Trusted Mole: A Soldier’s Journey into Bosnia’s Heart of Darkness

‘He and my grandmother lost touch at the end of the war. She went back to her pets in Scotland and he was sent to Paris to finish off his law studies. After that he joined the diplomatic service and was posted to London where he was the Third Secretary at the Serbian Legation. From there he tracked down Constance, pursued her to Scotland and they were married in Ayr in 1920. That was just the beginning of it.

‘He left the diplomatic service because the thought of rushing around Europe with my grandmother’s pets was too much for him. He went back to law in Belgrade where they built a home in Dedinje, just opposite what is now Milosevic’s palace, and settled down. They had four children – three daughters, of which my mother was the second, and a son. Most were actually born in Scotland.’

‘How come?’

‘Oh, don’t think they lived in penury in Belgrade. They had an extraordinary life. At least once a year they’d jump into the Bentley and drive from Belgrade to Ayr. It only took four days. On one occasion my grandmother was escort for ten days to the Duchess of York, when she and the future King George VI were visiting Belgrade in the early 1920s. So, all in all, they were pretty well-connected at court. The children received English and then Swiss finishing school educations, though they were removed from Switzerland as Nazism took hold of Germany and it looked as though Europe was heading towards another war. At the end of March 1941 they had to escape from Yugoslavia.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s obvious. Germany was about to attack in the Balkans. My grandfather was back in uniform as a lieutenant colonel and was the Royal Yugoslav Army’s liaison officer in the British Embassy in Belgrade. A few days prior to the German bombing of Belgrade and the invasion of Yugoslavia the Brits warned my grandfather and told him to get his family out of the country. Any family with connections at court was earmarked for liquidation by the Nazis. So he rang my grandmother, told her to get the children packed – one suitcase each – and to leave that very day. And that’s exactly what happened. They grabbed what they could and fled south by train that same night. My grandmother never saw her husband again after that call from the British Embassy. He stayed on to fight the Germans and died in 1943.’

‘What happened to your grandmother?’

‘She and the four children escaped by train, south to Istanbul initially and then over the Bosphorus into Asia Minor and down to the port of Mersin in southern Turkey. They stayed in Mersin for nearly a week hoping to catch a refugee ship across the Med to Palestine. Half of middle Europe was mooching about in Mersin having fled from the Germans. Eventually, they got passage on the Warshawa, a chartered refugee ship that was crammed with all sorts of aristocracy on the move out of Europe. Four days later they landed in Haifa, Palestine, where the British gave them refugee status and provided them with accommodation.’

‘And that’s where they sat out the war?’

‘Sat out? Hardly. All four children joined up with British Forces Middle East. Yvan, the youngest, lied about his age and got into the Royal Signals. The youngest daughter, Tatjana, joined the Royal Navy as a Wren, while my mother and her elder sister both joined the ATS and were posted to Cairo. My mother became a driver, initially moving tanks about large depots, then graduating to motorcycle dispatch rider and finally ending up driving ambulances during the battle of El Alamein. Her sister worked in SOE Cairo, on account of her Serbo-Croat, where she married a British officer called Rocky. He was an SOE agent and member of Force 133 which fought for Tito against the Germans in the Adriatic. Even got an uncle who fought there in the last war.’

‘So, your aunt was the only one involved on the Yugoslav side of things?’

‘Initially yes, but eventually my mother was roped into it too, again because she could speak the language. She was posted to a large refugee camp in the Sinai desert which was packed with Croat refugees. From there she was moved into Dr McPhail’s “Save the Children” Unit. By the end of 1944 they were in southern Italy preparing to go back to Yugoslavia with their ambulances as part of UNRRA, the United Nations Refugee Rehabilitation Administration. The first ever UN mission. Ironic that my mother should have been sent to Yugoslavia. In March 1945 she landed in Dubrovnik with her ambulance and spent the remainder of that year driving around Bosnia, Hercegovina and Montenegro dispensing aid to orphans. At one stage she managed to get up to Belgrade to check on the house. There was nothing left of it. German nurses had used it during the war but when the Russians arrived in Belgrade they’d used it as accommodation for a platoon. The Russians had stolen everything and defecated in every conceivable corner of the house.

‘She was eventually demobbed and returned to England to join her mother, sisters and brother, who were also now “out”. They lived for a while in Godmanchester in Cambridgeshire. Mum did Russian at the School of Eastern European and Slavonic Languages and even got a job as an interpreter in the 1948 London Olympics. Grandmother’s health wasn’t good, though. It was a combination of ill-health and poor English weather which forced them to emigrate to Rhodesia. They bought ten acres just north of Salisbury, built a house and settled down to grow flowers. My grandmother died in 1957, well before I was born. I never knew her, nor my grandfather who was left behind in Yugoslavia and died before the end of the war. In fact I never knew any of my grandparents, not even on my father’s side – all because of the last war really.’

‘And you end up in Bosnia fifty years later with the UN.’

‘Correct. Three generations, all fiddling around in the Balkans during three different wars. A novelist couldn’t have written that one.’

‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that your father was in the UN as well.’ Ian’s laughing.

‘No. That side of the story’s quite different. There are parallels with my mother’s side of the family, but nothing as grand and aristocratic. His father also fought on the Salonika front in the First World War, but as a warrant officer in the artillery. But that’s not to say he was a peasant or anything like that. In fact he was an agricultural specialist who’d been university trained in Prague before the War. They came from a small village in Sumadija called Mrcajevci, in Central Serbia. No great connections at court. My father was born in Kraljevo in 1920. His mother died when he was very young and he was brought up by his two older sisters, the eldest of whom was killed during an Allied bombing raid in 1943. He was educated in Skopje in Macedonia where he was studying law when the Germans invaded. He’d been politically active throughout the 1930s and had been a staunch anti-Communist and supporter of the King.

‘When the Germans invaded King Peter fled to London in April 1941 and set up a government in exile. The likes of my father stayed on to fight. You could write a book about what went on in Yugoslavia during the war and still not understand it. Although the Germans occupied the Balkans and fostered Fascism in Croatia, which included in those days all of Bosnia and Hercegovina, they were quite happy to allow the locals to fight it out amongst themselves in a bloody civil war. My father joined the Serbian Volunteer Corps, a Royalist outfit fighting Tito’s Communists. He was one of the original volunteers. By the end of the war he was a company commander in an infantry regiment. The commanding officer of his battalion, Ratko Obradovic, eventually became my godfather but was assassinated in an underground car park in Munich in 1968 by Tito’s UDBA assassins.’

‘Assassinated!’

‘That’s right. Tito couldn’t tolerate anti-Communist opposition from the émigré community, so he had them murdered. The Royalists and Chetniks, under Draza Mihajlovic, were forced to fight a rearguard action withdrawing from Yugoslavia. Some went north to Austria, others, like my father’s battalion, went west into Italy. In fact, his war ended on 5 May 1945 when he conducted the last bridge demolition guard of the war. They were holding the bridge over the river Soca, which marked the border between Slovenia and Italy. The bridge had been prepared for demolition and my father’s company was on the Slovenian side holding that end of the bridge in order to allow as many refugees as possible to get across into Italy. Russian tanks eventually appeared and they were forced to leg it over into Italy and blow the bridge. End of his war.

‘The next day they handed over their weapons to the British in Palmanova and were then carted off to a concentration camp at Eboli, south of Naples. No one really knew what to do with these people so they stayed in that camp for the best part of two years before being moved to other camps in Europe. My father was moved to one near Munich where, in 1947, he was selected by the British as suitable for labour in Britain. The Belgians had already rejected him. At the end of 1947 he stepped off a refugee ship at Southampton docks. No socks, no money and not a word of English. Each person was given a pound as they stepped off the gangplank; my father remembered his first purchase, a pair of socks, and his first meal, fish and chips, wrapped up in newspaper. I remember him laughing about this, how shocked and horrified that such a cultured people could eat their food with fingers from newspaper.

‘The deal for all these displaced people from Eastern Europe was simple. Three years labour in exchange for the right of abode but not citizenship. For three years my father, ex-law student, ex-officer, was a hod carrier at the London Brick Company factory in Bedfordshire. That did his back in. Still couldn’t speak a word of English and by the time he’d worked off his obligation to the British government he still wasn’t integrated into society in any way. To put that right he lived with an English family in Ealing and gradually learned the language. He also put himself through night school and taught himself electronics. By day he swept the floors of the Rank Bush Murphy television and radio factory at Chiswick. By night he studied for his degree. By the end of the 1950s he’d qualified as an electrical engineer and was employed by Rank as a TV design engineer.’

Ian’s puzzled by something. ‘But I thought your mother’s lot were in Rhodesia by this stage. How did your parents meet?’

‘In 1960 Rank sent him out to Southern Rhodesia to help set up the black and white TV system there. He and my mother met in Salisbury and they married in the Greek Orthodox church. I was born in 1962, my sister fifteen months later. Then, in 1965, Ian Smith declared UDI. My father sniffed another war and wanted no part of it whatsoever. You could hardly blame him. Branko, my maternal grandfather’s younger brother, was lost in Russia during the civil war. My mother’s father died in 1943 in Yugoslavia. My father never saw his father again after 1945 – he died in 1957 in Serbia. That’s why they decided to leave Rhodesia before things got worse.

‘We returned to London but most of my cousins stayed on in Rhodesia and fought their Communists in that war. In fact, we’ve still got the property in Harare. Mum’s eldest sister, the one who worked in SOE Cairo, lives there, has a beautiful house.

‘My father continued working for Rank in Chiswick. I received a pretty bog standard education. They pumped every penny they could into it; prep school in Leicestershire, minor public school in the West Country where I was head boy and head of the Combined Cadet Force. Father, of course, wanted me to be what he never was – a lawyer. I had other ideas. The day after my last A level – I did Latin, Greek and Ancient History – I walked into the Army recruiting office on Mayflower Street in Plymouth and enlisted in the Parachute Regiment. My father hit the bloody roof. Real drama.’

‘Drama?’

‘Like you wouldn’t believe. But you’ve got to see it from his point of view. So many upheavals, so much misfortune in both families for so long, it’s hardly surprising that the one thing he wanted for me was security. But you’re wilful at that age. At eighteen you know best and he just had to live with it.’

Ian has been listening patiently, only asking one or two questions.

‘Why didn’t your father return to Yugoslavia after the war?’

‘Oh, that’s because of the code.’

‘What code?’

‘There was an unwritten code, a rule, among the émigrés. There was to be no returning to Yugoslavia while Tito and the Communists were in power, not for any reason whatsoever. Some weakened towards the end of their lives and went back. He never did. A die-hard to the day he died. I suppose it was because of the assassination of my godfather. He didn’t even go back when his own father died. None of us did, except my mother who’d trip out there every couple of years to look after Dad’s sole surviving sister, Bisenija. She’d been declared “mad” and an “enemy of the state” by the Yugoslav authorities; she had no state pension, so we had to keep her alive from the UK.’

‘That determination never to go back to Yugoslavia is a hard attitude to take, Milos.’

‘Hard, but understandable too. It’s all a product of history and personal experience.’

‘That’s a lot of history you’re carrying around on your back.’

I’m silent for a moment. ‘It’s like a sodding monkey hanging off you. Can’t complain, though. It’s beyond my control. I suppose Trotsky was right in the end.’

‘In what way?’

‘Well, he said that anyone who wanted a quiet life should not have been born in the twentieth century.’

‘Do you think he was right?’

‘Looks that way now, doesn’t it?’

Ian doesn’t reply to that one. He’s turned the page on his note pad. The pen’s poised again.

‘Let’s get back to Bosnia, to the present. Pick it up from the start.’

‘Even that’s all over the place. I could pick any bloody starting point and it still wouldn’t make any sense. I mean, I could start in Iraq and Kuwait if you wanted me to, because that’s where this mess really began.’

‘All right then. Let’s start with something concrete.’

‘Like what?’

‘A date. When exactly did you go out to the Balkans?’

‘That’s easy! 29 December 1992. How about that, then? There’s a date for you.’

‘Okay then. Tell me about that and Kuwait if it’s relevant.’

‘It’s all relevant, in its own way.’