My cousin was the ‘Angel of Mostar' – 30 years on she's delivering aid in Gaza and Ukraine

Telegraph

4 days ago

My cousin Sally Becker had a strange recurring nightmare during childhood. Someone was about to remove her leg in hospital and she needed to escape. It instilled in her a long-term fear of losing a limb. But it somehow never stopped her from putting herself in countless situations where this might come to pass.
Given the existence she has led in the past three decades, repeatedly entering war zones to save the lives of children caught up in bloody conflicts, it feels like a small miracle she's here at all. Since her early 30s, she's been shot in the leg, inhaled chlorine gas, gone on hunger strike in a Kosovo jail and crossed borders under sniper fire. She has helped evacuate civilians from Bosnia, Chechnya, Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine and Gaza. Witnessed the worst of human suffering and carried on, even when her freelance humanitarian missions threatened to become engulfed in red tape and resistance.
Facing her for the first time in her tidy sitting room in Hove, East Sussex, I'm struck by how much like the rest of my family she is in appearance and manner. And yet how unlike the rest of us, hurling herself into life-threatening environments from which most would recoil in horror.
She was dubbed the Angel of Mostar when she first came to prominence during the Balkans conflict in the early 1990s. The story of this plucky British woman driving an ambulance across the frontline in Bosnia to evacuate sick and injured children captured the public imagination.
It captured mine too, not least because she's my father's first cousin, and my first cousin once removed. For years I had heard of her exploits and wondered how she did it. Marvelled at the genetic shake-down that meant she fearlessly entered war zones, while I very much did not. Had she always been so intrepid, so undaunted by danger?
'I was a bit worried,' she says, recalling the days before she set off on her very first mission, a typically understated and down-to-earth response.
A bit worried is how I feel before a mild-thrill theme park ride. Sally, now in her 60s, is discussing how she felt when she ignored the warning of her father (my great-uncle Jack) and hitched a ride to war-torn Bosnia with a humanitarian aid convoy.
'You can't get insurance for dismemberment!' her dad called to her from the hallway before she left. He thought she'd lost her mind. My cousin was undeterred.
After what she calls a 'fairly normal' childhood in Brighton, the second of four children, Sally had spent her 20s travelling and working as an artist. She was living on the Costa del Sol in Spain by the time the break-up of Yugoslavia at the start of the 1990s led to violent struggle between Serbs, Muslims and Croats. As opposing ethnic groups fought for territory, families that had lived alongside each other as neighbours found themselves on opposite sides of a brutal civil war.
'I didn't even know where Bosnia was,' Sally admits. But one April afternoon in 1993, a news broadcast stopped her in her tracks. The moment her life changed direction forever came when a civilian in war-torn Sarajevo – a woman accompanied by a little boy – looked straight into the camera and asked, 'Why is no-one helping us?'
Sally took it personally. 'It resonated with me,' she says. 'I felt like she was speaking to me directly, and I thought, 'Well yeah, why aren't I doing something?' So I decided I would.'
In her new memoir, Where Angels Fear to Tread, she tells the incredible story of what happened next. It's the story of a life spent going where the need was greatest, however perilous this was. Of taking huge personal risks to help as many people as possible. Of doing what she could to 'make a difference', as it's now known.
'People didn't really use that term then,' she reflects, 'but perhaps that's what I'd always wanted to do but hadn't found a way.'
Becoming the 'angel'
She had thought of becoming a doctor when she was younger. But when she asked her GP if she could borrow his books, he just laughed. Lacking both medical experience and engineering skills, she was turned away by various humanitarian organisations. Only when she approached a Croatian one called Suncokret was she finally accepted as a volunteer.
Suncokret arranged for her to join a convoy of trucks setting off from Godstone in Surrey in May 1993 and travelling overland to the Balkans.
'I thought I'd be there for two or three weeks,' she says. 'Instead, here we are, 30-odd years later.'
Delivering aid to a hospital under the control of Croat forces on the west side of the historic Bosnian city of Mostar, Sally saw wards 'filled with scarred and bandaged victims of the war raging less than a mile away,' she writes, in prose that capture the hell of armed conflict and its impact on civilians, as seen from the closest quarters.
Lodging in a hotel in Čitluk, 14 miles from Mostar, she was kept awake at night by the sound of missiles. It didn't scare her away, and she spent those first weeks in Bosnia ferrying aid to the hospital and helping a community living close to the frontline.
By June, divided Mostar was under siege from the Croatian Defence Council (HVO). They controlled access to the city and international aid organisations couldn't get in. Sally was determined.
At the hospital she met the head of the Croatian Military Health Authorities, Dr Ivan Bagarić. She told him she and her colleagues had hired a car, a white Renault 4, but needed permission to pass through the checkpoints in Croat-controlled areas. Dr Bagarić obliged, meaning Sally was able to drive back and forth from Čitluk to Mostar delivering aid – seemingly the only foreign aid worker at that time who could.
One day, a member of the UN Civil Police told her of the plight of a three-year-old Muslim boy living in East Mostar. He was suffering a serious heart problem and desperately needed surgery. Could Sally use her apparent influence with the Croats to obtain permission to evacuate him, asked the officer.
Dr Bagarić gave her permission to do so, 'Not for one child but for all the sick and wounded children and their mothers,' he said. It marked a turning point in Sally's war work.
'I would have risked my life to save just one child,' she writes. 'Ivan was giving me a chance to save them all.'
A ceasefire was arranged and Sally set off in an ambulance, steering around the spikes of deadly mines that protruded from the road. Crossing a disused airfield, she came under sniper fire and terror truly struck her for the first time. She was convinced she would be killed.
'Actually being in control of a vehicle which was being targeted by snipers was awful,' she says. 'I had a ceasefire arranged so I didn't expect to be shot at, it was totally unexpected. I just acted on instinct and decided to carry on driving while ducking beneath the steering wheel and putting my foot down.'
She remembered from films how cars swerved to and fro to avoid being hit by gunfire. She did the same and somehow escaped injury.
The mission was ultimately a success, resulting in the evacuation of five injured and sick children, who were taken to Italy and then the US for medical care. It made headlines around the world. The 'angel' moniker was coined, and it stuck.
I was at primary school at the time and knew nothing of the Balkans and only a little about that side of my father's family. We lived in Leeds, far from the Beckers in Brighton, who my dad used to visit as a child. I heard about the Angel of Mostar and felt proud to be related to her, even if I didn't actually know where Mostar was.
We learnt of Sally's exploits from the media, and no doubt also from my grandmother (her aunt). It all seemed exciting, if remote. I had no grasp of the danger she was in.
Then, in July 2012, I was watching the opening ceremony of the London Olympics and suddenly there she was. Dressed in white, my cousin was one of eight notable figures carrying the Olympic flag into the stadium while the world watched. She walked alongside Ban Ki-Moon, then secretary-general of the UN , Shami Chakrabarti, then head of civil rights group Liberty and others.
'Oh my gosh,' I said, 'it's Sally Becker! Did we know she was going to be there?' It came as a surprise to me, but perhaps it shouldn't have. She had ended up evacuating about 300 children from Bosnia during the conflict, and had spent the years since then engaged in similar activities in other war zones. The numbers she saved had climbed into the hundreds. It was, she explains, that initial breakthrough in Bosnia that spurred her on.
'Suddenly finding that I was able to save a life changed everything for me,' she says. 'I felt like I was finally doing something worthwhile.'
'I didn't give death much thought'
The publicity her work in Bosnia received helped draw attention to the plight of civilians but didn't come without criticism. The UN, she says, made out she was some kind of maverick. 'They said, 'We can't have every granny in a bus turning up.'' (She was in her early 30s at the time.) She describes the negativity she encountered from some as 'frustrating', more because it was unhelpful to what she was trying to achieve than because it was hurtful.
Doing what she has done must require immense reserves of mental fortitude. But on the sunny spring day when I visit her, I learn she is far from immune to the inevitable physical hardships of working in war zones. Her friends called her 'the wimp of Mostar', she smiles. 'It's not that I get scared easily, it's that I don't like walking, I don't like being cold, I'm not into camping or sitting on uncomfortable chairs. I'm really a bit of a pain. But out there I had to face all those things and a lot more.'
The distaste for uncomfortable chairs is understandable, given an episode in Kosovo, another part of the former Yugoslavia where ethnic tension had been escalating since 1993. It erupted into open conflict in March 1998 between Serb police and the separatist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA).
In December 1997, Sally started a campaign to raise money for aid and medical supplies to help civilians in the province. She appealed for British volunteers to join her on the mission, and set off with them in a convoy of ambulances and trucks from Brighton to deliver several tonnes of aid.
In June 1998, after fighting had intensified, the borders to Kosovo were closed so she decided to bring the aid to some of the thousands of refugees who had fled to Albania. With 26 volunteers aged 30 to 65, she drove to the port of Bari in Italy, then boarded a ferry to the country.
When the aid had been delivered and the rest of the convoy was returning home, Sally crossed the mountains on foot with a guide, to deliver paediatric medical supplies to a hospital in Junik, a town in western Kosovo surrounded by Serb forces.
Here she was asked to evacuate sick and injured children and their families back across the border to Albania. It would be a hazardous journey, but she agreed and set out on foot with two guides and a group of 24 women and children. Those who weren't well enough to walk were carried on mules.
Resting in woods at the border, they heard machine gun fire tear through the air. A helicopter gunship appeared overhead. While the rest of the group made it safely back to Junik, Sally stayed to help a woman and two children. After they were pinned down by gunfire for an hour, she surrendered and was arrested and taken to a police station in Gjakova in Kosovo.
The Serb paramilitary police interrogated her while forcing her to sit for three days and three nights on a broken chair that could only be prevented from toppling if she balanced using her feet (an ordeal she blames for back problems she suffers today). Brought before a local judge, she was sentenced to 30 days in Lipljan Prison for crossing the border without a visa.
She must have known she might not survive some of these situations. Must have reckoned with the prospect of death but somehow either accepted it or pushed it aside?
'I was always an optimist,' she shrugs. 'So I probably didn't give it much thought.'
'I'll do it as long as I can'
After Kosovo, Sally became a single mother to a daughter, Billie, now 25. I was informed of this development, oddly, by my GCSE history teacher who had read about my cousin in the news. Looking back now, I realise that while I was sitting through history lessons, she was making history and not just headlines.
Billie's father was Bill Foxton, a decorated former soldier who worked in conflict zones around the world and who Sally had met in Kosovo, but the relationship didn't last.
If Sally had to go away, she left Billie with her mother back home. But motherhood raised the stakes. 'It became much more frightening because there was so much more to lose,' she says. 'Apart from my mum, Billie only had me.'
Still, in 2017, she travelled to Mosul in Iraq, again to help evacuate women and children caught in the crossfire as Iraqi forces fought to take the city back from Isis.
'I didn't tell [Billie] I was going to Mosul until I got back,' she says. 'The possibility that [if I was captured] she might see me being held by Isis dressed in an orange jumpsuit doesn't bear thinking about.'
Does her daughter ever try to talk her out of going into conflict zones?
'No, she doesn't, she knows it's pointless,' she laughs.
Fortunately she can now help save lives remotely as well as in the field, having set up an app called Save A Child, which connects doctors in conflict zones with an international network of specialist paediatric consultants. It enables doctors in remote places, such as parts of Afghanistan, to upload paediatric case histories and receive expert advice on how to treat a child.
The app hasn't kept her at home though. In the last few years she has been to Ukraine and helped evacuate 240 children and mothers, and briefly to Egypt to help evacuate nine injured Palestinian children and their families from Gaza.
Sitting in her comfortable home on a quiet and leafy residential street near the southern English coast, I wonder how she adjusts each time she returns.
She's done it for so long, she says, that it doesn't feel jarring, not really. 'It's more that when I get back I think, 'Oh my goodness, I can have whatever I want to eat,' because obviously it's always difficult to get nice food in a war zone.'
Can she imagine a time when she decides not to go any more?
'It's becoming physically difficult as I get older. But I'll do it as long as I can.'
After that, she won't quit altogether; she'll continue her work remotely.
My cousin isn't someone who stops, I realise. Wars are still raging across the world and she's still got so much to do.