Eurasia Press & News
A senior British diplomat said “Bosnian Serbs love us to an embarrassing degree” after their rebel army massacred thousands of Muslim civilians in a war where John Major’s government was often seen as pro-Serb.
Charles Crawford, Britain’s ambassador to Bosnia who made the remark, added “we need to continue to exploit this” sentiment “to try to win an undue British role in lucrative reconstruction contracts in RS [Republika Srpska]”, a Serb-run region of Bosnia where the World Bank valued post-war building projects at $60m (worth $120m today).
Crawford made the comments in January 1997, 18 months after Bosnian Serb soldiers massacred 8,000 unarmed Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, which a United Nations tribunal later ruled amounted to genocide.
Major’s Conservative government only backed decisive airstrikes against Bosnian Serbs after the Srebrenica massacre having spent much of the 1992-95 war blocking action at the UN.
Crawford’s comments about Serbs were found in a file at the UK National Archives by Nadina Ronc, a London-based author and foreign policy analyst who fled Bosnia as a child refugee in the 1990s.
‘Irredeemably pro-Serb’
Britain – normally an enthusiastic exporter of arms – strongly supported an international weapons embargo on Bosnia during the war, which saw some of the worst atrocities in Europe since the Holocaust as Serbs committed ethnic cleansing and besieged Sarajevo.
Ronc believes the arms embargo unfairly prevented Bosnia’s official government – primarily made up of Muslim Bosniaks – from defending itself against Serb and Croat rebels who had better access to arsenals from their neighbours.
Douglas Hurd – Major’s foreign secretary until 1995 – defended Britain’s “realist” policy during the breakup of Yugoslavia, in contrast to America’s more interventionist approach.
He argued that supplying arms would put UK peacekeepers at risk and only mean warring parties had “the kit to go on killing each other”.
But his motives were questioned when he left office and took up a role at NatWest bank, which advised on the privatisation of Serbia’s telecoms company.
The bank allegedly secured the contract after Hurd had a breakfast meeting with Serbia’s president Slobodan Milosevic.
Against this backdrop, Crawford wrote: “In Sarajevo we began 1996 with the Bosniacs [sic] and to a lesser extent Croats distrusting the British as irredeemably pro-Serb.”
Yet he felt perceptions improved later in Major’s term, adding: “We ended 1996 praised by all parties for the elegance and skill with which we handled the London Conference,” referring to a summit on implementing the peace process, “and with former Bosniac critics at last seeing grudging merit in our balanced, active approach.”
Dissident perspective
Not all Bosniaks were won over, with Ronc’s father, journalist Hasan Roncevic, continuing to criticise UK policy in columns for Ljiljan, a Sarajevo-based newspaper.
Roncevic had evacuated his family to Britain near the start of the conflict, when tensions rose in their multi-ethnic city of Brcko.
Weeks later Bosnian Serb forces blew up the city’s bridge, killing around 100 Croat and Muslim civilians.
The Roncevics received refugee status in Britain and unsuccessfully lobbied the Conservatives to change their policy on Bosnia, where some of their relatives were tortured in concentration camps.
Ronc believes her family was placed under surveillance from around 1993 when a US diplomat “told my father that the British government was bugging our home phone.”
Roncevic grew disillusioned with Tory policy, claiming: “The English bugged our phone in the UK, because they didn’t like my writing.”
Ljiljan editor, Dr Dzemaludin Latic, told Ronc: “We were closely monitored by various spy networks and embassies, particularly your father, who critically analysed the deceitful policies of the English, especially under John Major and Douglas Hurd.”
Ronc further alleges that British authorities blacklisted her from getting jobs in the UK in retaliation for her father’s critical articles.
The claims are contained in her new memoir, Daughters of Dissidents Need Not Apply. The Foreign Office and MI6 declined to comment on intelligence matters.
UK policy towards the region shifted dramatically under Tony Blair, with the SAS hunting down Bosnian Serb war crimes suspects inside Serbia and British troops helping sever Belgrade’s control of Kosovo, where a statue in honour of Blair was recently unveiled.
