2 articles of interest: Unfinest Hour: Britain and the destruction of Bosnia by Brendan SimmsBritain's low, dishonest Balkan decadeMarcus Tanner13 November 2001 This is a book about grovelling: that is, a book about how the British establishment – Parliament, Army, Foreign Office and Fourth Estate – grovelled before Serbia's murderous dictator Slobodan Milosevic and his storm troopers in Bosnia from 1992 to 1995. Let's start with a photograph. It shows General Sir Michael Rose, British head of the UN peacekeepers in Bosnia, having what looks like a fantastic time with a mass murderer, Ratko Mladic, later indicted as a war criminal by the Hague tribunal. Rose is a central character in the book. Running what Brendan Simms cites as a "a cross between a third-rate public school and a brothel" in his Bosnia HQ, he epitomised everything that was rotten, wrong and plain wicked about British policy in the Balkans. The book shows him to have been a mean-spirited bully towards the Muslims, and obsequious when it came to dealing with Mladic. Such was the climate of philistine Islamophobia at Rose's HQ that when he chanced on President Izetbegovic listening to classical music, he wondered how a Muslim could possibly appreciate its "Christian sentiments". As Simms makes clear, Rose was not isolated in his doltish prejudices. All the departments of the British state and the two main political parties were as good as united in the belief that helping Bosnia (and Croatia) survive the Serb onslaught meant subscribing to some mysterious German conspiracy to take over the world. This phobia informed Britain's hostility to the American proposal to "lift and strike", meaning lift the arms embargo on Bosnia and strike the Serb armies encircling Sarajevo. This opposition took Britain far down the road towards condoning Serbia's genocidal war aims. Listen to this. "The Serbs are one of the bravest, fiercest, most patriotic races on earth and always have been – Greater Serbia is a dream that will never die." The voice of Milosevic? No, this is a British MP, Sir Peter Tapsell, in May 1995, three years after the gigantic massacres in the Drina valley and two months before Mladic exterminated the entire male Muslim population of Srebrenica, all 7,000 of them. And here is Tam Dalyell, the revered Labour "Father of the House", coming up with the strange remark that the Serbs could not be guilty of ethnic cleansing because the Bosnian Muslims were not an ethnic group; they were the grandchildren of apostate Christians who had betrayed their faith under the Turks. Where did Dalyell get this tripe from? It sounds just like history according to Tanjug, Milosevic's "news" agency, which churned out mountains of pseudo-historical rubbish throughout the war. There is a happy ending of sorts. In 1995 the Americans put Britain back in the box. They did what all the British generals and their smart-arsed media allies said was certain to bring the house down: they lifted and they struck. And no, there was no new Nazi German Reich and no Third World War. What happened was that the Greater Serbia that Tapsell had confidently prophesied fell apart, and Sarajevo's miserable three-year siege ended. Some books are hard to put down. This one is hard to pick up and read for any length of time, so excruciating are the remarks and actions it records. Talk about a low, dishonest decade! Reading it made me want to throw my passport on the nearest rubbish heap, so total is the indictment not merely of the British state but of the British intelligentsia, too, from top to bottom and left to right. And how curious that two of the handful of parliamentarians to emerge with any credit on the business were David Trimble and Iain Duncan Smith. Here we are, a few years on, and wondering why so many Muslims round the world – not to mention here – distrust and despise our much-proclaimed "values". Want to know why? This book provides part of the answer. The reviewer's book 'Ireland's Holy Wars' is published this week by Yale Also from the null sectionThe 50 Best collection Global Community? Meet the people who are making it happen Independent Health Insurance Contact Us Special offer ? save over £55 -->Book Reviews Melanie McDonaghMonday 12th November 2001 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 Brian Gallagher distributed by CROWN (Croatian World Net) - CroworldNet@aol.com
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