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Mr. Colin Breed (South-East Cornwall): I reinforce the point that the hon. Gentleman has just made. Mrs. Stankovic is my constituent; she and the whole family have experienced considerable suffering. That should be taken into account when considering the case of Major Stankovic--the matter has had wide ramifications within the family.
Mr. Bell: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that intervention.
Some background is in order. Major Stankovic is a British citizen; he is a serving officer in the Parachute Regiment of the British Army. As it happens, his father was a Serb and his mother is partly Serb and partly Scottish. They both fought against the Germans in Yugoslavia during the second world war, and were lucky to escape with their lives. They came to this country and made a new life. Milos was born a British citizen; and he is a British citizen. He was educated in British schools. He was accepted into Sandhurst and the Parachute Regiment, and embarked, as a captain, on a conventional military career. He undertook tours of duty in Northern Ireland and with the UN force in Kuwait.
In autumn 1992, when the wars of the dissolution of Yugoslavia began, the British Army was looking for someone in its ranks with knowledge of Serbo-Croat. Two officers had such knowledge; Major--then Captain--Stankovic was one of them. He was renamed Captain Mike Stanley by the Army, in order to mask his family's Balkan connections. The other officer was renamed Captain Costello. Together, and in rotation, they acted as interpreters and advisers to General Rose and General Smith--successive British commanders of UNPROFOR in Sarajevo, and did signal service.
Together, they were the key players in a covert operation, known to insiders as Schindlers. At the height of the war, that operation was responsible for spiriting out of Sarajevo 200 people--Muslims, Serbs and Croats--and reuniting them with their families abroad. Stankovic has
been described as the Schindler of Sarajevo. He served longer in Bosnia than any other British soldier. Hewas the go-between--the liaison officer--between UNPROFOR and the Bosnian Serbs. His job was to get close to them, to get them to trust him, to understand them and to report back on them. He did that. He unblocked convoys; he saved lives; and he set up the cessation of hostilities agreement in December 1994. He did all that. In December 1993, he risked his life to save a wounded Muslim woman, under fire, in a street in Vitez in central Bosnia. He was awarded the MBE by the Queen at Buckingham palace. In the spring of 1995, he was allowed to return to normal regimental duty with the Parachute Regiment, which he did with distinction. Two years later, he was accepted into the Joint Services Command and staff college, which, as the Minister is aware, is the necessary step to further promotion. It was there, on 16 October 1997, that the Ministry of Defence police came for him. They arrested him under the Official Secrets Act 1911 on suspicion of spying for the Bosnian Serbs.
A word about the Ministry of Defence police is in order. It is a relatively new force and does not seem to share the accountability of other police forces. It had had no previous experience of a case of that kind and no experience of the realities of the Balkans; nor did it possess even those fragments of knowledge that might have illuminated--like a parachute flare--the landscape of its ignorance.
The Ministry of Defence police arrested an officer with a quite unblemished record; they threw him into a cell where they wanted to hold him incommunicado for eight hours while they ransacked his house. From his house in Farnham, they took not only his diaries of Bosnia and his souvenirs, but everything that they could find--an old copy of Playboy, Christmas cards and a piece of sandpaper. They did not know what they were looking at, and they did not know what they were looking for.
The police disturbed a collection of medals and photographs that he kept in his home as a shrine to his father. From his mess uniform, they seized and confiscated his medals. When the list of witnesses was made known to us, we discovered that they had interrogated a Ministry of Defence official and inquired of him whether Major Stankovic was entitled to those medals. That was the first instance of the clear prejudice and animus against Major Stankovic. Of course, he was entitled to the medals; there were four of them--the UN Kuwait medal, the general service medal, the UN Bosnia medal and the MBE. All of them were earned the hard way; none of them came up with the rations.
The injustices multiplied. We discovered that the Ministry of Defence police were trying to turn neutral witnesses into hostile witnesses. A distinguished former soldier, who knew Stankovic well, had recently left the service and set up a private business. He was threatened with damage to that business, if he did not co-operate with the MOD police in the way that they wanted. We have documentary proof of that.
Another distinguished ex-soldier, who had held command, testified to the MOD police that, to his certain knowledge, Stankovic had acted in Bosnia with loyalty and propriety at all times. The investigators told him that, in that case, he might be interested to know what Stankovic had written about him in his diary. Stankovic's
diary contained the kind of personal assessment that any man might make in his diary of another. I protested personally about that to the chief constable of the MOD police--Mr. Walter Boreham--and pointed out that it was a flagrant attempt to turn a friendly witness into a hostile one. The chief constable could not even see the point. That is what is wrong with the MOD police; they have no sense of the difference between right and wrong.
There was another strange gap in the evidence. A key witness was Lieutenant-General Sir Mike Jackson--a true British hero, who now leads the NATO force in Kosovo, and is the colonel commandant of the Parachute Regiment. He submitted written evidence to the MOD police, stating what he knew about Major Stankovic. However, when we saw the list of witnesses provided by the MOD police, there was a declaration on the front cover that General Jackson had refused to give any evidence. That was a demonstrable lie. The Ministry of Defence police proceeded with their case on the basis of that kind of mendacity, half-truth and lying.
The greatest injustice of all was the length of time taken over the case. From the time of the arrest to the time when the papers were handed over to the Crown Prosecution Service was 13 months and two weeks. During that time, Major Stankovic was left to twist in the wind. The CPS examined the papers for almost five months, concluding, on 23 April this year, that there was no case to answer. Of course, there was no case to answer, because there was never any evidence.
The spotlight now turns on to the Ministry of Defence itself. There are questions that the Ministry and its advisers must answer. Why was Major Stankovic taken out of the staff college, thereby certainly ruining his career? Where was the presumption of innocence? It could not possibly have been on security grounds, because officers from foreign armies, who have no British security clearance, study at the college. No documents with a level higher than restricted circulate at the staff college.
Why was Major Stankovic not allowed a soldier's friend for the first two months after his arrest? That is the basic right of even the humblest private facing the possibility of a serious charge. When a soldier's friend was nominated--Brigadier Andrew Cumming of the 9th/12th Royal Lancers--why did the MOD police try to block that?
Why did a colonel sign a memorandum for internal distribution at the Ministry of Defence, warning serving soldiers who had been asked by the major's lawyer to give evidence on his behalf? The soldiers were warned that they did not have to do so. That means that those serving soldiers had an obligation to give evidence to the potential prosecution--the Ministry of Defence police--but were advised against giving evidence to the defence. We know for certain that some of them felt that they were intimidated and that, if they had given that evidence, their careers would have been affected. This is not a Kafkaesque police state; this is Britain, which is a free country with a loyal Army to defend it.
My next question relates to the cost. I believe that to prepare his defence--which he had to do--Major Stankovic has run up legal fees of up to 10 times his salary as a serving major. I shall not ask the Minister what contribution the Ministry of Defence has made because I know the answer, which is that not one penny piece has come from the legal defence fund.
I assure the Minister that the Army is watching carefully. It is aware of the injustice, and if Major Stankovic is not well treated, that will have serious repercussions throughout the ranks. Yesterday, I received a letter from a serving soldier who knew the major well in Bosnia. He said:
What about the rest of the major's career? Where is the apology? Where is the reinstatement? Where is the sense that the duty of care has not been exercised? He is entitled to answers on all those points.
I do not know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, whether you saw in The House Magazine last week a perceptive piece by Anne Perkins about this case, in which she drew a very apt analogy when she said that this is the British Dreyfus case. Alfred Dreyfus, a French officer of Jewish origin, was arrested over 100 years ago, also on suspicion of giving information to a foreign power. He was the victim of the anti-semitism of the French army and political establishment at that time. His sword was broken on the square and he was sent to the penal colony of Devil's island.
Major Stankovic's ordeal may not seem that extreme, although I suspect that it seems so to him, but he, too, is accused of not being one of us. It is the very qualities for which he was valued in Bosnia, such as his ability to make the mental leap across the linguistic and ethnic divide and to translate the people as well as the language, for which he is now being penalised.
"This case is something that astonishes and angers me in equal measure. I hope fervently that some of those responsible will be held to account for the appalling way he has been treated. Only then will I be convinced that there remains some hope that the rest of us will be fairly treated in future."
Major Stankovic is entitled to answers to further questions. Who were his shadowy accusers in the first place? Did the accusations come from the intelligence service of a foreign power? If so, which intelligence service of which foreign power? Who signed off those accusations in the Ministry of Defence in the summer of 1997? I doubt whether the decision could have been made at a level lower than that of the Chief of the General Staff. Major Stankovic is entitled to an answer to those questions.
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