Overview

The powerful, disturbing and highly acclaimed account of a British officer in the Parachute Regiment, of part Yugoslav origin, painfully caught up in the savage maelstrom of the Bosnian war. Milos Stankovic worked as an interpreter and liaison officer for senior British commanders and two British UN generals – Mike Rose and Rupert Smith. Armed with the pseudonym ‘Mike Stanley’ he was propelled from one nerve-racking crisis to another as he helped negotiate ceasefires between rival warlords, secured the release of UN hostages and organised the escape from Sarajevo of stricken families. Yet his close contacts with the Bosnian Serb leadership of Dr Karadzic and General Mladic bred suspicion and paranoia on all sides – not just in the Bosnian Muslim and Serb ranks (who thought he might be a British spy – General Rose’s ‘trusted mole’) but in the minds of the Americans as well. In a final, horrific twist, the author was arrested by the British authorities on suspicion of being a Serb spy – two and a half years after returning from Bosnia.

Full Product Details

9780006530909

Table of Contents

Reviews

A rambling memoir of the doomed effort to bring peace to Bosnia, from a British officer in the United Nations force. The UN was wary when Britain proposed career military man Stankovic for assignment to Bosnia in 1992, fearing he might bring along an agenda inherited from his parents, Yugoslavian immigrants of Serbian ancestry. (His mother and father weren't too keen about the assignment either.) But he was one of only three Britons proposed who could speak the language, and the UN desperately needed translators. Stankovic became much more than that: demonstrating an ability to climb right into the Serbian leaders' heads, he ended up as a fixer entrusted to make deals. His book immerses readers in a mad world whose feuds are traced back with obscene pride to the battle of Kosovo in 1389. In this society of 700-year-old grudges, where neither trust nor the notion of tolerance exists, the UN never has a chance. Stankovic traces his time in Bosnia through contemporary diary-like entries and later sessions with a psychiatrist after his arrest under Britain's draconian Official Secrets Act. (The charges of spying for the Serbians certainly sound ludicrous, even taking into account the fact that Stankovic is doing the telling; the fact that he was eventually released suggests they were baseless.) Though the bluster can get thick- red hot steel fragments slicing through aluminum, piercing the fuel tank, which we were sitting on, and wooooossssh . . . frying tonight! Fuck this! -Stankovic does a terrific job of clarifying the testosterone-driven conflict between the NATO and UN forces, the former a fighting machine, the latter a vehicle for peace, but both happy to turn Bosnia into a mad professor's laboratory in which a very unpleasant war was used as a proving ground to define the set of the New World Disorder. Joseph Heller would have felt right at home in this absurd and murderous milieu. (b&w photos) (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

Milos Stankovic was born in Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia in 1962 – a British citizen with Scottish and Royalist Yugoslav parents, themselves refugees from Yugoslavia. Educated in England, he enlisted in the Parachute Regiment in 1981; the Army sent him to university where he studied Russian at Manchester and in Minsk in the Soviet Union. He has served with the British Army in Belize, Northern Ireland and Africa, and with the UN in post-war Kuwait and Iraq, and two long tours in Bosnia between December 1992 and April 1995. Prior to his arrest at Staff College in October 1997, Major Stankovic served as a company commander with the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available