Bosnia and Herzegovina Dec 1995 – Jun 1996
The war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (henceforth in this account abbreviated to Bosnia) was part of the violent break-up of Yugoslavia which saw, in 1991, the secession of Croatia and Slovenia from the old communist federation. In early 1992 the multi-ethnic population of Bosnia (44 per cent Muslim Bosnians, 33 per cent Orthodox Serbs and 17 per cent Catholic Croats) voted in a referendum for independence.
The Serbs in the country, backed by the neighbouring Serbian government to the east, rejected the results of the vote, mobilizing their forces to secure Serb territory within Bosnia, including the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian and Croat towns and villages in eastern Bosnia. Croatia, with a long border on the north and west of Bosnia, also aimed at securing parts of the country as Croatian.
The war was bitter, featuring the indiscriminate shelling of towns and villages, widespread ethnic cleansing and systematic killings and mass rape, mainly perpetrated by Serbs, but also to a lesser extent by Croat and Bosnian forces – the Serb massacre of Muslims at Srebrenica being the most notorious in scale.
A United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR) had been deployed to, first, Croatia and then Bosnia since 1992 to support the delivery of humanitarian aid and ‘police safe areas’. By the time a peace treaty was signed in December 1995, plans were afoot that the United Nations should withdraw and be replaced by IFOR, a NATO-led Implementation Force to monitor – and if necessary enforce – the terms of that treaty.
In mid-September 1995, the presidents of Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia, under pressure from Russia and the US, agreed to cooperate in a peace settlement based on the preservation of Bosnia’s territorial integrity. After the start of a ceasefire in Bosnia and Herzegovina on 14 October 1995, serious negotiations could get underway. A month of negotiating produced a General Framework Agreement for Peace in Bosnia and Herzegovina (GFAP), better known as the Dayton Agreement, which was signed in Paris on 14 December 1995.
On 15 December 1995 in resolution 1031, the Security Council sanctioned the establishment of the Implementation Force (IFOR), which was to conduct Operation Joint Endeavour, a Chapter Seven operation. IFOR was a robust, 60,000-strong multinational NATO implementation force under unified command.
Its task was to monitor the observance of the ceasefire, and oversee the demarcation of an inter-entity boundary line between the Serb and Muslim-Croat areas, bordered on each side by a two-kilometre wide zone of separation in which no troops or weaponry of the three former warring parties were permitted, and supervise the cantonment of the military personnel and their heavy weapons.
IFOR was authorised to use force if necessary. Another of IFOR’s tasks – a more general one – was to restore law and order, thus enabling the civil part of the peace accord to be carried out.
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The Queen’s Royal Hussars deployed as part of this Implementation Force from late December 1995 through to early June 96. It was the first Regimental deployment post amalgamation and saw ‘A’, ‘B’ and Headquarter Squadrons deploying initially with ‘C’ Squadron rotating with ‘A’ and ‘D’ Squadron bolstering all Squadrons manpower.
The IFOR mission involved keeping apart the former belligerents by patrolling the manning of roadblocks and high-visibility deterrence of unlawful military manoeuvres by Serb, Croat or Bosnian forces. The topography – mountainous forested with narrow tracks often bordered by vertical precipices – was hardly suitable for the movement of tanks, and young drivers more accustomed to the flat plains of Germany and Yorkshire, often found their task daunting. Nevertheless, employing a mixture of cavalry elan and careful route selection, the Challengers of the regiment proved the infantry sceptics ( ‘You’ll never get those tanks up there’) wrong – just as the 8th Hussars had done with their Centurions in Korea.
The value of having tanks on hand was highlighted by an incident in March when troops of ‘A’ Squadron were deployed to block the route of a Bosnian armoured column bound for the town of Kulen Vakuf, near the border with Croatia, to chase out elements of Croat military which occupied the west of the town. On seeing first, the Scimitars of Reece Troop, the Bosnian general halted his force and explored forward in his staff car. Sighting the Challengers, he ordered a precipitate withdrawal.
The second half of the six-month tour was largely devoted to overseeing the safe return of the civilian population to their devastated towns and villages. When ‘B’ Squadron first arrived at Mrkonjic Grad, a town with a pre-war population of 27,000 only six people remained; by the end of the tour, it had become busy again as families returned home.
‘C’ Squadron arrived at the end of March, having had a pretty torrid time in Yorkshire trying to fulfil a regiment’s worth of commitments, and took over an area of 1,200km square. They managed, without casualties, one serious incident at the end of April by keeping a party of Serbs, who wanted to visit graves, apart from an angry crowd of Muslims who had been unable to visit the graves of their compatriots in Serbian territory. The squadron was also deployed to the troublesome Kulen Vakuf when contrary to the ceasefire agreement, Bosnian Croat forces refused to move back into their barracks. The arrival of the Challengers clearly visible on the hills around the town was enough to persuade the rebels to move out. So far not a round had been fired by either a tank or recce vehicle.
As the six months came to an end, a ‘C’ Squadron Land Rover drove over an anti-personnel mine which luckily damaged only a wheel, causing no casualties – a gentle foretaste of what was to lie ahead in even more violent countries.
