Unfinest Hour by Brendan Simms

Author:Brendan Simms
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141937670
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2002-03-02T16:00:00+00:00

The Bosnian war was a huge missed opportunity for the British army. Prior to 1995, tens of thousands of highly skilled and experienced soldiers were wasted on essentially alien humanitarian tasks. They were forced to negotiate with murderers and rapists, and they were often put in moral quandaries more terrible than those common to conventional warfare: their morale and warfighting capacity decayed correspondingly. This was primarily the fault of the politicians who had sent them there. But the men on the ground were in some ways complicit in this process: their preoccupation with local factors reinforced the doctrines of moral equivalence emanating from Whitehall; and they both underestimated the potential of air power and exaggerated the fighting strength of the Bosnian Serb army. They came to exemplify a ‘can’t do’ attitude. At the time and for long afterwards, this puzzled many, since the reversal of ethnic cleansing could have been construed as a welcome new task for the services after the end of the Cold War.

In fact, senior military men were alert to the possibilities of Bosnia. Sandhurst insiders have spoken of the high level of bitterness and disillusionment among men returning with their heads held high from the Gulf in 1991–2, only to find that their regiments were being abolished or amalgamated. They did not believe the Bosnian Serbs could be defeated; and for obvious reasons they had little use for an American-style ‘lift and strike’ strategy, which did not involve them. A manpower-intensive humanitarian operation, on the other hand, was an ideal way of staying the axe. It both saved cap-badges and – it was thought – avoided a quagmire. As the columnist Boris Johnson observed in one of his few astute comments on Bosnia: ‘The concept of peacekeeping has replaced deterrence as the central justification for the £25 billion of our money that is still spent on the Armed Forces… If you go to the Ministry of Defence, all discussion circles proudly back to Bosnia… At £186 million for the financial year 1994–1995, and a further £400 million for the new deployment, the UNPROFOR mission is a vast Keynesian employment scheme. That is why it is so important to maintain a peacekeeping operation, when there is no peace to keep.’261 This agenda chimed neatly with that of Glynne Evans’ UN Department at the FCO, which sought a new global role for the British Army in peacekeeping.262 This strategy was not unsuccessful: one of the triumphs which Bob Stewart records in his memoirs was the abandonment of the proposal to amalgamate the Cheshires with the Staffordshire Regiment.263 And it was certainly a subtext of Rose’s constant demands for reinforcements that the number of redundancy notices – many of them being issued to soldiers serving in Bosnia – should be reduced.264

More than a dozen British soldiers died in Bosnia, and hundreds of others were injured, some seriously. They ensured the passage of aid, saved lives, and temporarily delayed the deaths of many more. They reflected credit on themselves, their regiments and their country through many acts of kindness and courage.

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