Silence over Britain’s war-guilt must end

Seventeen years ago on a Friday, there began in the former Yugoslavia what Kofi Annan has called the worst war crime in Europe since 1945 — the shooting by Serb forces of about 8,000 unarmed men and boys at Srebrenica. The victims’ only crime was that they were Muslims. The war led to the killing of about 100,000 people and the displacement of more than two million, the vast majority Muslims.

While primary responsibility for the massacre lies with the perpetrators behind it, a secondary responsibility lies with those who could have prevented it but failed. In 1992, the UN had imposed an arms embargo that stopped Bosnian Muslims from exercising their inherent right to self-defence against the Serbs, who had inherited the former Yugoslavia’s army, the fourth largest in Europe.

Robert Hunter, the US ambassador to Nato from 1993 to 1998, believes that Britain was the country most responsible for preventing intervention by the UN or Nato to rescue the Bosnians. “Britain,” Hunter has said, “has a huge burden of responsibility for what happened at Srebrenica.” Responsibility for “Nato’s failure to act militarily lay in London”. When, after Srebrenica, Nato was finally authorised to conduct air strikes, the war was ended in 20 days.

The British people showed more humanity than their rulers. In April 1993, more than two out of three people in a Mori poll supported the dispatch of British troops, while in February 1994, more than half wanted air strikes against the Bosnian Serbs. But the foreign secretary, Douglas Hurd, defended the arms embargo since lifting it would create a “level killing field”, a remark that drew from a retired Margaret Thatcher the stinging retort that there already was a “killing field the like of which I thought we would never see in Europe again”.

In addition, Britain’s borders were closed to refugees since their interests, Hurd argued, “would put pressure on the warring factions to treat for peace”, the implication being that the refugee problem would force the Bosnians — the victims — to surrender. Britain’s stance had become that of the priest who passed by on the other side in the parable of the good Samaritan.

It is time, surely, to end the polite silence that has so far attended Hurd’s conduct. The Srebrenica massacre offers a dreadful warning of the dangers of a “realist” foreign policy that ignores the fundamental values holding liberal democracies together.

In March 1999, the Blair government took quite a different view of Balkan affairs, pressing Nato to commit troops to Kosovo to counter the threat of genocide against Albanian Muslims. This led rapidly to the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, denounced for dragging his nation into a war it could not win.

In April 1999, Tony Blair defended his foreign policy in an important speech in Chicago. “We need,” he declared, “to enter a new millennium where dictators know that they cannot get away with ethnic cleansing or repress their people with impunity.” We needed “a new doctrine of international community” to give “explicit recognition that today more than ever before, we are mutually dependent”. In consequence, Britain had a right, if not a duty, to intervene to prevent genocide, to deal with “massive flows of refugees” that become “threats to international peace and security”.

These ideas have now been embodied in the 2005 UN initiative, Responsibility to Protect, based on the principle that sovereignty is not a right, but a responsibility. It is this principle that the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, and his Foreign Secretary, William Hague, adopted in Libya, and seek to adopt in Syria.

In 2004, the Serbian president, Boris Tadic, apologised to Bosnia-Herzegovina for crimes committed in the name of Serbia; and in March 2010, the Serb parliament issued a declaration “condemning in strongest terms the crime committed in July 1995 against Bosniak population of Srebrenica”. Kofi Annan also has apologised for the UN’s policy of “amoral equivalence”. But there has been no apology from Hurd, even though British policy in Bosnia implicated Britain in the worst atrocity Europe has seen since the Holocaust.

— Guardian News & Media Ltd

Vernon Bogdanor is research professor at the Institute of Contemporary History, King’s College London.