Unfinest Hours In The Balkans

Sir, - Brendan Simms's book Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, and Eamon Delaney's fine review (Books, December…

Sir, - Brendan Simms's book Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia, and Eamon Delaney's fine review (Books, December 1st), remind us that the bombardment of Sarajevo could have been ended much sooner than it was.

For three years and four months the happy, untouchable gunners in the hills shelled the city almost daily. The current indictment against Gen Galic before the UN Hague Tribunal quotes "shelling and sniping of civilians who were tending vegetable plots, queuing for bread, collecting water, attending funerals, shopping", etc. The pictures from Sarajevo at that time showed all this. And the UN got the blame!

Yet two permanent members of the Security Council had troops and generals in Bosnia. The British broadsheet newspapers sang from what could be called, blasphemously perhaps, the same hymn sheet. Those old enough to recall the rabid Daily Telegraph attacks on the UN in the Congo in the 1960s can imagine what it, and the Spectator, would have said if the troops and generals came from small countries rather than from Britain and France. Actually, the generals might have acted - the politicians refused.

Instead "nothing could be done and nothing should be tried" was the suspiciously unanimous refrain. One hopes that those who excused this (because the guns were too well dug-in/camouflaged, or the Serbs had formidable tanks/guerrilla-fighting qualities, etc.) have uneasy consciences.

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Those who backed those excuses professionally might regret that they were so adept at knowing what politicians wanted to hear.

Only when officers from the big countries were chained as hostages to bridges and the murders at Srebrenice shocked the world was action taken. The shelling of Sarajevo ceased almost as soon as the gun positions were attacked. Action three years earlier would have saved many lives. - Yours, etc.,

E.D. Doyle, Tower Road, Clondalkin, Dublin 22.