Sunday, November 18, 2001		Books

Unfinest Hour: How Britain Helped to Destroy Bosnia by Brendan Simms. Allen Lane/Penguin Press, London. Pages 496. 9 pound sterling.

"BOSNIA," a diplomat noted as he watched the then British 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 statesmen and the graves of the slaughtered is Brendan Simms’s theme.

We may see better demolitions of the last Conservative government, but Simms’s attention to telling detail and cool, literate anger make "Unfinest Hour" the best epitaph for the wretched years of Premier John Major’s administration I’ve read.

He wants us to count what Britain did to Bosnia along with Munich and Suez as a great 20th century Conservative foreign policy disaster.

Simms sees the wars of the former Yugoslavia as having one cause. Serbs, who combined nationalism and socialism in a familiar mixture, did not merely want to seize power but to guarantee that only Serbs lived in Serb-occupied territory. Thus, while the Bosnian government retained Serb and Croat support, every mosque in the lands Milosevic’s supporters held was levelled.

For years, Simms claims, Britain led the chant that nothing could be done. Yet in the assaults which 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 Douglas Hurd and fellow British politicians Malcolm Rifkind and David Owen.

He holds that 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, he alleges, Hurd went further. No-fly zones, relief for Bosnian enclaves, war-crimes tribunal and armed protection for humanitarian convoys were fought in the European Union and at the 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 contributed to this attitude, according to Simms . No one would make Britain lose face by forcing the Foreign Office to think again, particularly not the "naïve"s Americans. Throughout the war, the British elite 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 which, at one point, saw Malcolm Rifkind, a Defence Secretary who had never seen combat, 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 UK Embassy. "But they were going crazy on this."

Rifkind’s interventions — Senator John McCain came close to slapping him at one meeting — will surprise many readers because the British tend to give an unwarranted benefit of the doubt to patrician Conservatives. The British politicians who dealt with Bosnia were meant to be gentlemen of moderate temperament; sophisticates with breeding and manners who were a cut above the rabble-rousing Thatcherites.s.

Simms is very good on how the distinction between aggressors and victims was blurred and everyone became a member of a :"warring faction"; how the legitimate and 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."

For Simms, "Unfinest Hour" is more than a diplomatic history. It is a grim cultural study of Britain’s political, military and intellectual elites of the early 90s who watched suffering and saw practical treatment as more dangerous than the disease.

Kosovo supplies Simms with a kind of happy ending. If he could find the time, Prime Minister Tony Blair would undoubtedly enjoy this dissection of the politicians and pundits who now oppose the Afghan war.