[Nettime-bold] Unfinest Hour

["Ivo Skoric" <ivo@reporters.net>]

British historian Brendan Simms wrote a book acusing British 
government of appeasement of Milosevic in Bosnia - here is Nick 
Cohen's review for Sunday's Observer and the Lord Hurd's reaction 
in The Scotsman:

Nick Cohen reviewed Brendan Simms' devastating new book, 
Unfinest Hour,
in Sunday's Observer.  An excerpt:

     Simms mints the phrase 'conservative pessimism' to describe
     the mentality of Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind and David Owen.
     They evaded Serb responsibility for the atrocities and vastly
     overestimated the difficulties of intervention.  Exhausted
     by Ireland and haunted by Suez and Vietnam, Conservative
     politicians and the 'experts' in the press and think-tanks
     maintained that ethnic cleansing was an unpleasant fact of life.

     The dominant ideology might have propelled Britain to sit out
     the Bosnian conflict.  But Hurd went further. Not only did Britain
     refuse to reverse Serb aggression, 'we' made damn sure no one 
else
     did either.  'Pessimism' doesn't quite capture the malice of
     British policy.  American attempts to lift the arms embargo
     on the Bosnian government were opposed by vehement 
mandarins.
     No-fly zones, relief for Bosnian enclaves, war-crimes tribunals
     and armed protection for humanitarian convoys were fought
     to the last ditches of the European Union and United Nations.
     'Any time there was a likelihood of effective action,' said
     Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Polish Prime Minister, '(Hurd) 
intervened
     to prevent it.'

Andras Riedlmayer
=================================================
=====================
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4291391,00.html
The Sunday Observer (London)
November 4, 2001

Observer Review Pages, Pg. 15

Books:  Betrayal in the Balkans:  Britain's refusal to act in the
former Yugoslavia left the Serbs free to butcher thousands of 
Bosnians:
Unfinest Hour: How Britain Helped to Destroy Bosnia by Brendan 
Simms

NICK COHEN

 Unfinest Hour: How Britain Helped to Destroy Bosnia by Brendan 
Simms
Allen Lane/ Penguin Press pounds 18.99, pp496

 'BOSNIA,' A COMMENTATOR noted as he watched the Foreign 
Secretary
agonise
at the height of the Balkan wars, 'will be on Douglas Hurd's 
tombstone.'
Lord Hurd is still with us, but tens of thousands of Bosnians are 
dead.
The connection between the grave statesman and the graves of the
slaughtered is Brendan Simms's theme.  We may see better 
demolitions
of the last Tory government when the official records are released,
but Simms's attention to telling detail and cool, literate anger make
Unfinest Hour the best epitaph for the wretched years of the Major
administration I've read to date.  His argument, that what Britain
did to Bosnia stands alongside Munich and Suez as a great 
Conservative
foreign policy disaster, is irrefutable. The wars of the former
Yugoslavia
had one cause:  irredentist Serbs, who combined nationalism and
socialism
in a faintly familiar mixture.  They didn't merely want power, but to
guarantee that only Serbs lived in Serb-occupied territory. Thus, 
while
the Bosnian government retained Serb and Croat backing, every 
mosque
in the lands Milosevic's supporters held was levelled. For years,
Britain
led the chant that nothing could be done. Yet in the assaults that
forced
Milosevic to sign the Dayton Agreement of 1995 and in the Kosovo
campaign,
the determined application of force compelled the supposedly 
mighty Serb
armies to back off and precipitated a democratic revolution in 
Belgrade.

   Simms mints the phrase 'conservative pessimism' to describe
the mentality of Hurd, Malcolm Rifkind and David Owen.  They 
evaded
Serb responsibility for the atrocities and vastly overestimated the
difficulties of intervention. Exhausted by Ireland and haunted by 
Suez
and Vietnam, Conservative politicians and the 'experts' in the press
and think-tanks maintained that ethnic cleansing was an unpleasant
fact of life.

   The dominant ideology might have propelled Britain to sit out the
Bosnian conflict.  But Hurd went further.  Not only did Britain refuse
to reverse Serb aggression, 'we' made damn sure no one else did 
either.
'Pessimism' doesn't quite capture the malice of British policy.
American attempts to lift the arms embargo on the Bosnian 
government
were opposed by vehement mandarins.  No-fly zones, relief for 
Bosnian
enclaves, war-crimes tribunals and armed protection for 
humanitarian
convoys were fought to the last ditches of the European Union and
United Nations.  'Any time there was a likelihood of effective action,'
said Tadeusz Mazowiecki, the Polish Prime Minister, '(Hurd) 
intervened
to prevent it.'

   Post-imperial weariness mixed with genuine imperial arrogance.
No one would make Britain lose face by forcing the Foreign Office to
think again, particularly not the 'naive' Americans. Throughout the 
war,
the British conservatives were resentful Greeks to wide-eyed 
American
Romans.  The conviction that Britain had a superior knowledge of 
the
futility of reforming a wicked world pushed Whitehall into a kind
of madness.  Only the possession of an unhinged mind can explain 
how
Malcolm Rifkind, a Defence Secretary who had never seen combat, 
could
bellow 'you Americans don't know the horrors of war' at Senator Bob
Dole,
who lost an arm in World War II.  'Your guys were usually so 
refined,'
an American diplomat said of the Washington Embassy. 'But they 
were
going crazy on this.'

   Rifkind's ravings - Senator John McCain came close to slapping 
him
at one meeting - will surprise readers in a Britain where snobbery
gives an unwarranted benefit of the doubt to patrician conservatives.
The politicians who dealt with Bosnia were gentlemen of moderate
temperament; sophisticates with breeding and manners, who were 
a cut
above the rabble-rousing Thatcherites. Yet Hurd out-Thatchered 
Thatcher,
who honourably opposed Serb aggression, when he declared that 
'there is
no such thing as the international community'. He then sank to a 
depth
I can't remember Thatch reaching when he effectively closed 
Britain's
borders to Bosnian refugees.  'The civilians have an effect on the
combatants,' he explained. 'Their interests put pressure on the 
warring
factions to treat for peace.'  You have to read this disgraceful 
passage
several times before you realise that Hurd was denying sanctuary 
to the
victims of the Serbs (and of his diplomacy) so he could use their 
misery
to force Bosnia to cut a deal with the ethnic cleansers.

   Corrupt language followed corrupting policies. Simms is very 
good on
how the distinction between aggressors and victims was blurred and
everyone became a member of a 'warring faction' filled with 'ancient
hatreds'; on how the secular Bosnian government was transformed 
into
'the Muslims'.  The Bosnian war, he writes, 'became a strange 
beast:
a perpetratorless crime in which all were victims and all more or 
less
equally guilty'.  The debasement of the terms in which Britain could
think about the Balkans reached a nadir when Kirsty Wark 
described
a Catholic Croat Bosnian spokesman as a 'Muslim' on Newsnight 
and
ignored his protestations that he was nothing of the sort.

   Ah, but it takes you back.  David Owen Balkanising the Balkans.
Major complaining about critics 'grandstanding from the safety of
their armchairs'. (Try it at home if you believe it is possible.)
Douglas Hogg screaming that it would take 500,000 troops to turn 
back
the Serbs.  MI6 spinning that the Bosnians were massacring 
themselves.
And - how could we forget? - the valiant General Sir Michael Rose, 
who,
while refusing to contemplate effective military action by the troops
under his command, opined that demands for intervention came 
from
'the powerful Jewish lobby behind the Bosnian state' and wondered 
at
a performance of Mozart's Requiem in Sarajevo if Alija Izetbegovic,
the cultured Bosnian president, understood 'the Christian sentiment
behind the words and music'.  Rose's 'ancient hatreds' coexisted 
with
a grudging admiration for Serb officers. Even the butcher of 
Srebrenica,
General Ratko Mladic, wasn't all bad, in his considered view, but a
'man who generally kept his word'.

   Unfinest Hour is more than a diplomatic history.  It is a grim
cultural study of the political, military and intellectual elites of
the early Nineties who watched suffering with a faux-realist relish
and saw humane treatment as more dangerous than the disease.  
Formal
differences between Left and Right scarcely mattered. Hurd 
sounded like
John Pilger when he implied it was racist to intervene in Bosnia but 
not
in Angola or Cambodia. Pilger mimicked Hurd when he accused the
Americans
of wanting to 'recolonise' the Balkans.  For every Lord Carrington
harrumphing that 'they were all as bad as each other' there was
a Misha Glenny saying that those ancient 'irrational beliefs' drove
all parties in the Balkans into cycles of insane slaughter.

   Kosovo supplies Simms with a happy ending of sorts.  If he could
find the time, Tony Blair would enjoy this dissection of the experts 
who
now oppose the Afghan war.  But just as Northern Ireland blinded 
Hurd to
what was before his nose in the Balkans so, I fear, the success of
Kosovo
blinds supporters of the campaign against bin Laden to its huge 
dangers.


/To order Unfinest Hour for pounds 16.99, plus p&p, call the 
Observer
Books Service on 0870 066 7989/


  D Hurd reviews B Simms' book and says it is biased.
There are many reasons, that B Simms begins from an incorrect
premise, hasn't had access to gov't documents.


"But I assumed that certain ordinary rules of his
profession would be observed - that he would record the facts 
evenly,
and that he would try to enter the minds of those who formed and
executed
British policy before declaring his own conclusions. No such luck.
>From beginning to end Simms has written a polemic. He has had 
access to
no new material apart from interviews on familiar lines with those
immediately concerned. The record, as he tells it, is one-sided from
the beginning; offensive epithets are scattered over every page."


Daniel
(article not for cross posting)
-------------------------------------------------------------

The Scotsman    Nov 3, 2001
Edinburgh (UK)

Book review: Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia:
The war we steered clear of
-------------------
By  Lord Douglas Hurd


   Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia by Dr 
Brendan
Simms

   Penguin Press, 18.99 pounds

   Being attacked in print by journalists under the impression that 
they
are writing the first draft of history is nothing new to me. Being
attacked in print by a historian, however, is - and it is rather
depressing to find that objectivity when writing about the recent past
is in just as short supply as it is among journalists, who at least 
have
the excuse that they are chasing daily deadlines.

   When Dr Simms, author of this book about British foreign policy 
in
relation to the Bosnian civil war, came to see me at his request I 
could
tell from his manner and the loading of his questions that his work 
was
likely to be critical. But I assumed that certain ordinary rules of his
profession would be observed - that he would record the facts 
evenly,
and that he would try to enter the minds of those who formed and
executed
British policy before declaring his own conclusions. No such luck.
>From beginning to end Simms has written a polemic. He has had 
access to
no new material apart from interviews on familiar lines with those
immediately concerned. The record, as he tells it, is one-sided from
the beginning; offensive epithets are scattered over every page.

   The Bosnian war stirs strong emotions and to express them 
cannot be
wrong. But so extreme are Simms's denunciations that I tried to 
work
out his starting point. He seems to write on the assumption that in
1992 Bosnia was a long-standing sovereign state, which suffered
aggression from people who called themselves Bosnian Serbs, but 
had
no rights in the country where they lived. His analysis is so
extravagant
that the range of people who are denounced because they did not 
share
it is very wide. Ministers, diplomats, generals, peacemakers of 
course -
but also the Labour Opposition, much of the press and academia. 
Even
effective critics of government policy such as Paddy Ashdown come
under the lash.

   Simms greatly exaggerates the damage caused by Bosnia to
Anglo-American
friendship. Certainly there were strains and disagreements in 1993-
1994.
But the comparison with Suez is absurd. I lived through that 
breakdown
as a young diplomat in 1956; for a few weeks it was total. No such
collapse occurred over Bosnia; we took care to prevent it.

   It is nonsense to talk, as Simms does, of Serbophilia in the 
Foreign
Office. I can think of no Foreign Office minister or official who
spoke to me approvingly of Serb conduct. There was nothing heroic
or supportable in the behaviour of the Bosnian Serbs, or of 
Milosevic.

   We often made the point that none of the three parties was free
of blame; but Simms's own quotations show that I placed the 
greater
blame where it belonged, on the Serbs. The only decision of mine of
which Simms approves is the one most often criticised, namely to 
join
in the European agreement in December 1991 to recognise Croatia 
and
Slovenia. Simms passionately opposes the arms embargo 
imposed by
the UN on all parties in the Balkan conflict at the time, but the
UN Security Council Resolution could only have changed by lifting it
on everyone. Can Simms not enter into the minds of almost all of us
in Britain, the EU and the majority of the Security Council who felt
revulsion at the thought of trying to achieve peace by flooding all
sides in Bosnia with yet more arms? We were engaged in a peace
process, not an expansion of war.

   Some lessons of Bosnia are still a worrying question mark in my
mind. I am clear about the arms embargo. I am glad we did not 
commit
British troops to fight a ground war in Bosnia. I am glad we did not
follow Simms's alternative policies and fill Bosnia with yet more
refugees and corpses. Wisdom from an armchair can be particularly
bloodthirsty.

   Though Simms exaggerates British resistance in principle to
airstrikes, with benefit of hindsight I am not so clear whether the
earlier and stronger use of airpower might have been effective.
Certainly the "dual key" b which, in order to protect the British
and other troops on the ground, the UN had a veto on airstrikes,
became untenable.

   Simms attacks the way the war ended. Even the US negotiator at
Dayton, Richard Holbrooke, is rebuked. Like the rest of us, 
Holbrooke
worked for peace by dealing with Milosevic. Simms uses the 
familiar
argument that Milosevic was the problem rather than the solution.
Precisely because he was part of the problem he had to be part of
the solution. He had to be brought to desert and betray his Bosnian
Serb allies. Eventually economic sanctions, diplomatic and military
pressure on Serbia did their job. Milosevic dragged the Bosnian 
Serbs
to Dayton and forced their signature on the peace agreement. The 
war
ended and sanctions against Serbia were partly relaxed.

   This relaxation told Milosevic that he had a choice. He could have
begun to edge his country closer to the rest of Europe. But he could
not accept that this would involve stopping the persecution of the
Albanian majority in Kosovo, and restoring autonomy to them.
He made the wrong choice, with disastrous results for his country
and himself.


   Lord Hurd was British Foreign Secretary from 1989 to 1995.
   -----------------------------

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