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Trusted Mole - A Soldier's Journey into Bosnia's Heart of Darkness (Paperback, New Ed)
Loot Price: R246
Discovery Miles 2 460
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Trusted Mole - A Soldier's Journey into Bosnia's Heart of Darkness (Paperback, New Ed)
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Loot Price R246
Discovery Miles 2 460
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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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)
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.
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