Unfinest Hour: Britain and the destruction of Bosnia
Brendan Simms Penguin, 462pp, £18.99
ISBN 0713994258
This is an important book, and opportune. It's not just that Slobodan Milosevic is back in the dock at the International War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague, threatening to tell all about the "green light" that British and other western politicians gave his operations. It is the whole international climate that makes this polemical history so timely. Britain and America are busy building up an international coalition of Islamic states against fundamentalist terrorism, which embraces some of the vilest and most repressive regimes in the world, including Sudan and Saudi Arabia. But if you cast your mind back a decade - difficult, I know, for those commentators who think forever in the present tense - there was rather a different scenario.
A European country with a history that long predated the Ottoman conquest, which had been recognised by the international community and had a majority of Muslims quite unlike those with whom we now have to deal (viz, C of E in temperament), was violently dismembered. That was Bosnia, whose war was lazily described as a civil war. It wasn't. Without the actions of the Belgrade government in arming and directing the minority Serbs, and without the arsenal of the Yugoslav army, let alone the propaganda directed from Serbia, it would have been impossible for this conflict to have happened as it did. It became a complex, multi-sided war, but the origin was simple enough. It was an attempt by the Bosnian Serb leadership, backed by Milosevic, to cleanse the greater part of Bosnia of its Croats and Muslims. It was an end usefully summed up by that silky euphemism, ethnic cleansing, and it was achieved with remarkable swiftness (70 per cent of the country was cleansed in the first few months) by systematic terrorism, mass rapes, detention/murder camps and conspicuously horrific massacres.
The worst single massacre of all happened right at the end of the war, when Ratko Mladic's forces murdered more than 7,000 men in Srebrenica. He remains at large. And when the mad mullahs, from Bradford to Islamabad, start to list the iniquities of the west against Islam, they mention not only the bombing of Iraq, but Srebrenica, too. What such people wilfully ignore is that the US was not to blame for the west's role in that massacre. Quite the contrary. The Tory administration in Britain was principally responsible for the policy of intervention in the Bosnian war on the wrong side.
Brendan Simms subjects the policy of Douglas Hurd to merciless analysis; it is remarkable, really, how easily John Major can be discounted on the major foreign policy issue of his premiership. But his responsibility - as well as that of lesser lights such as Douglas Hogg and Malcolm Rifkind - is no less great because they were civilised and, in the case of Rifkind, intelligent people. As the author puts it: "Britain played a particularly disastrous role in the destruction of Bosnia. Her political leaders became afflicted by a particularly disabling form of conservative pessimism which disposed them not only to reject military intervention themselves, but to prevent anybody else, particularly the Americans, from intervening either."
Impartiality in the conflict would have been one thing, but Britain's dual policy of the arms embargo, which favoured only the Serbs, and its promotion of a series of plans for ethnic partition in Bosnia translated into taking the Serbian side. The US policy of "lift and strike" (plus Afghan-style food drops for the enclaves ) was a coherent alternative to full-on ground involvement, but that was vetoed by the Brits. As for the humanitarian effort, Simms sees it, for all its palliative effects, as an alibi for political and military non-intervention.
For all its measured lucidity, the author's tone is one of contained moral indignation. An academic historian and a lecturer in international affairs at Cambridge, Simms is good at anger management, even though his main argument is that Britain's finest made a bloody hash of the conflict in Bosnia. The book is based on sources available at the time to everyone. There's no first-person pain, no privileged insight - none of the "I was there and it was awful" human-interest journalism. This is a cogent moral argument.
Melanie McDonagh reported on the war in Bosnia for the London Evening Standard, among other publications
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