tanks. A mere six weeks ago these soldiers had been fighting each other in a war of savagery and atrocity that was medieval in its excess. Both sides were very suspicious of each other. Their attitude to NATO was unknown, but so far the faction forces seemed to be conforming to most of the military requirements of the peace agreement. British NATO troops had been granted ‘freedom of movement’, something that was always denied to UN troops, although Warriors had forced open a Bosnian Muslim checkpoint that had attempted to stop a NATO vehicle.

A cease-fire was supposed to be in force. During the day it seemed to hold, but at night there was a constant sound of firing. There were exchanges of fire between the two front lines, and armed civilians fired at shadows, at suspicious movement and into the air to reassure themselves and deter looters.

In three weeks’ time, the formerly warring armies would be required to withdraw from their front lines to create between them a zone of separation four kilometres wide. During the previous three years’ fighting all three factions had continually undermined the UN mission in Bosnia. Attacks on UN troops, obstruction at every level, duplicity, endless wrangling and repeated refusals to implement cease-fires had made it impossible for the international community to broker a lasting peace. No one knew if the factions would attempt to frustrate the NATO mission in the same way. If they failed to comply, NATO could use military force to compel them to do so. This would mean NATO ground troops attacking non-compliant faction forces. If so, would NATO take casualties? Would the Dayton Peace Agreement survive? For the soldiers and officers of the battlegroup, this was the source of no small anxiety and tension, alleviated only by their confidence in their training and each other.

On 23 December a British engineer party travelling in two Land Rovers set out to conduct a route reconnaissance. Without notifying the battlegroup, they drove through the Bosnian Muslim front line at the village of Sassina, five kilometres north-east of the town of Sanski Most. Passing through the front line held by Bosnian Muslim troops, they carried on into no-man’s-land, where the leading Land Rover drove over an anti-tank mine. The front of the vehicle was totally destroyed. Both of the crew were injured, one seriously. The battlegroup sent an armoured infantry platoon of four Warriors to the scene. They evacuated the casualties from the minefield and brought in a helicopter to fly them to the field hospital. The platoon provided protection for an engineer mine clearance party, who lifted six anti-tank mines from the frozen track, allowing the recovery of the wrecked vehicle.

The next day was Christmas Eve. The Bosnian Corps Headquarters delivered a protest note complaining that Serb troops at Sassina had directed machine-gun fire towards the Muslim lines. Unless the factions conformed to the peace agreement, and military tension and suspicion were reduced, the NATO mission would not succeed. The armoured infantry company was ordered to investigate the allegations. They decided to get the two opposing commanders together in neutral territory to sort out the problem.

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