Chapter 12 of Adrian Hastings, 'The Shaping of Prophecy: Passion, Perception and Practicality' (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1995), pp. 145-153.
I have never been to Bosnia or to any other part of former Yugoslavia and I have had no personal interest in it whatever. Yet I have come since 1991 to give a great deal of time and energy to crying out to an indifferent world the truth about Bosnia as I see it, a truth not just about mass murder, rape and the attempted genocide of an entire society but about the sustained collusion of the British Government and the United Nations Secretariat in what is going on: the greatest public crime in post-Second World War European history. If numerous other, better informed and more influential people had been saying the same, I would have felt no special obligation to do so. It is because they have not been, because there has been a glaring absence of outcry on the part of the academic, artistic, literary, ecclesiastical and political establishment that I have found it incumbent upon me to do what I could. I have in consequence written as many letters and articles in the press as I could muster, I have spoken in Trafalgar Square and at public meetings in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds and elsewhere, I have produced three editions of a booklet SOS Bosnia, and I have appeared as often as invited on radio and television.
I have been greatly heartened as I learnt more about Bosnia and developed my own analysis to find it almost entirety in accord with that of a number of people who knew far more about it than I did. I am referring to Branca Magas, author of The Destruction of Yugoslavia, Mark Thompson, author of A Paper House: The Ending of Yugoslavia, Noel Malcolm, author of Bosnia: A Short History, Mark Almond, author of Europe's Backyard War, Bogdan Denitch, author of Ethnic Nationalism: the Tragic Death of Yugoslavia, Professor John Fine, author with Robert Donia of Bosnia and Herzegovina: A Tradition Betrayed, and Marshall Harris, until his resignation responsible in the State Department in Washington for the Bosnia desk. There is simply no comparable alternative analysis. The ignorance, avoidance of central issues of history and justice, the pomposity and smugly patronising pretence to be trying to do one's best with impossible Balkan types which characterise, for instance, the speeches of Douglas Hurd and David Owen have, on the contrary, simply reinforced my conviction that something very nasty is going on, not only in Bosnia but throughout the corridors of Western power.
The Bishop of Worcester, replying to my 1994 article in Theology (see below), has written that I cannot be so naive as to think that there is only one view a Christian can take in regard to Bosnia. As regards essentials, I willingly confess to being so naive as to believe just that. The fate of the Jews at the hands of Hitler presented no less and no more clear an issue in the 1930s: what then, as now, could truly be judged a status confessions, an issue so basic that the church is required of its very nature to commit itself at the pain of ceasing to be truly the church. The incontestable essentials include, I suggest, the following:
- The war in Bosnia, following on that in Slovenia and Croatia as well as the originating Serb subjugation of Kosova, is entirely the product of Serb nationalism and aggression.
- The war has been waged against a people, its culture and religion; in intention and in many places in execution it has been truly genocidal, genuinely comparable with the Holocaust.
- There have been no remotely comparable crimes committed upon the Bosnian side.
- The Serb Orthodox Church and its bishops have overwhelmingly backed the campaign of aggression.
- The attack upon Bosnia is a blatant violation of the United Nations Charter, to which the Bosnian Government has again and again appealed.
- The Arms Embargo, imposed upon the Bosnian government and people by the United Nations and defended above all by the British Government, has severely affected their ability to exercise their right of self-defence and is inherently immoral and illegal.
- Strong military action, especially from the air, undertaken by NATO or the UN, could quickly have ended the war in 1992 or at any time since.
- All the settlements proposed by the West - the Owen-Vance plan, the Owen-Stoltenberg Plan, and the Contact Group Plan - are profoundly unjust, unnecessary and unhelpful for a stable future. All derive equally from sustained Western, and especially British, determination to see Bosnia divided in favour of the Serbs.
- That no effective international action has ever been taken, except to stop the shelling of Sarajevo after the Market Place massacre in February 1994, is above all the responsibility of the British Government, determined that Serbia should not be forced to withdraw from the greater part of its gains.
Seldom has such evil been done and done so publicly. If proof be needed of the anaemia from which the British churches suffer at present it can be found in the failure to conduct a clear analysis or to raise their voices against this huge crime and the collusion with it of our own government. The following three pieces were published, one for each year of the war, as an appeal to the churches to think again; an appeal which, sadly, has gone almost unheeded.
The Tablet, August 1992
The greatest human disaster to have happened in Europe since the Second World War is taking place in Bosnia; the most ruthless and calculated aggression not just against a state but against a people: large-scale massacre, the herding of tens of thousands of ordinary people into concentration camps, sealed trains and exile. Why? Because they are not Serbs. This recrudescence of racist nationalism of the crudest type is a mirror image of the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Only this time the victims are Muslims.
Bosnia is an independent country recognised by both the European Community and the United Nations. Its government has followed a policy backed by the large majority of its citizens and in no way discriminatory against the rest. It has appealed repeatedly for help from the world community against aggression and genocide. The people of Bosnia have lived together for centuries in a completely mixed way and no policy of 'cantonisation' (which in effect is a mere subterfuge for handing over large parts of the country to Serbia) could possibly do justice to such a community. Moreover its imposition would be a betrayal of a European ideal of pluralism, an ideal which it is ironically the Muslims who are defending. What has destabilised Bosnia has been the rise of a Serb racialist nationalism espoused by Milosevic and the plan to create a 'greater Serbia' by 'ethnic cleansing' of large areas which never have been Serbia. The government of Bosnia is not then standing for the rights of Muslims alone. It is standing for Bosnia's historic character as an open society in which Muslims and Christians live freely together. Nowhere else have Muslims been more open, more friendly, more integrated into the European world.
The vicious attack by a nominally Christian group upon a Muslim community will enormously increase the pressure towards fundamentalism in Islam all across the world and will immensely damage Europe's own resources for reconciling Muslim and non-Muslim. It is a religious as well as a human tragedy of the first order.
Britain has, sad to say, the greatest responsibility for the failure to respond to Bosnia's pleas for help. The British Government has consistently impeded the giving of effective assistance through insisting on a continuation of Lord Carrington's wholly ineffectual role and arguing mistakenly that this is a war internal to Bosnia. Essentially it is not. The Serbian minority within Bosnia is seizing control simply through the services of the planes, heavy artillery and tanks of the former Yugoslav army controlled and manned from Belgrade.
What have the churches done to speak out in defence of Bosnia, of its peace-loving Muslim community and against a revival of the most virulent racism? There appears to have been a most striking silence from all the principal church leaders in Britain. It will go down in history. We pour out our tears at the Holocaust but close our eyes to the Holocaust happening in 1992. 'Only he who shouts for the Jews may sing the Gregorian chant', declared Bonhoeffer fifty years ago. Only he who shouts for the Bosnian Muslims is entitled to do so today.
The Guardian, July 1993
Bosnia has exposed the moral and ideological bankruptcy of Western society more devastatingly than anything this century, even Nazism. The evils are comparable. Yet, while we know far more about what is going on, we have done far less.
Splendid as have been the efforts of the smaller relief agencies, the political response - and especially the presence of Unprofor - has been a well-devised cover-up for inactivity. The genocide of a European people has continued for over a year, and Europe has done nothing to stop it when it could have ended it - and still could end it - within a week. For this our political leaders (and most especially the government of Britain, which has orchestrated the world's reaction from first to last) will for ever bear the shame.
This has been possible only because almost every other side of society has failed to express any real sense of outrage. This is true of the Labour Party, of the academic community and even of the media.
The silence of church leaders in this country has been, if anything, even more striking. Yet it is precisely when the normal mechanisms of society are failing to guard the values of humanity that the church is needed. That remains its supreme social justification: to be a prophetic voice, the voice of the voiceless, the unsilenceable defender of the poor and of justice. If those in need are mostly Muslims who have lived peaceably for generations with their Christian neighbours but are now being destroyed by nominal Christians, that is all the more reason for Christians to come to the rescue. Yet what has the Archbishop of Canterbury or of York had to say, or the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, or the Council of Churches of Britain and Ireland? What a silence have we been treated to at this the greatest outrage of post-war European history! Bishop George Bell of Chichester was a lonely voice fifty years ago when he spoke up for the Jews. Where is a Bishop of Chichester today?
Why are Christian leaders behaving like this? The first reason is the perennial parochialism whereby most church people remain preoccupied with the parish pump (and, when tens of thousands of Bosnian women are being systematically raped, the ordination of women is a parish pump issue). The second reason is a misguided ecumenism. Anglicans in particular are anxious to remain on good terms with the Orthodox, and the Serbian Orthodox Church has had closer relations with the Church of England than any other. It is also doing a very great deal to fuel Serb nationalism. To take a strong line against Serb aggression could be to displease one's Orthodox friends. Better to stress instead that this is a complex matter and there must be wrongs on every side.
Thirdly, a misguided pacifism which can eat the guts out of an effective Christian political stance. Few Christians are really pacifist. Most of the clergy who were in the Peace Pledge Union in 1938 were in uniform by 1940. But many like to think that pacifism is best so long as their own homes are not threatened. To justify their position they almost always play down the reality of evil, misread reality, claim that a Goebbels or a Karadzic is not really as bad as all that. If someone is a complete pacifist and would be prepared to see their own children butchered by a terrorist rather than intervene, then so be it. But there are few such people.
And even they have no right to deny arms to other people desperately endeavouring to defend their families and homes. For the rest of us who are not pacifists and never have been, to refuse either to intervene and use our military might to save a small nation which has appealed to us for help or allow them arms to help themselves against the equivalent of something far worse than the IRA, is morally wicked, thoroughly soft thinking and wholly unChristian. If the church had spoken out, not once but daily, if our archbishops had insisted on going to Sarajevo and staying there, sharing the life of its bombarded people, then our government would never have persevered in its course of studied determination to prevent any effective resistance to aggression.
The church is not so weak, if it would only venture its strength. It might actually have stopped the war, achieved the fruits of a true pacifism - a concern for peace which could actually bring peace.
The claim, regularly heard, that there is nothing we can do which is likely to end the war, is baseless. The Serb attack on Croatia stopped once force was met by adequate force. Again, the moment it looked as if Milosevic would genuinely pressurise Karadzic to end the war was the moment when there was a serious threat of American military action. At that point the war was close to ending. However, British pressure quickly removed the American threat.
When force is met with force, the war will end. It is Britain and the UN which are ensuring it continues by refusing either to stop it or to allow Bosnians their natural right - the arms to defend themselves.
Sadly, it has from the start been British policy that a Greater Serbia should be created and Bosnia destroyed. And church leadership in this country, by its erastian inability to challenge that policy, has colluded, and is colluding in the crime.
Theology, July 1994
Reflecting on the response of the churches in Britain and within the Ecumenical Movement to Bosnia once more, I remain appalled by how little they have done at the level of their leadership to recognise without ambiguity what has been happening, to condemn what is evil and above all to offer any significant support to a European nation oppressed in a way unprecedented since 1945.
Again and again church leaders in this country have been urged to visit Sarajevo, to show some really significant degree of human and religious solidarity with the Muslim community of Bosnia in its ordeal. They have entirely failed to do so. Almost the only church leader to have spoken emphatically enough to be heard has been the Bishop of Barking, to whom all praise for his willingness to stand up and be counted, even in Trafalgar Square. For the rest one has received the sort of avoidance reply typified by a spokesman of Lambeth Palace in response to the suggestion that Archbishop Carey, having visited the Sudan, could now highly appropriately go to Bosnia: 'There are no Anglicans in Sarajevo.'
Three documents illustrate what the churches have said. The first is a 27-page report of the Council of Churches of Britain and Ireland on Serbia and Croatia, January-February 1993; the second a message adopted by the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches at its meeting in Johannesburg, 20-28 January 1994; the third a speech by the Bishop of Worcester in the House of Lords debate on Bosnia, 14 February 1994.
Take the CCBI report first. From its opening line it purports to be about 'former Yugoslavia'. Its delegation took place at a time when war between Croatia and Serbia was over but the attack on Bosnia at its worst, yet it decided to 'confine itself to Serbia and Croatia'. It visited Belgrade and Zagreb (for no more than a week in all) but nowhere in Bosnia. It has many interesting and thoughtful things to say but it avoids any serious political analysis as to why this war has broken out or what, in objective terms, might be just or unjust. While its Bosnian and Muslim contacts are marginal, it still manages to insert into its 'Conclusion and Recommendations', without the slightest serious examination of the pros and cons, the suggestion that military intervention in Bosnia is unlikely to be justified. The delegation was briefed in advance by the Foreign Office and stayed in Belgrade at the British Residence. When it had so little time in all to hear a divergence of views from anyone else, and spent less than forty-eight hours even in Zagreb, it was hardly a balanced way to come to an understanding of the situation. Certainly the view the delegation expressed was the view the Foreign Office wished to hear. Apart from that, the central fact remains that at the time a crusade of extermination, human and cultural, was being carried on by Serbs against Muslims, a British church delegation took as its priority to visit Serbia and Croatia and concentrate upon the ecclesiastical tension between the two. This seems to me a glaring example of what churches ought not to do in a time of political crisis.
The second example is very much worse. Seldom has the World Council performed more discreditably than in its Johannesburg message. It first declares that 'much of the reporting of the conflict lacks objectivity' (the reporting has, on the contrary, for the most part been outstandingly objective, the one redeeming element in the West's response to the crisis) and adds that 'violence and brutality are being committed on every side, Serb, Croat and Muslim' (all the evidence is that there has been systematic genocide and rape on the Serb side from the start; that what has been done by Muslims has been in retaliation, unplanned and on a vastly much smaller scale). There is no further reference to Muslims whatsoever. It then goes on to speak of the 'desperate shortage of food and medical supplies' in Serbia and Montenegro which has 'caused widespread suffering to the civilian populations' without the slightest reference to the fact that the shortage of food, medical supplies and every necessity of life - let alone the constant bombardment from Serb artillery - is infinitely worse in Bosnia. It manages never once to make use of the word 'Bosnia'. Unsurprisingly, the message goes on to oppose armed intervention, in this as in everything else reflecting a militant Serb viewpoint, toned down with suitable talk of the need for reconciliation. Seldom has a message of the World Council so entirely abandoned a theology of liberation and of justice.
Thirdly, the speech of the Bishop of Worcester. It was the only speech by a bishop in the House of Lords debate and it is to be presumed that it had been cleared at Lambeth. It reflected only too clearly every piece of mistaken analysis used to justify doing nothing to save Bosnia from aggression over almost two years. First, the bishop was careful to stress that this was a civil war when in reality it is primarily a war of aggression. Then, almost laughably, he repeated the well-worn assertion that it would take 130,000 men, if not more, to save the city of Sarajevo from the guns of the soldiers surrounding it. He went on to add that he did not believe it right nor wise to make air strikes. I say 'laughably' because that very week General Rose and a NATO threat of air strikes had made Sarajevo safe from shelling, without any additional men and without the loss of a single life, for the first time in eighteen months. Logically it must be presumed that the bishop would have preferred the massacre hi the market place to have continued on a daily basis. In fact, of course, he simply had not thought out what he said. His speech was just one more example of poor analysis, acceptance of a Foreign Office viewpoint by church leaders and - underlying that - of Serb claims. It is remarkable that the Bishop of Worcester referred at length to all the good things he claimed the churches were doing in the war, beginning with the Orthodox, but never at any point made mention of Muslims. Is this really why we have bishops in the House of Lords?
The overall impression of these and other documents is of an amazing inability to face up to the reality of evil and to grapple responsibly and clear-mindedly with a moral crisis comparable to the Holocaust. On the one hand the ecumenical desire not to upset the Serb Orthodox Church and, on the other, willingness to swallow whole the political line of the Foreign Office and the European Community, have completely nullified any prophetic voice on the part of central church leadership. Sadly it reveals how low the organised Ecumenical Movement has sunk. This year there is a special celebration for Bishop Bell in Chichester Cathedral. Was there ever a more glaring example of building monuments to the prophets when they are well dead? A Bishop Bell in 1994 would have been quite a different matter.
