Army PR officer from Llandudno remembers Bosnia
ARMED Forces public relations officer and former North Wales Weekly News reporter Mervyn Wynne Jones was reunited with veteran BBC correspondents Martin Bell and Kate Adie at a royal commemorative service at the National Memorial, Staffordshire, last week (22 May).
Judith Phillips
The outdoors ceremony near Lichfield in memory of the 72 British servicemen killed during the UN and NATO Balkans missions was attended by HRH Princess Michael of Kent, Bosnian Defence Minister Selmo Cikotic and many civic and military dignitaries.
John Bright Llandudno educated Mervyn worked closely with both correspondents when the world's media descended on Bosnia in 1992 to witness the United Nations peacekeeping mission across the war-torn region. Mervyn ran press centres in Tomislavgrad and Vitez throughout the bitterly cold Balkans winter of that year.
It was a challenging time for all concerned," said Mervyn, 48, of Tremeirchion. "The soldiers of the Cheshire Regiment battlegroup were doing a remarkable job in a physically harsh, diplomatically-fraught and very dangerous environment and were encountering almost daily atrocities by one side or another."
"There was something surreal about the entire situation. A Croat howitzer would fire each morning as regular as clockwork from the field beyond our house at the Serbs in the hills nearby – every window shook. The son of the Bosnian landlord from whom we were renting the house cum press centre would return from the frontline occasionally, relax with a glass or two of the local hooch, and then come out into our driveway and let-off steam with a magazine or two of his AK47. At the stroke of midnight on new year's eve the night sky was full of tracer fire. We stood at the door and watched in disbelief."
"Ethnic cleansing was rife and it was a common sight to see towns and villages ablaze. Everyone out there at the time has his tales of somewhat lively situations. I spent one night in a school basement with artillery shells and mortar rounds landing above – I've kept some of the pieces of shrapnel – and I came under sniper and cross-fire on a number of occasions. It concentrates the mind, as they say, but when one's younger one rather thrives on the buzz of it all I suppose."
"Sarajevo was a tragic place and looked like something out of an apocalyptic sci-fi movie. Trams lay upended in the snow, tanks were abandoned beside the road, tower blocks were shattered and burned, and the population was sifting through upturned bins and hacking away at tree stumps with hand-axes for kindling," added Mervyn.
Having worked previously with Martin Bell and Kate Adie in Berlin during the heady days of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and in the Saudi desert during the first Gulf campaign of 1991, Mervyn had come to know them well. Martin Bell now works as an ambassador for UNICEF.
Mervyn joined the Ministry of Defence in 1986 and has since served across the globe, residing in and running press office teams in places as far-flung as the Falkland Islands and Cyprus. His work has taken him to some 50 countries. He has recently returned from five years in Northern Ireland where he was the MOD's chief press officer, and he is now co-ordinating Defence public relations across the east and west Midlands.
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