Unfinest Hour: Britain and the Destruction of Bosnia (Hardcover)

Brendon Simms, author of this revealing study, is Director of Studies in History at Peterhouse and lecturer in International Relations at the Centre for International Studies, Cambridge University. What he has to say is that, essentially, Britain's role in the Bosnian tragedy, was nothing short of being disastrous.

He has carried out dozens of interviews, trawled through the documents and come to the conclusion that Britain's political leaders were afflicted by a disabling form of conservative pessimism which not only rejected military intervention by Britain but prevented any other country intervening. Attitudes changed with the change of government by the time of Kosovo for, as the current, much wider crisis only too telling reminds us: isolationism is no longer an option. --Michael Hatfield.

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"Unfinest Hour" is the first book fully to lay bare the hypocrisy and incompetence of British policy towards Bosnia. It shows how, inspired by the best of intentions, a group of British politicians and soldiers succeeded in ruining every international initiative to help the besieged Bosnian government. The sheer enormity of Britain's failure has been little understood. "Unfinest Hour"'s task is to make it emphatically clear. For in the early 1990s a weak and jaded British government thrust itself into stage-managing the world's response to the break-up of Yugoslavia. Through a mixture of arrogance and misjudgement a policy was embarked upon which denied weapons to the legitimate government in Sarajevo. This disaster was then compounded by Britain's role in the United Nations Protection Force: a force with a serious enforcement mandate, which the British above all rendered largely ineffective. Well-trained British troops were ordered to stand by as Serb militas killed and cleansed at will. As outrage followed outrage, Britain became estranged from all her principal allies, grimly pursuing to its end a course of action with neither humanity nor logic. Simms brings back to life the deeply flawed figures from that period - Hurd, Rifkind, Owen and Rose - and the self-appointed experts who connived in their policies. Driven beyond endurance by Britain's behaviour, the United States eventually intervened in 1995, swiftly breaking the militias' hold on Bosnia and in a fortnight showing the absurdity of the policy of the previous three years. This absurdity had in the meantime led to the death and displacement of hundreds of thousands of ordinary Bosnians. "Unfinest Hour" is both a brilliant polemic and an important "first draft" of history, which tackles what is still the most raw and disturbing issue in contemporary Europe.

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