by Richard Beeston (Overseas News)
THE old, borrowed London ambulance looked out of place and vulnerable as Sally Becker steered it uncertainly across what had once been Mostar's airport runway but today is one of the city's most notorious frontlines. As any veteran of Bosnia's civil war will confirm, snipers rarely respect the neutrality of civilian casualties, but this time out of good luck and careful diplomacy the guns did fall silent long enough to allow the slow-moving convoy of two ambulances and four Jeeps, carrying journalists, across the no man's land.
The bumpy ride, sometimes over dirt tracks, did take its toll and occasionally a cry of pain went up from Selma Handzar, 10, who lost an arm and suffered shrapnel wounds when an artillery round exploded in a sandbagged playground. The explosion also mutilated her brother Mirza, the youngest evacuee, who nevertheless managed a smile as he was carried in a stretcher into the safety of the Spanish peacekeepers' battalion headquarters at Medugorje. From there the children will be evacuated to Zagreb and eventually third countries. The saving of five young lives from Mostar will certainly not alter the course of conflict, a fact confirmed only minutes before the evacuation began yesterday morning when two more children were admitted to the overcrowded intensive care unit, suffering from shrapnel wounds from a tank shell explosion. Nevertheless Ms Becker's success story must rate as one of the most extraordinary episodes of individual human victory over the misery of the civil war in the former Yugoslav republic. It is an achievement made even more poignant by the continued inability of the trapped UN convoy to extricate itself through negotiation from Mostar's angry demonstrators.
"My biggest hope is that this operation will open up the channels and we will be able to evacuate all injured children from every side of the war," said Ms Becker, 33, an artist from Brighton. She first became interested in helping victims in the Bosnian war when she volunteered to drive aid convoys into the area. "I do not belong to any charity, I do not even have an office, just the determination to help these people," she said.
Certainly her dedication and instinctive understanding of the twisted logic of the Balkans have served her well. Although from the start she was motivated by wanting to help an injured, but fatally wounded, Bosnian Muslim boy trapped on the besieged eastern half of Mostar, she at first concentrated her efforts on gaining the trust of the Bosnian Croats on the western side of the city, where she now lives.
"I wanted to make it clear from the beginning that I am not here to take sides, and that I want to help children from all backgrounds who need to be rescued," she said, adding that she hoped to concentrate her efforts next time on injured Bosnian Croat children trapped in central Bosnia at the makeshift hospital at Nova Bila.
Her tactic and the publicity surrounding her success appear to have worked so well that the desperate 162 UN military and aid workers still trapped in Mostar, with no end in sight to the stalemate, turned to the British volunteer in the hope that their mile-long convoy of armoured personnel carriers and lorries might somehow be tacked on to the back of her two-ambulance operation. The UN's desperate situation in Mostar, where Muslim demonstrators are now insisting that the column will only be allowed to leave after the besieged enclave is declared a UN safe area patrolled by international peacekeepers, is symptomatic of the overall loss of credibility in the organisation by Bosnian Croats, Muslims and Serbs alike.
28th August 1993 (Copyright © The Times 1993)
by Anthony Lloyd (Overseas News)
A BRITISH United Nations plan to evacuate sick and injured Croats from Nova Bila hospital, in the Vitez enclave, deteriorated into an acrimonious farce yesterday after Sally Becker, the controversial British aid entrepreneur known particularly for such work in Mostar, took most of the casualties out to Split the night before in a Croatian military helicopter.
When the UN operation eventually went ahead it managed to evacuate only 13 of the 35 sick and injured and their dependants.
The original plan, first researched by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees more than a month ago, intended to evacuate a total of 88 Muslim and Croat casualties to Sarajevo and Visoko, from where they would be flown to Split, and then on to third countries for treatment. However, UN bureaucracy and the negotiation of safe passage across front lines delayed the operation, against a background of increasing UN paranoia as news of Ms Becker's imminent arrival spread.
"It would be a great shame for Becker to grab the limelight," the UN operations staff order said four days ago, with an eye to their own publicity. "She will receive no aid from the UNHCR or Unprofor (UN Protection Force). She has flagrantly ignored UN guidelines, she will not follow her plan through, and these people may come off worse eventually, once her blaze of publicity has gone," added a British officer. Ms Becker, no stranger to criticism, retorted: "If I don't take them out, these people will never make it on to the UN evacuation lists."
The Croatian Hip helicopter ferries ammunition and military advisers several times a week from Split to the beleaguered HVO, the Croat militia, in Vitez. Ms Becker's use of it as a means of entering the enclave three days ago and then leaving with 43 civilians, among them the most seriously injured, drew vituperative attacks from the UN. "She has broken the deny-flight resolution, and put the evacuees at risk," said an indignant officer.
In reality the Hip's night flights are relatively safe, as its landing strip is in a quarry hidden from view and out of range of the Muslims' few anti-aircraft guns. To the desperate people in the hospital, some of whom had been waiting for evacuation for three months, it doubtless seemed a worthy risk compared to the fitful nature of so many UN operations, however well intended. More contentious will be the problems she may have created for the evacuees in the countries that had agreed to take them, a deal already arranged by the UNHCR, but one that now appears threatened by her independent action. However, self-aggrandisement and mismanagement seem traits applicable to both groups. If the UN operation was so imminent, it came as news to doctors at Nova Bila, who claimed that they had no such warning of the UN's plans until the arrival of Ms Becker.
Sergeant Paul Murray, commander of the UN ambulance convoy, showed an impressive Guardsman-like lack of emotion when he arrived to see a row of empty hospital beds. Subsequent events, however, were to try him as he attempted to work out how many of his original charges remained.
"One woman is somewhere in Novi Travnik. A sick man has gone off for a walk with his wife; we don't know where he is either. Right now I'm not sure how many there are to take out," he said, turning hopefully to a UNHCR doctor, who shrugged blankly. Eventually 13 people were rounded up, of whom five were dependants. They walked into the row of ambulances through the freezing fog, clutching plastic bags full of clothes and belongings, a lint eye-patch on one man being the only visible indication of injury.
After onlookers helped to push the lead vehicle out of the ice in which it had become mired, the convoy departed. "Now it's down to God and the weather," observed Sergeant Murray, weighing up the weeks of his work that had been pre-empted by bureaucratic sluggishness and the woman from Hove in the helicopter.
23rd February 1994 (Copyright © The Times 1994)
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